FORT COLLINS — An attorney for Tim Masters returned his attention this afternoon to two doctors — a physician who is dead and a forensic psychologist whose work helped convict the man of murder — as he continued to lay the groundwork for a new trial in one of the city's most notorious killings.

One was Dr. Richard Hammond, who committed suicide in 1995 after a house-sitter discovered an elaborate secret videotaping system in his home that captured images of dozens of women using the bathroom.

The other was J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist from California whose work was key to convincing a jury that Masters stabbed and sexually mutilated Peggy Hettrick on Feb. 11, 1987.

Hettrick's killer stabbed her once in the back, inflicting a fatal wound, and then sliced away flesh from her vagina and left breast.

Masters was the prime suspect in Hettrick's killing from the first hours of the investigation, but it was 11 years before Fort Collins police investigators obtained enough evidence to arrest him. He was convicted in 1999, largely on the basis of Meloy's testimony about dozens of writings and drawings — many of them violent — produced by Masters when he was a teenager.

In between Hettrick's killing and Masters' arrest, the Hammond case broke. He was arrested on a sexual exploitation charge, and police investigators found roughly 300 videotapes, many of them containing extreme close-ups of women's genitals.

Hammond, who lived within a few hundred yards of the field where Hettrick's body was found, took his own life before he was formally charged, and several months later Fort Collins police investigators obtained a court order allowing the destruction of all the evidence in the case.

Now attorneys for Masters are fighting for a new trial, asserting that Hammond should have been investigated as a possible suspect in Hettrick's killing and alleging that police and prosecutors deliberately withheld information that would have been helpful to the defense.

Hammond, they have argued repeatedly, had a perverse fascination with women's genitals, was a sexual deviant, lived near the crime scene, and had the surgical skill necessary to mutilate Hettrick.

Nathan Chambers, who represented Masters at his 1999 trial, returned to the witness stand this afternoon, answering more questions about how he might have handled the case differently if he'd been given information about Masters.

While Chambers was on the stand, attorney David Wymore, who is leading the effort for a new trial, meticulously went through Meloy's testimony from the 1999 trial in an effort to show that Hammond fit his theories better than Masters did.

In that testimony, Meloy talked about sexual homicides and outlined his interpretation of the voluminous writings and drawings produced by Masters.

At one point, Wymore tried to underscore his point by asking Chambers about a story written by Masters as a teenager, one in which Meloy concluded that a character named "Mace" was significant.

In that story, Wymore asked, "does somebody sneak up on a woman, jab a knife in her back, and then excise her vagina?"

"No," Chambers answered.

Is there anywhere in that story, Wymore went on, where the character made "video after video after video of people's daughters' and wives' and cousins' vaginas?"

"No," chambers replied. "Hammond had sort of cornered the market on that."

Meloy has not returned phone and e-mail messages left at his California office by the Rocky Mountain News.

Masters' current attorneys, Wymore and Maria Liu, are engaged in a series of hearings with special prosecutors from the Adams County District Attorney's Office over a series of motions.

At the same time, attorneys for Masters are expected to file a formal motion seeking a new trial — which is expected to trigger at least a month of hearings, probably in early to mid-2008.