FORT COLLINS — One of the attorneys who represented Tim Masters at his 1999 murder trial stood his ground today, asserting that his client was innocent and was framed by police investigators for Peggy Hettrick's murder.

Erik Fischer, one of two lawyers who represented Masters at his trial, faced cross-examination for the first time in a series of hearings aimed at determining whether police and prosecutors withheld important information that would have helped his defense team.

"I believe that Tim Masters is innocent, and I believe if we'd been provided with appropriated discovery this case would not have proceeded in the manner it did and he would not have been convicted," Fischer said under questioning from Michael Goodbee, assistant district attorney in Adams County.

Goodbee is one of the special prosecutors representing the state in the case.

Hettrick was stabbed in the back early the morning of Feb. 11, 1987, and sexually mutilated by a killer who sliced away tissue from her genitalia and left breast.

Attorneys David Wymore and Maria Lui have worked for weeks to build a case that Fort Collins police and prosecutors withheld reports and other information that would have helped Masters win an acquittal. Among the documents they have unearthed are police reports showing that investigators contacted a plastic surgeon to talk about the nature of the mutilations.

A letter to the doctor was turned over to Fischer - on the day the trial began, he testified - but no report from the doctor was ever produced, and neither he nor the detective who talked to him was called to testify. That doctor recently said that in his opinion it would have been almost impossible for Masters to have mutilated Hettrick in the way prosecutors argued that he did at the trial.

Fischer grew agitated when Goodbee asked him why he didn't protest in court that he was being given only partial information at the last moment, and why he didn't follow up with the surgeon himself.

"I was a little busy in a murder trial, Mr. Goodbee," Fischer said. "How many murder cases have you tried?"

Fischer spent six days on the witness stand being questioned by attorneys for Masters. He repeatedly asserted that documents that were not turned over to him would have altered the way he and attorney Nathan Chambers

"I'm upset about not getting all this information - very upset," Fischer said. "I think it's outrageous."

Among the observers in the courtroom this morning were Larimer County District Attorney Larry Abrahamson, whose office was removed from the case earlier this year because of the potential of a conflict of interest - the actions of people working in his office are at the core of the fight to win Masters a new trial.

Adams County District Attorney Don Quick was named the special prosecutor in the case, meaning he represents the state. Goodbee and Chief Deputy District Attorney Thomas Quammen have been handling the courtroom work on Quick's behalf.

Hettrick, a 36-year-old manager at a Fort Collins Fashion Bar, went out walking late the night of Feb. 10, 1987 and eventually ended up at a bar and restaurant called the Prime Minister. She was last seen leaving that business early the next morning, and about six hours later a bicyclist discovered her body in a field a few blocks away.

Her killer stabbed her in the upper back with a large knife, then sexually mutilated her with a very sharp instrument, such as a scalpel.

Masters, then a 15-year-old high school student, quickly became the focus of the investigation. He admitted walking up and looking at Hettrick's body on the way to catch the school bus, but told no one about it, he said, because he thought it was a mannequin and some sort of a cruel hoax. Investigators also found hundreds of pages of drawings and writings, many of them violent, and survival knives in his bedroom.

But it wasn't until 1998 that Fort Collins police obtained an arrest warrant, based largely on a forensic psychologist's interpretation of those writings and drawings. A jury convicted Masters the following year, and both the Colorado Court of Appeals and the state Supreme Court upheld the verdict.

Judge Joseph Weatherby, who is handling the case now, will be asked to determine whether information was improperly withheld from Masters' defense team and - if it was - whether it prevented him from getting a fair trial.