Chapter 14

The Bear Hunter

The orb-shaped fragment that lay among the rounded rocks was the top of a human skull. It rested at the bottom of a slope in the crease of a parched creek bed. Come spring, the clear mountain waters would return, running downhill to the Clark Fork River in the valley below. But now, on this Monday afternoon in September, the man who tramped uphill through this rugged mountain terrain was on dry ground. He was a bear hunter slowly ascending a logging road along a ridge that led up to the meager beginnings of this drainage called Crystal Creek. His eyes were peeled to the ground. He was scanning for any telltale sign that he was still on the trail of a wounded black bear.

He was looking for tracks, or a blood drop, a broken branch, and at whatever fell within his tight-grid vision, when he spotted the distinct rounded object that wasn’t, he could tell, an ordinary, water-polished rock in the stream bed.

It was the Monday afternoon of September 9, 1985. Later that day, when sheriff’s deputies, led by Captain Weatherman, would climb to the shoulder of the ridge, to a spot that marked the nearly imperceptible headwater of this mountain creek, they would find most of the rest of the skeleton. It belonged to a young woman. It appeared that she had been dumped on the side of the slope at least a year ago and maybe longer.

One large leg bone, the femur, was found nearby, as were numerous bits and pieces of bone. There was evidence of a lot of dental work, and that encouraged Captain Weatherman. The skull of this latest victim showed two bullet holes. She had been shot once in the back of the head and once in the temple. Two .32-caliber slugs were found at the site.

A forensic examination of the skeleton would eventually tell Weatherman that this victim was smaller than Debbie Deer Creek. She was between twenty and twenty-two years old. Her height was probably five feet to five-foot-two. Her weight was estimated at approximately a hundred pounds. She had light brown hair and may have been of partial Asian descent. Forensic determinations suggested she may have been right handed, and she was definitely a smoker. Ballistics examination of the slugs were fairly conclusive. They were Winchester/Western Silver Tip bullets, which could have been fired from any of the following gun makes: Ceska, Walther, Llama, Star, Savage, or Astra.

But Weatherman didn’t have a weapon. All he had was another body of a murdered female. No clothing or personal items were found at the site. This woman had been shot, stripped, and left nude on the ground. Animals may have disturbed the body, and the force of water would have washed the rounded skull down the grade.

As the crow flies, this body was three miles southeast of the Bonner Dam, where Debbie Deer Creek had been found. What was more sobering to Weatherman was the relative proximity not only to Debbie Deer Creek, but also to Siobhan McGuinness and the Beavertail Hill Girl. This was the fourth young female body found slain—and the fourth unsolved homicide—in the fifteen-mile stretch east of Missoula to the county line.

Captain Weatherman had only recently retired the mystery of the Beavertail Hill case, disposing of the facial reconstruction that had so badly deteriorated anyway. His persistence had paid off. Twice a year, he would dig out the file and send the dead girl’s description out across the national network of police computers. In early 1984, the had become aware of a massive effort in Washington State to track the so-called Green River killer, who was suspected of having killed more than forty women in a stabbing and strangulation spree that ran from July of 1982 to March of 1984. Most of the victims were prostitutes or runaways who would not be reported missing for weeks. In time, all but four of the Green River victims would be identified by the machinery of the Green River Task Force.

But more importantly to Weatherman, on February 6, 1985, he hit a match. Investigators in Washington didn’t suspect that this Montana skeleton belonged to the Green River killer, but at least they knew who she was. Her name was Devonna Nelson, a fifteen-year-old presumed runaway.

The long, slow process of making the identification had begun on March 9, 1984, almost a full year earlier, when someone on the street tipped a local Seattle policeman that Devonna might be among the crowd of missing persons being sought by the task force. On March 27, the task force harvested Devonna’s dental records and entered her into the net. Ten months later, after they had issued a regional broadcast for records of unidentified skulls, Captain Weatherman sent the dental evidence from both of his Jane Doe bodies to William Haglund, chief investigator at the King County medical examiner’s office in Tacoma. It was to be one of eleven positive identifications of unidentified bodies found in California, Idaho, and Montana made through the forensic screening process.

Now, as the fall of 1985 was upon him, Weatherman knew what his next move would be. He would call Dr. Charney in Fort Collins one more time, and ask him to work with this new bullet-holed skull to produce a likeness that he would place on his bookshelf in the company of Debbie Deer Creek. He would name this one Chryssie Crystal Creek.

The Missoulian didn’t make much of the Crystal Creek skeleton. A six-paragraph story that appeared on page 9 of the September 17 edition was prepared by the Associated Press, not by a local staff reporter, even though the discovery of a single unidentified human skeleton was rare enough in Montana at the time. In the whole state, from 1981 to 1985, close to a dozen unidentified bodies in various stages of decomposition had been discovered. Only four remained unidentified and unsolved. One of those was found in Lewis and Clark County to the east. The remaining three were the ones found in Missoula County. After the Beavertail Hill girl was identified, two remained, and their plastic reconstructed heads emitted blank stares from the bookshelf in Captain Weatherman’s office, as if looking over his shoulder as he labored in vain to put a real name to their faces.

The slight differences in M.O. notwithstanding—one victim was buried, the other dumped on the ground—Weatherman was certain that the same person had killed both Debbie and Chryssie, and he was beginning to see that the beautiful Clark Fork River valley had become someone’s dumping ground.