Chapter 19

The Orphans

Main Street was bumper to bumper with police cars on the Saturday morning the hometown buried their own Mike and Teresa Shook. The onlookers in shop windows and on streetcorners had never seen anything like it. Every Hamilton police officer, every highway patrolman, and all the deputies from the sheriff’s department provided a squad-car escort for the mourning family. There were cruisers ahead and cruisers behind, escorting them first to the Dowling Funeral Home on Second Street South, and then again along Hamilton’s Main Street, past the eight short blocks of two-story, brick-faced storefronts. The vehicles made a somber, slow-moving line all the way up to Riverview Cemetery.

Mike and Teresa were buried together on a treeless plot of land that abuts the Bitterroot River. The Reverend Muriel Gooder, who had been Teresa’s best friend in Sunday school and with joy in her heart had married the couple six years before in the tiny Grantsdale Community Church, now officiated at this final ceremony. A teacher at Mike’s school, Susan Dolezal, who spoke fondly of her colleague during a tearful memorial assembly at the school three days before, said everyone should take one message from this tragedy: “Let it be a reminder to us that we need to treasure our friends.”

The show of sympathy and respect from the police community overwhelmed the family members, and it also provided them their first sense of security in a week. Sheriff Dye’s deputies stood by, videotaping the funeral, hoping to identify any suspects who might show up.

Matt and Luke had come home two days before. They had been immediately whisked out of Ravalli County and were in the temporary, secret custody of Bob Shook’s sister, who lived across the state line in Salmon, Idaho. Megan was still hospitalized in Denver, where her grandmother, Marie Schmitt, kept vigil. When Megan did come home, the day after Christmas, one of the highway patrolmen stayed with her overnight at her grandparents’ house, doing it on his own time. The next night, a Hamilton policeman did the same, because the family had become paralyzed by a fear that whoever had done this would come back to finish the job, eliminating the only witnesses, the children.

Detective Leete, who had guarded the children while they were in the burn ward at Porter Memorial, had tried to gently coax information from Luke, who held the most promise as a witness. When Luke came home, he was again interviewed. It was a tender process, and though Luke had yet to offer them anything useful, they didn’t give up. Even as their direct efforts seemed to fail, Sergeant Printz was quietly trying another approach. He frequently stopped by to visit the boy, aiming to befriend him, hoping to win his confidence. While all the children were interviewed, Luke was the key. He had opened the door for the killer.

Megan, at two-and-a-half, was just too young to correlate the facts of the night of the attack. Matt, the oldest, had slept through most of it.

The last time Sergeant Printz tried to get Luke to remember what he could about the awful night, he made a tape of the conversation. That single, last recording told Sheriff Dye how the entire crime was committed, from beginning to end, but it still fell short in important ways. When they asked Luke if he knew the man, and what the man had called himself, the boy couldn’t give them what they wanted.

“Did you know this man?”

“Yes, we visited him,” was all Luke could reconstruct. He couldn’t relate where or when. It was a puzzle.

“Did you know his name?”

The detectives went over and over Luke’s response to that question.

What came out of Luke’s mouth was incomprehensible to them. For one thing, the boy didn’t talk as clearly as they needed him to. Was it unintelligible? Was it mumbled? Was it because Luke was in posttraumatic shock? Was it a foreign-sounding name?

Eventually, Sheriff Dye gave up trying to figure out what Luke was saying. While it was a high priority, he also faced pressure from a community that was growing uneasy. At Coast to Coast Hardware, a new stream of customers was requesting doorlocks, security lights, and related hardware, mentioning the Shook murders as the reason for the purchases. The Angler’s Roost, a sporting goods emporium south of Hamilton, sold four or five handguns that it wouldn’t have sold otherwise. Rumors were spreading that it was a cult killing, that the bodies had been mutilated. The mood of the community was further unnerved on more than one clear, chilly night, when wandering deer, possibly drawn by the blaze of lights emanating from the empty house on McCarthy Loop, tripped Sheriff Dye’s alarm wires. Up and down the Bitterroot, the siren could be heard for miles, a scream in the night, a grim reminder of the events of December 12, 1985.

“Not a thing is new,” Sheriff Dye said to reporters, dismissing a rumor that the slayings had anything to do with drugs or cults. “We found nothing to indicate that the Shooks were involved in any way with drugs.” Indeed, the testimonials were still pouring forth on the letters to the editor page from agonized friends and colleagues, like Anthony Tognetti, the superintendent of the Stevensville school district. “You will not be forgotten,” he wrote at the end of a tribute to Mike Shook printed under the headline: “A Truly Fine Man.”

After the children were reunited in the early weeks of the new year, having been led to understand, as best as the family could say it, that their mother and father had gone to heaven and weren’t coming back, they stayed with Mike’s sister. She and her husband, who had their own children, were living in a trailer court at the time, and their neighbors, aware that the children still were perceived to be at risk, set up a phone-tag network to alert one another to any suspicious traffic.

The fears that fed the rumors found amplification in the common knowledge around town: Sheriff Dye had absolutely no idea where to start looking for suspects. Everyone knew it. It could be anyone in town, he suspected, which is just what confirmed the community’s dread.

Sheriff Dye had a handful of physical evidence: semen recovered from Teresa’s body, a stray red hair, and a .22-caliber bullet. He didn’t have the gun, or the knife that killed Mike and Teresa. There was nothing missing from the house as far as he could tell, though it was too early to rule out any motive. Sheriff Dye’s deputies checked on everyone who had been around the house in the recent past, especially the workers who had been hired to help with the last details of construction.

The autopsy concluded that the knife wounds to the chest had killed Mike and Teresa, and indicated that the couple died sometime around eight o’clock. The food in their full stomachs had hardly begun to be digested. The evidence of ligature marks on the arms and legs of both victims, indicating they had been tied, was kept secret, as was the gash on Teresa’s leg and the evidentiary slug. Sheriff Dye’s closed-mouth approach to the press during the investigation of a sensational murder was certainly precedented and partly warranted. Whole chapters in law-enforcement textbooks are devoted to the practical and otherwise harmful aspects of sharing information with the public, who then shares it with all viable suspects, including the guilty one. Had the sheriff elected, though, to share more information about the case—especially the use of ropes to restrain a rape-murder victim on a bed—it would have set off a battery of klieg lights in Captain Larry Weatherman’s mind. It was just like the Donna Pounds case.

Within days of the murder, Missoulian reporter Larry Howell dug out the fact that ropes were involved, which he wrote about in a page-three story under the headline: “Double Murder Victims Had Been Tied, Says Official.” The story was not officially sourced to Sheriff Dye, but it was nevertheless a true account. The law-enforcement official who spoke with anonymity asserted that the couple had been tied at one point during the attack and gave more details about how Teresa was found, such as how her bra had been cut off and her pants unzipped. Though the anonymous official source stopped short of saying she had been raped, it was easy enough to read between the lines.

But Captain Weatherman, sitting in his office fifty miles to the north, didn’t make a connection. As chief of detectives in Missoula County, it wasn’t in the cards for him to be privy to the casework in Ravalli County. The killings were also trademarked by the murder of a man as well as a woman, so it didn’t appear to him to be related to his growing list of unsolved female homicides. And there was no precedent for him to pick up the phone and chat with Dale Dye about the case. Sheriff Dye watched his border. Jealous of his prerogative and protective of the power and authority of his office, Dye was an old-fashioned Western lawman. He was known to require Missoula County deputy sheriffs, if they were planning to even drive through Ravalli County on the way to Idaho, or were to drive through the county on official business for any reason at all, to call into Dye’s headquarters to advise the desk of their presence. It was like asking permission to merely step on his turf, and you had to do it every time.

He wasn’t about to share the signature of this killer with anyone outside his department, but it was there: the ropes, the knife, the sadistic, murderous rape.

It never occurred to Sheriff Dye to check on the recent delivery of furniture from Conlin’s, even though he covered his bases by questioning other workmen who had been around. The insurance agent who processed the fire-damage claim for Bob Shook had made a call to Conlin’s. It was routine procedure to establish the value of the furniture, which for claim purposes was still considered to be brand new, and to obtain a photocopy of the original sales receipt and check the delivery receipt. When he did, he found everything was in order. There was the sales receipt, and the delivery receipt. The goods had been delivered and signed for. There would be no problem, Bob Shook was told.