Chapter 29

The Knife and the Elk

That night, the TV news would carry the story of the Missoula couple who survived an ordeal with an intruder who didn’t survive. The report would be seen on television screens across the state. Among the barest details of the story was the connection between the couple, their attacker, and Conlin’s Furniture. But that was the single most important detail to Bob Shook, who sat in his living room fifty miles away in Hamilton, electrified by this information.

Christ, that’s where the kids got the furniture, he thought, his mind leaping.

“Georgie,” he called to his wife, “they said that this guy worked down at Conlin’s.”

Bob wasted no time getting on the phone. He called the sheriff’s department, but was told that Sheriff Dye was gone for the day, and so was the deputy who was assigned to the Shook homicides. Bob told the deputy on the desk why he called.

“When they announced it on the TV, that this guy Nance, the guy that was working for that furniture company, tried to kill Wells and his wife, well right then, I says, ‘You know that sounds like the same thing that happened up here.’ That’s where the kids got the furniture,” he said.

Bob was told the information would be passed on. It already grated on Bob Shook that the investigation into his son’s and daughter-in-law’s murders seemed to take so long. Over the past nine months, he had learned to live with the frustration. “How are things going?” he would occasionally ask Sheriff Dye’s men. He really wanted to know why it was taking so long. Every time, the answer came back the same. He was not the only one who wondered why. Always he was told that these things take time. Bob’s son, Steve, who was on the Hamilton force, finally told his father that the sheriff’s department was at the end of the line, that they didn’t know anything.

Bob knew he now had a red-hot lead, and he wasn’t going to hesitate anymore. First thing in the morning, he would call the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department.

Captain Weatherman was out when he called, but he was told he would be back soon. Bob stayed by the phone. When it rang, he was burning to tell Weatherman what he knew.

“When you go in, if you go in and check this guy Nance’s house—” an excited Bob started to explain.

“We have been out there this morning. We’re going back this afternoon,” Captain Weatherman said.

“Be on the lookout for a statue of a bugling elk and a knife, a custom-made, bone-handled Kelgin hunting knife.”

“I think I saw that knife this morning,” Captain Weatherman answered.

Nine hours later, shortly after seven in the evening, Bob Shook got a call from the dispatcher at the Ravalli County Sheriff’s Department. Sheriff Dye wanted to see him, and he could either come over to the office or Sheriff Dye would come to his home. An hour later, Bob and Karlene, Steve’s wife, met with the sheriff in his office. Sheriff Dye handed him the knife, which he identified as the one he had given his son for Christmas two years before. Karlene, in turn, recognized the elk as the one she had made and given to Mike and Teresa.

When detectives went to Conlin’s to ferret out the delivery receipt, to verify that Wayne had delivered to the Shooks, it was no longer in the file. Sometime in the last few months, after the insurance adjuster had called, the delivery receipt had disappeared. If Wayne had removed it himself, and no one else would have had any reason to take it, he failed to cover all his tracks that day. The record showed Wayne’s initials on another delivery made that day in Stevensville, and his partner recalled that they had then gone on to Hamilton.

All day Friday, only a handful of law-enforcement officials and reporters knew that Wayne was on his way to receiving a posthumous designation as the serial killer who had preyed on his hometown for more than a decade, almost from the time he was old enough to act on his own. It was enough for those who knew him simply to digest what had happened, let alone discover too that he had been a prime suspect in the brutal, unsolved sex murder of Donna Pounds, a minister’s wife, twelve years earlier.

Everyone at Conlin’s who read the fifth paragraph of Larry Howell’s banner front-page story in the Friday Missoulian was plowing new ground in their understanding of Wayne: “And in a bizarre twist to an already strange story, authorities said Thursday that Nance was one of two prime suspects in the brutal …” etc., etc., etc. They found out they had been working with somebody who turned out to be somebody else.

Those who knew Wayne from childhood, like Marge Frame, who couldn’t understand the mean side of this little boy, learned what had become of the cute carrot-top who incinerated kittens. “Unbelieving at first, and that’s when you start remembering all these things. And then you would hear other people say, ‘I’m not surprised.’ He was like the kid on the bus. Once you thought about it hard enough, it fit.”

Bill Van Canagan had already had his aftershock on Thursday, when he learned the circumstances of Wayne’s death, telescoping back to the still-fresh nightmare he had been unable to shake since senior year at Sentinel and then forward to the hot night only two weeks before when he flushed an intruder from the shadows outside his bedroom doorway. Had it been Wayne? Coming to get him? Shaken, he got on the phone. He had to talk to somebody about this.

Rick Davis was worked up, too, when he got a call from the sheriff’s department.

“I think it would be a good idea if you came downtown. We need to talk to you,” the deputy said.

The investigation had focused on the old Ford pickup that had been parked in cockeyed fashion in the Wellses’ sideyard, and led to the supposition that Wayne had an accomplice. Rick Davis fell into the dragnet because the Toyota pickup Wayne was driving was coleased by Rick. Was he the accomplice who had been slouched down on the seat of that old truck?

No, he had sold the Toyota to Wayne after he had left Conlin’s employ.

“I cosigned for him. They said they would take my name off in six months, but I guess they didn’t, or Wayne didn’t.”

The man in the old Ford pickup called the sheriff’s department a few days after he learned that the police were running down all owners of older-model orange and white Ford trucks just like his. He was terrified that he would become entangled in a homicide investigation, when all he had been doing out there was surveiling his girlfriend, whom he suspected of two-timing.

The Saturday newspaper provided more bombshells. The barrage of connections between Wayne Nance and a series of sex-motivated murders emanated first from Sheriff Dye, who disclosed the link to the Shook homicides: the knife and the elk. Captain Weatherman noted that there were several other murders over the years that would be wrested from their dusty file holders and eyeballed for Wayne Nance signatures. Among them principally were the separate killings of three young women whose bodies had been found east of town.

A gigantic maw opened, swallowing the community’s preconceptions about somebody who might have been a friend, a coworker, a joker, a drinking buddy, a son—or just the deliveryman off-loading a new stuffed chair for the den.

Captain Weatherman had been in Wayne’s room in the spring of 1974, when he found the black bag containing the .22-caliber shells and casings and the bloodied but washed underpants. This time, when he led detectives on the search of the house at 715 Minnesota Avenue, concentrating on Wayne’s room, they had to retrace a time continuum to comprehend what medieval tortures might have been contemplated or carried out in this unholy chamber. It was a sick eclecticism that they would record with their evidence camera, but what triggered their most intense interest was the sacral bed. What perversions were in mind here? The sheet was of green rubber. The bedposts were looped with rope ties. On the posts at the headboard, one side clearly was tied so as to permit escape from the ligatures, an indication to the detectives that Wayne had practiced on himself. Wayne’s father told Captain Weatherman that his son had a skin condition that called for him to sleep on a rubber sheet. The detective inferred otherwise, and suspected that Wayne may have even used his bed as a sacrificial altar, removing his stabbed, bloody offering in the handy, leak-proof wrapper. Then out to the truck for disposal.

Among the items removed for evidence was a strip of coin-booth photographs that showed Wayne in three poses with a dark-haired woman exhibiting not much more than the trace of a smile. Her bangs were cut at the eyebrows. She wore oversized, gradient-tint glasses and a raglan-sleeved sweatshirt. In one pose, she and Wayne are kissing. Was she the 140-pound corpse he had pulled from the frozen earth at the Bonner Dam? Whom he had personified as Debbie Deer Creek?

George Nance identified her only as Robin, a drifter, and he took umbrage when Captain Weatherman solved at least part of the puzzle by positively identifying Robin as Debbie Deer Creek—one and the same.

A single hair recovered from the driver’s-side door hinge of Wayne’s truck was long enough and visually similar in color. Captain Weatherman immediately took it to the lab, where he was gratified to learn it was a forensic twin to Debbie Deer Creek’s dark-auburn lock. Hair is not usually considered a final arbiter in forensic matchmaking, but in this case the layered series of hair dyes—natural light brown to deeper brown to the final dark auburn—matched without a doubt.

Wayne’s father said his son’s pickup was out of commission at the time Robin was around. Its clutch was out, he said. So they shouldn’t have found one of her hairs in the door latch.

Captain Weatherman further certified to himself that Wayne Nance killed the mystery girl, Robin. He shipped her skull and the coin-booth photo to Dr. Charney, the forensic physical anthropologist at Colorado State University, where a photographic superimposition comparison was made. It produced a match.

“They do fit. I am certain that that’s who we’re dealing with. I am certain that Wayne Nance killed her,” Captain Weatherman said.

Sheriff Dye replayed the audiotape on which little Luke Shook was trying to say what the intruder’s name was.

“I am certain now,” Sheriff Dye said, “that when he came in the door, he said he was Conan the Barbarian.” And on September 26, Sheriff Dye learned that the .22-caliber slug removed from Teresa’s leg had been fired by the single-action six that belonged to George Nance.

While Doug was making his initial recovery in the hospital, Captain Weatherman came to visit, and he relayed a conversation he recently had with Wayne’s father. At first George maintained that Wayne was set up by the Wellses, that he had warned Wayne about fooling around with a married woman. He claimed that Kris was, indeed, sweet on Wayne, and that when Doug found out about it, Wayne was invited to the house, where he was ambushed.

“Well, George has finally said, ‘It looks like my boy did this,’” Weatherman told Doug. “‘But he didn’t do all these other things. So quit trying to pin all the crimes in Missoula on him.’”

There was another visitor, too, whom Doug will never forget. It was Mike Shock’s brother-in-law, who had driven a couple of hundred miles, from the logging operation he worked at in the middle of nowhere, to thank Doug Wells.

“Sonovabitch,” he said, spouting a friendly blasphemy. “I just came here to tell you you’re a goddamn hero.”

“Well, you just told me you’re going to adopt three more kids, and you already have four of your own. I think you’re the goddamn hero.”