Epilogue

When Wayne returned to Kris in the bedroom for the last time, immediately accusing her of calling the police, he was signaling that his next move would be quick. The police might be on their way. He would have to kill her, and fast. There’s no doubt Kris seemed to be facing the last few moments of her life.

Most victims of a serial killer don’t survive more than two minutes once they come under the killer’s control. But the Wellses, who had spent more than an hour and a half with Wayne, managed to kill their potential killer in return. Doug and Kris survived as living victims, witnesses to the fulminating rage that drove Wayne right down to the moment of the kill. They had no way of knowing what was going through Wayne’s mind, but they can talk about what he did and what he said as well as how they reacted, all of which bears directly on the FBI’s current research into the role victims play when they fall into the deadly clutches of a sociopath like Wayne Nance.

At the FBI’s invitation, Doug and Kris have become regulars at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where special agents of its Behavioral Science Unit profile killers by deduction: What they learn from the crime scene—and the victims—tells them something about the killer. How do they unwittingly abet these killers? As the killer manages to succeed again and again, how can he be caught? The Wellses make the trip four times a year, addressing seminars on the subject of their specialty: Wayne Nance, serial killer. Their courage and grit draw handclaps from the FBI agents who hear their story, at times spellbound, always fascinated to learn whatever they can about this most elusive kind of murderer.

“Did he take his gloves off when he tied the knots?” an agent asks Kris. “Yes,” she answers, “when he cut up the ropes in lengths.”

“Did the autopsy show that he was on anything?” another asks.

“There wasn’t a trace of anything in him,” Doug answers.

“Was your bedroom on the first floor so he could see in?”

“No. It’s a split-level house.”

“Was there ever any indication in the neighborhood of a Peeping Tom?” the question comes.

“No.”

“When you got your gun from the nightstand, and turned the light on, why didn’t you finish him off?”

“I was gonna empty the gun on him when I turned that light on,” Doug answers, “but when I saw that he … I never saw a dead man before, but he sure looked like one.”

No one knows exactly how many people Wayne killed.

Local law-enforcement authorities credit him with at least four murders: Donna Pounds, the girl named Robin, and Mike and Teresa Shook. He is the only suspect in the unsolved murders of Devonna Nelson and Chryssie Crystal Creek. Weatherman is certain, too, that Wayne was the masked intruder who ambushed Janet Wicker in her apartment.

There is no way to link Wayne to the Verna Kvale case, because as far as Weatherman could determine, Wayne was not on leave from the Navy at the time. But Dusty Deschamps regrets that the blob of semen recovered from her thigh is now lost, because it would have made for an interesting DNA comparison.

Nobody knows who killed Siobhan McGuinness. But the little girl’s mother believes that it was Wayne, and she has profusely thanked Doug Wells for avenging her daughter’s murder. “I don’t know anything about you or how you have reconciled this within your soul, but I want you to know that I think of you often and with love and compassion. And if my hand could have been with you, I would have gladly struck and killed that motherfucking monster!” she wrote to him. “God surely must have acted through you.”

Weatherman and Deschamps don’t categorically exclude Wayne as Siobhan’s killer, but they don’t think he is responsible. The FBI’s serial murder profilers, however, see the crime as a logical stepping-off point for a young killer like Wayne. It fits a typical pattern of graduation. An inexperienced killer starts off with an easy victim, hedging his risk. In time, he enhances the thrill of the kill by taking on more risk. In Wayne’s case, as he became more self-confident, he ultimately challenged himself to conquer the protective male before vanquishing the female. Authorities now view that pillage-and-rape syndrome as an expression of Wayne’s need to actually experience his own Viking fantasy.

Special Agent Hazelwood, an expert in serial sexual homicide, theorizes that one reason Wayne didn’t tie Kris up as tightly as he did Doug was that, aside from the fact that Doug presented a genuine physical threat, perhaps Wayne was crossing over into his imaginary world.

“He was obsessed with Kris. He had built it up in his mind that she loved him. Not binding her tightly, and her not escaping, might have fit into his fantasy of her really being in love with him.

“The primary reason he’s of such interest to us is because of the fact that he committed, to the best of our knowledge, all of his crimes within a very, very small area and was still able to evade apprehension or identification. Even though he was strange, even though he arose as a prominent suspect in what they think may have been one of his first murders, he was able to mislead the people, and that’s what we’re interested in.

“Law enforcement in general looks at M.O. much, much too heavily to link crimes,” Hazelwood says. “We look at signatures. M.O. changes over time. It evolves with age and maturity. What doesn’t change is the signature: stabbing and tying up.

“Wayne really got off on stabbing. You gotta look for the signature, and his signature was tying up and stabbing.”

Siobhan McGuinness was stabbed.

Donna Pounds was tied up and shot.

Devonna Nelson was stabbed.

Verna Kvale was stabbed.

Debbie Deer Creek (a.k.a. Robin) and Chryssie Crystal Creek were shot and may well have been tied.

Mike and Teresa Shook were both tied and stabbed, and Teresa was shot.

The Wellses were both tied and Doug was stabbed and then shot.

After it was all over, the community breathed a sigh of relief. For months, the noonday commentaries on Missoula’s street corners were peppered with testimonials of personal close encounters with Wayne Nance—“I went to Sentinel with him”; “He delivered a chair to me”; “I remember him from the Cabin, once …” Any mention of the Wellses drew an immediate salute. Doug Wells became a statewide legend. Those who might eventually forget his name would never forget the story.

The Missoulian, in its very first report on the incident, quoted an unidentified detective who said: “It’s like Christmas for us. The good guys won.” On its editorial page, under the headline, “A Killer Is Killed—and a Fear Is Lifted,” the editors wrote: “Nance has been linked to the kinds of deliberate, meaningless, haunting crimes seldom seen in Montana … Horrible, tragic crimes now seem well on their way toward being solved, and western Montana may be a bit safer.”

The Missoula Reward Fund, which had been started in 1974 to help solve the Siobhan McGuinness case, disbursed three thousand dollars to the Wellses. More than two hundred other financial donations were made to the couple, from individuals as well as through a benefit campaign that set up accounts at every bank in Missoula and at five savings institutions in the Bitterroot. The money defrayed mortgage payments and helped pay medical bills. Doctors signed over insurance checks. Hospital administrators told them not to worry about the bills they couldn’t pay: Doug had performed a public service and the community owed him. It was not going to be the other way around.

It had taken twenty-two stitches to close up the gashes on Doug’s head. Wayne had used a handmade club that the warehouse guys at Conlin’s had watched him make. He had used Bonneville Power Administration lead wire, looping it up and back and up and back until it was the size he wanted. Then he wrapped it with black electrician’s tape and fashioned a bolster to distinguish the handle from the club end.

The slug that brushed the sciatic nerve in Doug’s right leg had given him a case of foot drop. He had almost no control over it for months. It hung limp at the ankle, and he was forced to wear a leg brace. Eventually his doctors extended his Achilles’ tendon and reconstructed the ankle, and the nerve came back.

The stab wound to Doug’s chest was a more serious matter. The knife had missed Doug’s heart by a fraction of an inch, but it had severed his diaphragm and cut open the stomach lining. Fluids escaping from his stomach migrated to his chest, irritating the pericardium, which wept in defense of the heart. As the pericardial sac filled, it put pressure on his heart. It was drained once, but in a week’s time had hardened to the consistency of an orange peel. A quarter of an inch thick in places, it was crushing his heart and reducing blood flow to one-third normal. Because he could have suffered a heart attack at any moment, doctors performed emergency open-chest surgery and removed the protective membrane.

Even after Doug recovered from the physical trauma of the events on that warm September night, both Doug and Kris discovered their lives had been irrevocably changed. For months after the attack, Doug complained of a queer floating sensation and suffered from vertigo and bouts of disorientation, and he also had recurrent nightmares about Wayne. In one, he and Kris were driving down a one-way street, and when they came to a stop sign, there in a doorway of a building that was right at the curbside stood Wayne, glaring at him. In another, they were at a restaurant with some friends, and as Doug looked up, he saw Wayne. He was the busboy. “What the hell’s he doing here?” Doug said, and one of his friends responded: “Why don’t you leave him alone? Haven’t you done enough to him?” Doug’s last bad dream was set in a warehouse, where upon seeing a friend of his who was driving a forklift, Doug started to jump aboard, only to see the man turn at him, brandishing a knife. It was Wayne again.

“Every time we would go out and have our nachos and beer, or sit down at lunch, pretty soon we’d be talking about it,” Doug says. “I don’t think there was ever a time when the final thing we would say wasn’t: ‘God, am I glad he’s dead. That dumb ass, he fooled with the wrong people. He got it. He got what he deserved.’ That was how we would pull ourselves out of it.”

Before the attack, Doug used to sit out on the back deck in the evening, staring off beyond the city limits into the mysteries that lie beyond the mountaintops. There, in his hard-earned private reverie, he embodied an image akin to a Norman Rockwell ideal. But he no longer could be out there alone in the dark. And for a full year after Wayne’s death, Kris would keep a gun with her at all times, even when she mopped the kitchen floor.

They also strategically placed loaded handguns around the house, and practiced like a SWAT team, ready for anything. One night, while they slept, the smoke alarm in the hallway just outside their bedroom woke them. In two flashes, Doug was at the front door, gun in hand, and Kris was at the patio door, gun up. When they pulled back from their positions to stop the ear-piercing beep, they discovered a large black spider inside. It had somehow shorted the alarm, electrocuting itself.

It was dead, all right.