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TELLURIDE
Bill Masters landed in Telluride in 1974 with $20 in his pocket, escaping Los Angeles suburbia.
His Volkswagen was broken down and he was hitchhiking with his chainsaw up to carve runs on the new ski hill above the mining town when the town marshal picked him up. By the time the marshal dropped off the 23-year-old Masters — who had a criminal justice degree — he was a deputy marshal. A year later he would be town’s chief marshal.
“And here we are,” says the white-haired 73-year-old who has been elected sheriff of San Miguel County 12 times, serving 46 years as the county’s top cop. He’s the longest-serving lawman in Colorado history.
Over the course of nearly half a century, Masters has seen culture-shifting changes in his box-canyon home. The population of San Miguel County ballooned from around 1,500 when he arrived to closer to 8,000. The once hardscrabble ski resort above town is now a world-class tourism destination. Homes that once sold for a few thousand dollars now cost many millions.
A view of Telluride from above in 2021. (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun)Masters has rolled with every step, working to keep his residents safe while protecting the free-wheeling character of the community he helped build in the 1970s and ’80s, as Telluride replaced mining with festivals, skiing and tourists.
“I don’t think I ever had a plan,” says Masters, who will step down from peacekeeping — he draws distinct lines between “peacekeeping” and “law enforcement” and his mission is the former — in early June. “I was definitely the straight guy in this comedy routine. There has to be a straight guy and I took on that role because somebody had to do it. Everybody had to have a role and be a part of the vision back then and I was the Boy Scout.”
But lately, the changes have become too much for Masters, who will hang up his badge June 2.
Wearing his trademark vest and pressed shirt — never a uniform — he bristles at a growing list of rules for cops, especially the state requirement that he keeps a body camera running anytime he talks to anyone, capturing his every interaction. That regulation came down in 2020 as part of sweeping police accountability legislation in the wake of cops murdering George Floyd in Minneapolis. Cameras challenge officers in the community, he says. Fewer people will call for help if they know they will be captured on video as a public record, Masters says.
“We should make legislators wear body cameras and they would figure it out,” he says.
Masters harbors a decidedly libertarian bent, which is uncommon among police bosses. The regulations and laws trickling down from state lawmakers — many of which he calls “Orwellian” — have pushed too much enforcement into his peacekeeping ethos.
“I’m convinced now that this is just no country for old men,” says Masters, referencing his favorite movie and book. “I think the whole business is changing very rapidly, and I’ve been able to adapt over my long career several times. But now it’s gotten to the point where I can’t.”
Back to that law enforcement-vs.-peacekeeping issue.
“We have to try to uphold the law with the minimal amount of force necessary,” Masters says. “But all laws really authorize the police to use force and every law can be deadly.”
That’s how police end up killing a man for selling single cigarettes on the streets of New York City, Masters says. It’s not the fault of the police that lawmakers decided to pass that law.
“The legislature needs to be careful with what they pass. They should probably put in there ‘What level of force should police use for this law?’” he says. “At least the police officers know there’s a limit to what level is required for this law. Or better yet, don’t pass the law.”
Masters went nearly 50 years without anyone suing him. Now he’s got four people promising lawsuits against his deputies.
“Nobody got hurt, right? Nobody. They’re all privileged white people. Some poor little white kid got his feelings hurt,” he says. “I think I’m on the verge of screwing up, getting angry, and I don’t want to be a grumpy old cop, right? And I don’t want to do something wrong because I can’t accept the new way things are supposed to be done. I mean, I forget to turn on this body camera all the freaking time.”
Masters likes to talk about “sidewalk justice.” He doesn’t break the law, but he also doesn’t use it to break people. If he enforced the “thousands and thousands” of laws that state politicians have crafted ever since he became sheriff, he says, “we’d need a much bigger jail.”
(William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)“Every turn has a story”
On his desk, Masters has a small bowl of coins. He likes to rifle through them as he chats and hands an old Indian Head penny to a visitor. It came from an old pal who used to see him on the street and yell “Hey old penny!” One day Masters asked why.
“He says, ‘Because you’re a dirty copper,’” says the sheriff, leaning back with a rumbling laugh.
For years Masters used to hand out old coins with holes drilled through the middle and a nail. That dates back to the old fellow who owned Last Dollar Road, the only way in and out of Telluride more than a century ago before they forged a highway over Dallas Divide. He charged folks a dollar to use his road.
“And so the legend is that the old miners would take a silver dollar and drill a hole in it, and then nail it to their cabin wall, so they wouldn’t spend it in the bars or anything, but they’d always be able to get out of town and pay their toll,” Masters says.
Masters loves his hometown history. In his office, he’s got a St. Peter-sized ledger with painstakingly perfect cursive detailing every arrest, jailing and conviction in his county through the 1800s. He often references “Memoirs of a Lawman,” an accounting of the adventures of Michigan-born Cyrus Wells “Doc” Shores, the Western Slope lawman and frontiersman who chased horse rustlers and train robbers across the Western Slope in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
In a conference room at the Wilkinson Public Library, Masters flips through a book of Western Slope sheriffs and marshals throughout the 1900s. Like in his early years, these cops didn’t have uniforms and they drove their own cars. They weren’t necessarily trained in policing. Just like him.
He comes across a photo of Montezuma County Sheriff Wesley Dunlap and he’s got a story. Masters always has a story.
It was 1935 and Dunlap was transporting two brothers from jail in Glenwood Springs to Cortez for a murder trial. They were accused of robbing and killing an old shepherd. They drove up to a car accident on Dallas Divide, which was unpaved then. As the sheriff got out to help, the prisoners took his gun and killed him. The massive manhunt that followed was one of the first times police used aircraft to search for bad guys.
“Doris Ruffe, the old county clerk, once told me she was a little girl and these guys had hid out underneath her dad’s barn down there in Placerville and they had convinced her to go make some sandwiches for them,” he says. “Those guys were eventually arrested working on a ranch somewhere over by Buena Vista and convicted of homicide again. There are a lot of those interesting cases, that, again, there are no police reports. It was all press reports.”
Out driving his cruiser, Masters likes to flick on the siren when a car coming toward him is driving too fast. He doesn’t often pull them over. Just a jolt to get ’em to slow down, reflecting his peace-and-safety mission. And about those roads: Every mile conjures a memory for Masters.
“Every turn has a story,” he says.
Bill Masters walks through downtown Telluride. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)Forging a new community
Masters has wrangled with a couple bandits like his historic predecessors but mostly it’s been “people who thought they were outlaws,” he says.
A lot of the people who were landing in Telluride in the 1970s and 1980s, he says, “were in search of something.
“They wanted to start a new life and a new community that didn’t have the same values that maybe suburbia had,” he says. “I was one of them.”
He bought his first house for $30,000 in the 1970s, a block or so from where the gondola would be built 20 years later. The owner — “this gal from Texas,” he says — financed the deal with only 10% interest and 10% down. He remembers his dad coming to visit and standing aghast that he dropped that much on an old miner’s cabin. He sold it a few years later for $197,000.
“I think it’s worth something like $4 million, now,” he says, shaking his head like most people do when they talk about home prices in the end-of-the-road resort town.
He lived outside of town in Placerville for a bit but moved back to Telluride 20 years ago and raised four kids who could pedal their bikes to school. He doesn’t miss the drive into town. All but one of his deputies — his son Lane Masters — commute into town and must endure the daily traffic jam on the winding road into town.
Now three of his kids live in town, where they are raising families. He’s got three grandkids a short stroll from his home in a quiet neighborhood perched on a canyon wall. (On an early morning in March, a rock dislodged on the cliffs above his home and crushed his wife’s idling Jeep, after she had dashed into the house for a moment.)
He rides his e-bike all across town. He rarely pedals a block without stopping to chat. Lately, everyone wants to talk about his retirement. Local filmmaker David Holbrooke is making a documentary on him, so he’s on a bit of a farewell tour — cameras in tow — as he cruises town.
“Directing a documentary on Sheriff Masters makes so much sense to me because he’s lived a singular American life,” Holbrooke says. “He’s been involved in so many fascinating cases and his ideas have really stood for something, telling us so much about policing, or as he likes to say, ‘peacekeeping,’ in this country.”
San Miguel County Sheriff Bill Masters talks with his son Lane Masters near the San Miguel County Sheriff’s Office near Telluride. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)“There must be a better way.”
In 1984, when Glenn Frey’s “Smuggler’s Blues” tune blasted from coast to coast, Masters was a self-proclaimed “drug warrior” who had earned Drug Enforcement Agency accolades for busting drug dealers with undercover operations. With Frey’s crooning, the DEA attention turned less fawning and Masters’ perspective on the drug war started shifting.
“They move it through Miami. Sell it in LA. Hide it up in Telluride, I mean it’s here to stay,” Frey sang.
Keep singing the song, Masters says.
“‘You see it in the headlines, you hear it every day. They say they’re gonna stop it, but it doesn’t go away,’” he says. “Glenn Frey, he really hit it on the head.”
DEA agents started calling Masters as Frey’s tune dominated the airwaves. Many had never heard of Telluride, he says, and they were asking why this town they had to look up on a map was in a song about drug smuggling.
Masters had heard whispers that some Telluride residents were fitting cars with hidden compartments, driving down to South America and returning with bundles of cocaine. He once helped feds bust a Telluride food cart that was selling cocaine alongside tacos.
“It’s absolutely not true” that he has turned a blind eye to drug trafficking, he says. “Still, I’ve long said there must be a better way.”
He used to hold traditional law enforcement views on drugs and was happy to jail users and sellers alike.
Masters was a college student studying law enforcement when he worked with the Los Angeles Police Department on President Richard Nixon’s 1967 “Challenge of Crime in a Free Society,” a report that urged decisive action on a supposed crime wave and launched the law-and-order anchored Drug War.
He was a member of the Libertarian Party when the political movement first formed in 1971. When he replaced Sheriff Fred Eller at age 27 in 1980, he was a registered Libertarian but became a Republican at the urging of county commissioners a few years later. Back then, San Miguel County was largely Republican. He switched back to the Libertarian Party in the late 1980s.
It was then that he started to shift his views on drug abuse.
“There are numerous examples of laws that I think are bad laws that have been passed with good intentions. A big example is the drug war,” he says. “We can’t arrest ourselves out of addiction and we can’t arrest ourselves out of drug use. That was very evident early on and yet no one had the courage to stand up and say ‘We are doing something wrong here. This is not working.’
Masters found that courage in the early 2000s. At the height of his libertarian popularity — everyone called him “Liberty Bill” — Masters in 2001 penned a book calling for the end of drug prohibition. His main argument in “Drug War Addiction: Notes from the Front Lines of America’s #1 Policy Disaster” was that police should focus on violence and the nation should look at drug addiction as a health issue, not a criminal one.
Today, he laughs and calls it “a stupid little book.”
“All I did was talk to myself when I wrote it,” he says.
But he’s still an outspoken critic of the drug war. It should not be treated like a supply problem addressed with punishment. It should be addressed on the demand side, he says.
The law enforcement profession for almost a century has promised citizens it would take care of all of society’s problems and that was a wrong tack, Masters says.
“Most of the peacekeepers believed that the war on drugs was right and you just got to give us more and more money, more and more jail cells, and we will solve this problem for America,” Masters says. “And they should have said, ‘Don’t look at us. We can’t solve that. That’s a mental health problem.’ Why are people using drugs is what you need to be asking. And what’s wrong with our education system? What’s wrong with our society, that people want to use all these drugs all the time?”
Art Goodtimes — a long-haired hippy poet who runs a mushroom festival and served as San Miguel County commissioner for 20 years — counts Masters as a friend. He sees Masters’ stint with the Coast Guard as a first step toward a half-century of service in San Miguel County.
“His mission with the Coast Guard was to serve. He didn’t use weapons but he went out and rescued people. That set him on the path,” says Goodtimes, who remembers Masters disarming a mentally distressed Vietnam veteran who was waving a gun at passersby in the 1980s.
“Most cops would have shot him,” Goodtimes says.
Bill Masters takes a moment at the entrance to his office, where four photographs honor the two women and two girls who were murdered on his nearly 46-year watch as sheriff. His investigators identified the killers in each case. “We had four very complex homicides that required an unbelievable amount of work,” he says. (Jason Blevins, The Colorado Sun)Four murders in 50 years. “All crimes are solvable.”
Masters has investigated four homicides in his tenure as sheriff. Solving them required years of investigations. Photos of the four victims — two women and two girls — are displayed prominently at the front desk of the sheriff’s office.
“We couldn’t have just had a simple one,” he says. “No, we had four very complex homicides that required an unbelievable amount of work.”
Eva Schoen was 44 when she was shot as she slept in her log cabin home outside Telluride in August 1990. The mother of two daughters — who were sleeping downstairs when their mom was killed — was married to the heir to the U-Haul family fortune. That family was embroiled in a bitter fight over the billion-dollar company and Masters’ detectives initially suspected the Schoen family feud played a role in her murder. After a December 1992 episode of TV show “Unsolved Mysteries” floated new leads in the nearly 3-year-old case, Masters’ investigators arrested a New Mexico man, Frank Marquis, who was charged with burglary and murder, ending speculation that the murder was connected to the family’s battle. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and burglary and was sentenced to 24 years in prison in 1994. He was released from a New Mexico prison in 2011.
Schoen was Masters’ first murder case “and I thought it was never going to end,” he says. “I had to push the crew. A few of them came and told me ‘Sheriff, you gotta understand this could be unsolvable.’ I’d say, ‘Don’t ever say that in my presence again.’ All crimes are solvable. If you put enough time, money and energy into it, you can do it. Just don’t ever give up.”
It was barely a year from the sentencing of Marquis that Masters’ detectives were investigating another murder.
In November 1995, the body of 18-year-old Buffy Rice Donohue was found bound and battered in a remote prairie outside Norwood. She was last seen two years earlier in Montrose.
After several years of work, Masters pinned her death on an ex-cop, David Middleton, who was convicted in 1997 for the 1995 murders of two women in Reno, Nevada. San Miguel County prosecutors never charged Middleton, who is on death row in Nevada, but in 2000 they charged Middleton’s girlfriend with being an accessory to murder and she was sentenced to prison.
That one still bothers Masters.
“We had a good case. We presented it to the district attorney and I even gave him $50,000 to prosecute it and he refused. He said it was a waste of money to prosecute a man on death row,” Masters says. “I gave him the money with no strings attached and he bought a car (for the D.A.’s office) with it. What an asshole.”
The most emotionally exhausting murder investigation for Masters and his team was the killing of two sisters, 10-year-old Malaya Roberts and 8-year-old Hannah Marshall, whose mummified bodies were found locked inside a tarp-covered Toyota Camry on a Norwood farm in September 2017. They had been abused, starved and locked in the car for months. The car was filled with empty food cans. The leader of a doomsday cult on the remote property had told her followers that the girls were “evil spirits” and “unclean.”
The girls’ mother was sentenced to life in prison for murder and her husband was sentenced to prison for fatal child abuse. The Haitian leader of the cult was sentenced to prison for 64 years after her conviction on fatal child abuse charges. And the owner of the farm struck a deal with prosecutors and was sentenced to prison for 12 years.
“We missed some of the signals on that,” Masters says.
He had a deputy go out to the property the year before the girls were found as part of an inspection of a licensed marijuana grow. The owner of the property said he was no longer growing marijuana because the people who were living on his farm — members of the cult — had told him the weed was evil, Masters says.
The deputy saw two kids running around during the visit. They were not the girls who would be killed. Those girls were never let outside the vehicle in the back of the farm. The deputy returned to the office and suggested to Masters that maybe social services should visit the property and check on the two kids he saw.
“We filed it with social services in Denver and they didn’t do anything,” says Masters, taking a second to collect himself in a rare and brief display of emotion that isn’t frustration or anger. “In the old system, I would call Alan, our social services director here in town and he would be over there in a day. Now we have to call Denver and it goes through this huge bureaucracy and they review it and they send it to another director and it just gets lost in the shuffle. Nothing ever happens.”
If the kids the deputy saw were obviously in danger, he could have immediately pulled them out of the farm.
“But these folks were just living a different lifestyle, you know,” Masters says. “Obviously he didn’t see the children living in the car.”
Masters spent 16 hours interviewing the man who owned the farm, Frederick “Alec” Blair, who was in his early 20s when he let the traveling caravan of cult members take over his property. He was a lost young man, Master says, “and the cult gave him a sense of purpose.”
“He was completely brainwashed,” Masters says. “He goes to me, he says ‘Bill, I believed everything they said. I was sequestered and I just had my dog. I loved my dog. My dog was everything to me and one day they told me my dog was evil and not to feed it anymore and put it in a cage and let it die. And I did.’”
A framed archive details all the peace officers who have served as San Miguel County Sheriff inside the San Miguel County Sheriff’s Office. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)Liberty Bill
Masters knows the live-and-let-live ethos. He balances that with peacekeeping, mostly responding to criminal issues after someone calls and complains.
He was the only Libertarian sheriff in the country in the 1980s at the height of the “Just Say No” drug movement. He was one of only a handful of elected officials who were members of the limited-government Libertarian Party. He says it is impossible to not join the drug war because of the flow of federal funds into local police coffers.
That was a big deal for the Libertarians, who were hoping that a 20% sliver of Congress could change the direction of the federal government. The party, which first formed in Colorado, kept asking Masters to headline events all over the country.
“That got to be kind of a pain in the ass,” he says. “Then they just started losing their wheels and they were just too libertarian for me. I mean, there is a place for government. But as with most political parties, the radicals ended up running it.”
Then San Miguel County started its lean toward liberalism. Masters found that he could more easily reach out to Colorado’s elected leaders if he was a Democrat. So he switched to the blue team.
“I found I could have a say in things if I was involved in a party. Really it could have been either one,” he says. “I’m still active in the Democratic Party but the progressives, they drive me crazy.”
He still holds true to principles of Jeffersonian libertarian democracy, he says, “but it’s worth being a Democrat right now.”
Goodtimes says Masters “never cared about titles or parties.”
“He works for everyone in the community,” Goodtimes says.
Don Coram, a Montrose lawmaker who represented San Miguel County for more than a decade in both the state House and Senate, said Masters represents a fading type of leader.
“Bill was not hung up on a party. He’s the guy who appealed to everybody because he was real,” Coram said. “There aren’t many more like him. We are not there anymore. He’s riding off into the sunset and he’s taking reason and common sense with him.”
Masters doesn’t anticipate any future public role. Definitely not county commissioner. Again with the libertarian bent: He does not want to do anything where decisions are reached via committee.
“No wonder our elected leaders can’t figure out what to do. It’s a bad system and that I think leads to worse government because then the bureaucrats have to run everything because the elected people can’t lead,” he says. “And of course the bureaucrats only want to expand their power all the time. That would drive me crazy. And politicians have to listen to everybody who has something to say. If I don’t like what someone is saying I tell them to leave.”
For years Masters recorded quick weekly clips for KOTO, Telluride’s local radio station. His Masters’ Minute police reports — read in his planar cadence — often included explanations of criminality that included too much alcohol, “poor decisionmaking” and “a general lack of maturity.”
Spend a few hours listening to Masters tell stories about his half a century in San Miguel County and he starts to sound like, well, the community’s dad. His tone can swing between frustration and disappointment. Then he sounds proud. Hopeful. There’s always a sliver of wisdom and advice to glean.
“I raised a lot of kids, I guess,” he says.
Now, maybe, it’s time to step away from parenting.
“I worry that I’m going to miss being the sheriff. It’s been such a part of my identity now for so long,” he says. “And being the retired old sheriff, maybe there’s nothing worse than that. I don’t know. I’m gonna have to find that out.”
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