Prologue

All kinds of people like to live in nice places like Missoula, Montana. The streets are clean. The air is exhilarating. The people are friendly. And there’s plenty of hometown pride to go around. The same kids who go to grammar school together graduate from high school together. The University of Montana, right in town, is the next step for many who stay on in Missoula, staking out a career and raising family in this palm-sized metropolis with all the feel of small-town America.

The verdant, high ridges of the surrounding Rocky Mountain ranges—interconnecting as the Ruby, the Garnet, the Sapphire, the Mission, the Bitterroot—rise as if they had been fashioned on purpose as massive, protective shoulders, embracing the valley below in a crucible where man can build his shelter in peace.

This far northwestern corner of Montana that lies west of the Continental Divide, where the milder climate finds its inspiration in a Pacific orientation, has always been an oasis for man. Some ten thousand years ago, Asian peoples migrated here via the Alaskan peninsula, discovering a bounty of bison and mammoth. Nearly two centuries ago, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark searched for the Northwest Passage, an imagined water route to the Pacific, they became the pathfinders instead for successive waves of fur trappers and mountain men, who were followed in turn by miners and timberjacks and cattlemen. Lewis and Clark had traveled on foot, by horseback, and by boat for more than two thousand miles in Montana alone, charting what would become America’s fourth-largest state. To the east stretched the prairie, a vast, sometimes baking-hot place that, despite its rugged appearance, was also an elusively subtle rainbow of greens and browns under an endless blue sky. To the west, the northern Rockies, the lion’s share of which lie within Montana’s borders, arched as the backbone, articulating some of the most beautiful intermountain valleys to be found in the United States.

Now, as they have been for millennia, the mountains are still heavily forested, covered with tawny grass and speckled with huckleberry and scrub. In the fall, the cottonwood trees in the valley still turn red and then orange with the first frost. The evergreen needles of the larch, higher on the hill next to the Douglas fir, still turn yellow and then fall to the ground, appearing dead through the winter but prepared to sprout again in the spring, always repeating the cycle.

But for more than a decade, beginning in the dead of winter in 1974 and ending in the early fall of 1986, the business-as-usual serenity of this ideal Western habitat was shattered. For the span of those twelve years, the community’s wide green valley was transformed into a landscape of fear and loathing: Someone—or some thing—was preying on their open, trusting natures, culling the young and the beautiful, the pride of the community. The first victim was a child, a girl of five who was brutally raped, stabbed, and murdered.

Then, only a matter of weeks later, in the late afternoon of a Maundy Thursday, the lawmen would be called to the scene of a second murder so diabolical that words could not be found to categorize it. It was the sadistic sexual torture murder of a minister’s wife, the work of a true homicidal deviate. As word of this second murder spread, fed by rumor and exaggeration that further embellished the facts, Missoulians young and old were soon locked in a new, alien state of paranoia.

While the sheriff’s department didn’t explicitly link the two killings, the talk of the town did. The townspeople were already swept up in rumors about devil worship in neighboring Idaho, where only months before, in November, a young newlywed couple from Rathdrum, in northeast Idaho, mysteriously disappeared. Word had spread that the couple had been abducted and sacrificed by a satanic cult, that Rathdrum was the center of a devil-worshipping cult. In the minds of Missoulians then and now, Rathdrum, though two hundred miles away, is considered to be just over the hill. And it was no big stretch of the open-minded imaginations of many Missoulians to believe the tales that linked satanism with news reports of cattle mutilations reported in the Plains states to the east, beginning in the fall of 1973, and in eastern Montana in 1974. The animals were found with their lips, udders, and genitals removed, cut off with what was alleged to have been “surgical precision.”

An unusual spate of recent unsolved murders and disappearances under investigation elsewhere in Montana, some of which had the imaginable mark of a mad satanist, also stirred the public soup.

So it was not surprising that the word in Missoula was that the little girl, and now the minister’s wife, were the latest victims of a killing cult, or that this latest ghastly murder had become the talk of the luncheonette counters, the subject around the dinner table, and the reason why women were no longer going out of the house alone at night. It hung in the airless corridors of the county courthouse like a gas with invisible but suffocating power over the sheriff’s department. Even by the wildest standard of murder in Montana, this one didn’t register. There was no way to rank it among the legendary barroom brawls or domestic savageries that ended in someone’s death. It was, in a word, preposterous.

But it was to be only the beginning, one young deputy would learn in due course, as his entire law-enforcement career would become notched again and again with the indelible signature of one killer. Larry Weatherman, who was a rookie when the killing started, would collect the corpses, found dumped by the roadside or half-buried in the woods just east of town, left there by Missoula’s own serial killer, a native son, who killed and killed again with immunity. He was a local boy who attended local schools. He was a remarkable worker and a talented artist. He was incredibly sweet to the women who knew him, more attentive to their emotional needs than even their boyfriends. He was always there with a gift or flowers or just a card. He never forgot birthdays. He was someone who could be counted on if a favor was needed, who would go out of his way to help anyone. All one had to do was ask. He was the veritable boy next door—and in the case of the minister’s wife, he was the boy next door, a friend of the family.

With each new grisly discovery, Larry Weatherman, who would become captain of detectives, would also become the principal caretaker of yet another unsolved murder. First there were two. Then four. Then six. Seven. And it wasn’t over yet.

Neither Weatherman nor anyone else could see that the boy next door, who had in fact been a prime murder suspect when all the killing began, harbored a split personality that plotted one sadistic, torturing murder after another while also managing to impress almost everyone with doting favor upon favor. Neither Weatherman nor anyone else would see that the unseen menace, who held an entire community in suspense, was someone with a name and a face they knew well. Captain Weatherman was not geared to detect the sometimes-changing M.O. or the escalating scale of risk associated with each successive crime, both of which served as the killer’s grant of immunity. The victims were not prepared for the dialectic of a haunted mind that would prey so easily on their trust. Everyone who knew the killer was blind to the deep, dark pageantry of his emotional side, where ordinary human feelings had been supplanted by something else—a hidden reservoir of treacherous, fickle, and violent fantasy.

Whether the girl named Chryssie Crystal Creek saw it coming will never be known. What is known is that sometime in the early part of 1984, someone had taken his fresh kill up into the mountains east of town. He would have navigated the steep, rough logging road in a four-wheel drive pickup, then carried the naked corpse the rest of the way up a slope that overlooks a rocky gulch. The creek bed below would have been drying up to nothing more than a furrow of polished stone. Once at the top, at the almost imperceptible headwater of tiny Crystal Creek, he would be rid of her. There he would dump the body, shot twice in the head—once in the back and again in the temple—for animals to pick over.

In time, the waters would return. The skeleton would be buffeted on the rocks, smashed into pieces to be carried along with the drainage of Crystal Creek, downhill to the Clark Fork River, westward past the small outlying towns of Bonner and Milltown, on through Missoula, where it would flow westward still.

By the time she was found, more than a year later, all that Captain Weatherman would be able to determine from the fragmentary bone evidence was that he had another young, white female murder victim, which he would name, as he had the others before, with a practical nod to the local geography. He would call her Chryssie Crystal Creek. The date was September 9, 1985. He was beginning to get a sinking feeling.