Chapter 11

A Mother’s Suicide

George Nance was tired. He had been on the road for days. Now it was after midnight. He had just completed a long haul and it was time to go home. He could see it in his mind: an easy chair, a beer, and some television. He would be kicked back for awhile. But when he stepped through the door, though noticing that Charlene’s car wasn’t parked outside, he still wanted to believe that she was inside waiting for him.

But he was disappointed. Charlene wasn’t there, and in the same moment he became certain of that fact his anger started to flare. He knew exactly where she was. She was at the Cabin, and he turned right around and headed back out the door. He climbed behind the wheel of his old, blue and white Dodge pickup and headed out to get her. The truck would barely have a chance to warm up in the mile or so drive on this early April night. But his temper would.

George had never wanted Charlene to work at the Cabin in the first place. Charlene worked as a barmaid, in addition to her waitressing job at Taber’s Truck Stop across the highway. Del Tyler, the owner who had recruited her, allowed the women to drink whether they were on shift or not.

George pulled up, parked his truck, and headed inside, where he found his wife. The argument started immediately. George insisted that Charlene come home. She refused. She wouldn’t have any of it. He accused her of being drunk. She spit the words back in his face, and the two of them commenced another drag-out fight, another page in their hard-bitten life. By the time George and Charlene had taken their argument outside into the parking lot, it became clear that Charlene was planning her own exit. She yelled and screamed her way over to her own car, a 1976 Chrysler Cordoba, and got behind the wheel. The roar of her engine told George it was time to get into his truck. Charlene was leaving. The argument was still alive, as far as he knew, and he doubted that Charlene was headed for home.

But by the time he got his truck into gear, Charlene was accelerating away at a high rate of speed. She was heading eastward, in the general direction of home, though George still didn’t believe that’s where she was headed. So he pursued. But Charlene’s powerful Cordoba was too fast, and after George lost her in the night, he headed back home.

It was about an hour later when George heard the car pull up. He was waiting for her. Then he heard the knock on the door, and instead of Charlene, he found two sheriff’s deputies standing outside. They were there to inform him of an accident.

Charlene had driven no more than a mile from the Cabin when she turned off onto the Speedway, a semi-oval switchback that makes the loop back along the Clark Fork River to the western side of East Missoula. A quarter of a mile along this road, she had turned left onto Deer Creek Road, crossing a bridge and continuing east on a gravel road that leads up to the ridges that become Hellgate Canyon. She reached a terrific speed in the short time she navigated a long, easy curve in the road. She hit the tree, a giant Ponderosa pine that stands just off the road shoulder at the terminus of the arc, head on.

The crash site was on a stretch of lowland known as Bandmann Flats. Charlene had died just two miles from East Missoula, and less distance than that from her own home at Tamarack in Pine Grove, diagonally just across the river. Sheriff’s deputies could see that she should have been able to avoid the tree, given the path of her vehicle up to that point, but that she instead had hit it head-on, and there was no sign that she had tried to brake. The fierce impact of the crash had split her Cordoba in half. A single piece of sheet metal still remaining on the driver’s side was all that held it together. She had died instantly. The date was April 4, 1980. Charlene was the fifty-fifth fatality on Montana highways that year. Her death was designated a suicide.

A few hours later, as the sun rose over the valley, George and his children, Desiree, twenty-seven, Wayne, twenty-five, Bill, twenty and Veta, eighteen, the younger three of whom still lived at home, would realize that they faced the rest of their lives without their mother, and the first thing they would have to do is think about funeral arrangements.

Charlene, who had married at sixteen on Missoula’s North Side, would be laid to rest only five blocks from there in the city cemetery. She had lived forty-four years and thirty days, raised four children—changed their diapers, dressed them as infants, tied their toddler shoes, washed their faces, sent them off to school, and generally tried to keep them in line as best she knew how. During most of that time, she worked too, and earned an undying reputation among her coworkers at Ming’s Restaurant and Paul’s Pancakes and Taber’s and the Cabin as a first-class waitress. She was fast, dependable, and honest. She had earned the professional respect of her peers. Charlene was salt of the earth. But now she was gone. There would be no more morning chatter over coffee, no more standing and arguing, no more screaming and hollering from Charlene.

George bought a double headstone for her grave, reserving a place for himself, with his name also carved in the granite next to hers. A month later to the day of Charlene’s crash, George’s father died, and the family was presented with their first opportunity to move out of the trailer and into a house of their own. George’s father had left him a modest ranch house on Minnesota Avenue in East Missoula, no more than a stone’s throw from the Cabin. So George decided to move in there with his children, to get away, he told them, from the many memories of Charlene still harbored in the trailer at Tamarack.

Wayne confided in his friends that no one really knew if his mother drove off the road on purpose, had accidentally veered too far off the shoulder, or had had too much to drink that night. One rumor spread that Charlene had a boyfriend who lived up Deer Creek Road, offering an explanation for the route she had taken. Whatever the case, it was once again the start of Easter season.

Wayne was twenty-five years old, living at home with his father in their new house on Minnesota Avenue, bouncing at the Cabin at night, and trying his hand at college at the University of Montana. Four years had passed since Wayne had been resurrected as a suspect in the McGuinness and Pounds murders. Unsolved murders number three, Gil Wooten, and number four, Verna Kvale, were now four years old and still unsolved. But the discovery of the remains of the young murdered girl whose body had been thrown down an embankment along I-90 on the eastern end of the county was only two months old. The corpse of the victim Captain Weatherman had dubbed Beavertail Hill Girl had been found in late January of 1980. Later, much later, Captain Weatherman would identify the body and also determine approximately when she had been so unceremoniously dumped along the interstate.

As if it had been mandated by some memorial clockwork, on March 1, 1978, a few months after Wayne’s Navy discharge and his prodigal return to Missoula, the Missoulian resurrected the story of Missoula’s unsolved murders. On an inside page, next to the movie ads for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, playing at the Village Twin, and 2069, a spacy skin flick at the Wilma Theatre, the unbylined story marked the anniversaries of the springtime murders with an update on the Missoula Reward Fund. It reported that the fund’s board of directors had decided to keep the more than five thousand dollars that it had amassed for another year, even though no one had collected any of it so far. Esther Fowler, the fund secretary, said police officials doubted that anyone would ever collect any of the money offered for information about the McGuinness and Pounds murders, thus explaining why the board had set a five-year limit on those cases.

It was an innocent enough decision for the board to make, as was its earmarking of two thousand dollars of the reward money for the Law Enforcement Youth Camp. It also was considering putting some of the money in a fund for rewards for information about other serious crimes in Missoula. But the story struck an exposed nerve at the sheriff’s department, where Sheriff Moe was serving out the last year of his last term in office. He didn’t want history to close out the possibility—not while he was still sheriff—that his department would someday solve the McGuinness and Pounds murders. He especially didn’t want history to be thus carved in stone on the same day Charles “Ray” Doty, a retired Missoula policeman, filed as Democratic candidate for sheriff to run against Sheriff Moe’s hand-picked successor, Robert Zaharko, the undersheriff, who was running on Sheriff Moe’s Republican coattails.

The small notice of Doty’s primary filing appeared in the Missoulian, however, on the very same page and right next to the story about the so-far fruitless McGuinness and Pounds investigations, and it thus tweaked a political nerve. In the next day’s paper, the headline appeared in bigger type. It read: “Area’s Unsolved Murders: ‘Something May Turn Up.’” And Sheriff Moe had his say. He didn’t dispute what Esther Fowler said. But he did insist there were good suspects in both murders. The problem was, he explained, insufficient evidence to charge and convict them.

“That doesn’t mean to say,” added city police captain Marvin D. Hamilton, hammering home the point, “that the two murders will never be solved. We always have hope that something will turn up.”

In the past four years, the Missoulian had printed thirty-one stories about the McGuinness, Pounds, and Kvale murders. Sixteen of those stories had appeared on page one. Wayne was an avid reader of the Missoulian, and he regularly watched the local television news. The consecutive reports of the squabble over whether the reward would ever be paid out because someone might someday help solve the crime, and solving the crime without ever paying out a reward would no doubt have drawn his interest. It is doubtful that Wayne even raised an eyebrow at the wishful thinking connoted in the line, “Something May Turn Up.” No one at the sheriff’s department even knew that Wayne was back in town. What is certain is that in the late spring of 1978, as he was considering enrolling at the University in the fall, he left town again. Wayne wanted to spend some time with a former Navy buddy who was living in Seattle.

Devonna Nelson disappeared from the streets of Seattle without a trace. It was July of 1978. She was a slight fifteen-year-old, weighing no more than a hundred pounds. Her wavy strawberry-blonde hair fell neatly to her shoulders, cupping a sweet face. Her eyes were an innocent blue. And her parents were going through a messy divorce.

Devonna had been living with her father in Illinois and then in Louisiana, and most recently had been shuttled to Seattle to stay with her mother, Hazel Jones. When Devonna ran away, she was wearing a dark-colored dress, a pair of earrings, and some costume jewelry. Hazel Jones never saw or heard from her little girl again, and as the days turned into weeks and then months, then years, the Mother’s Day card that Devonna had given her became ever more precious.

When the work train crew found the remains of the stabbed and dumped Beavertail Hill Girl, no one knew that it was Devonna Nelson, the Seattle runaway. Captain Weatherman had run a description of the Beavertail Hill skeleton through national police computer networks every six months since the discovery of her body. He had a hunch the girl might be from the Pacific Northwest, but it was just a hunch.

In time, Captain Weatherman would identify her but would never know what exactly had happened to Devonna after she failed to return to her mother’s home, except that she had been transported hundreds of miles across two state lines and deposited—as if in last-minute haste—on a roadbank not fifteen miles from the Missoula city limits.

Weatherman would also eventually learn that Wayne Nance’s visit to Seattle coincided with the girl’s disappearance. The name Wayne Nance hadn’t yet crossed his mind. There were, in fact, no suspects in the Beavertail Hill Girl case.

By the winter of 1980, Wayne was maintaining 3.53 cumulative average (out of a maximum possible 4.0) at the University, though he had gotten off to a poor start in the fall of 1978. He managed an A in a first-year studio art course, but earned F’s in a modern fantasy English course and in a course entitled “Introduction to Woman.” He dropped a course in logic and finished the term on “Academic Warning.” The following semester, he applied himself and earned straight B’s in four courses—an anthropology class in primitive technology, two art classes, and a history class in European civilization.

Though Wayne managed to maintain a strong academic profile, at times he would lighten his load considerably. In the spring 1979, for example, he took two art classes, a class in local flora, and a course in fresh food preparation. In later semesters, he would excel in a subject, such as earning an A in a five-credit biology course, only to turn around and fall down in it, pulling only a C in the next sequence. Still his overall grade-point average was impressive, and he racked up consecutive semesters of progress as an A and B student, taking some of the toughest courses the University had to offer.

But Wayne’s academic career would be short lived. After his mother’s death, Wayne didn’t continue in summer school as he had in past summers. When September rolled around again, Wayne was back, enrolling in German, Spanish, and physics classes. But it was to be a perfunctory commitment. He pretty much had dropped the idea of college. He got F’s in all three courses, and dropped out.

And during this summer of 1980, Captain Weatherman would investigate a bizarre incident—one involving ropes—that would cause him to once again vividly recall the Donna Pounds case.