Chapter 2

A Christmas Grave

It was a windless, overcast afternoon, and very cold. The frozen Clark Fork River appeared below as a giant white serpent, ice-packed, its undulations stilled to the eye, but its waters flowing endlessly westward beneath the ice pack, draining the high-elevation ridges of the Sapphire Mountains, a north-south range of the Rockies some ten miles southeast of Missoula. The river angles through Bonner and Milltown, through Hellgate Canyon, into Missoula, and beyond to Idaho, eventually to join the tributary system of the mightier Columbia River.

The man who plugged his way above this vista of winter’s majesty on a Monday afternoon was a wildlife photographer. He was stalking photo opportunities, pausing frequently to check light readings, glancing upward to the trees for birds, and keeping a keen reconnaisance behind his steps. He was on the slight rise known as Bonner Dam, and he was quite alone, because it was the afternoon of Christmas Eve 1984. Everybody else was downtown in the stores, getting off work early or huddled inside against the arctic temperature.

As he scanned the lower trees of this wooded place, his eye caught something. He couldn’t make it out at first, so he walked closer. It was something sticking out of the ground, and it was black. Approaching, he could see that it didn’t resemble the typical downed tree limb, or dead, snapped pine trunk. When he got right up to it, he recognized it, and then he reeled back in horror. It was a blackened human leg, protruding from the rock-hard ground at a forty-five–degree angle. There was the knee. There the ankle. The foot.

Blood raced to his head. In a reflex, he anxiously looked back along the vague trail that he had just descended. It was still dead quiet. There was no one there. He made rapid mental notes about exactly where the grave could be found as he clambered back down the ridge and across a field to his car, sheltering his camera against the cold inside his coat, very eager to call the sheriff’s department. He would tell them the protruding leg marked the grave. It was under a large spruce, about 100 yards from the top of the dam. It was along a little-used dirt lane.

Captain Larry Weatherman knew the spot well, but only by its reputation. The rocky knoll and the grassy, flat spot underneath had been a popular place for teenagers for years. In the Seventies, along with the changing times, it was the place to throw a keg party, or to rendezvous with friends and enjoy some hallucinogens.

Flanked by his deputies, Captain Weatherman tromped his way up to the spot. It was easy to find. But it was not going to be easy to get this body out of the ground. The earth wouldn’t break against the digging gear they had brought. Weatherman radioed for someone to bring up a tent and a portable heater. Maybe a few hours of heat would soften things up. It was getting late by the time the tent and the heater were put in place over the grave. Then Weatherman had to decide whether he was going to get his deputies up here tomorrow, on Christmas Day, to dig a corpse out of the ground. He decided to wait until Wednesday. Maybe the earth would have softened up enough by then to enable them to make a forensically correct exhumation of this body. Though he had his doubts that it would be easy even then.

So for two nights, on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day, the grave of the girl named Robin was enshrined in a tent, eerily pitched in the black wilderness. The only sound was the periodic blast of hot air from the thermostatically controlled propane heater.

And on Wednesday, when the deputies returned to Bonner Dam, they discovered that Weatherman had been right about how hard the ground was. The deputies had to use chisels. It was as if the body were encased in granite.

It was easy to make a sex determination. The dead woman’s large breasts were still present and intact. The skull, Weatherman could see, was fractured from the impact of bullet wounds. As the first bullet entered, it would have precipitated a rapid expansion of the gases within the cranium, exploding the bone apart. After the site was excavated with the same kind of care given to an archeological dig, Weatherman was disappointed that no bullets were recovered. That told him that it was most likely that the young woman had been killed elsewhere and then dumped here. He dreaded to think what it meant, now that he had two unidentified bodies—both young females—who had been killed and dumped on the eastern edge of town.

The first was the body of a younger girl who had been found along Interstate 90. She had been stabbed in the chest and tossed down an embankment. By the time anyone noticed that she was there, her corpse had become almost completely desiccated. Weatherman’s attempts to identify this girl, whom he dubbed the Beavertail Hill Girl in reference to the slight topographic rise of Beavertail Hill along the highway near the site of her fragmented remains, had so far been futile. It had been years since the crew of a slow-moving Burlington Northern freight train spotted the girl’s bones laying up against a chain-link fence that ran along the track line. That was late January of 1980. Weatherman theorized then that whoever had killed this girl had thrown her off on the roadside, and that her body had then rolled down the bank coming to rest against the fence. In the year and a half that the body rested there, it became nothing more than a sun-parched skeleton, reduced to a hubble of almost indistinct artifact. It was as if it had lain in repose, sub rosa in the landscape, alongside Montana’s main artery—a kind of existential eye on the comings and goings on the interstate.

The girl’s hair had completely separated from the skull. It looked more like a strawberry blonde’s hairpiece that now, having fallen off, lay up against the fence, snagged in place. Her dress was gathered in a tight wrap around the neck. There were no shoes at the site, and no underpants. Police recovered a pair of earrings and some other inexpensive jewelry. An incisive wound to a rib indicated that the cause of death was a stab wound to the chest. It was estimated that she had been approximately fifteen years old.

That case was now nearly four years old and going nowhere. Captain Weatherman had no reason to suspect that those two murder scenes, except for their relative proximity to each other and the fact that the girls had been dumped after being killed elsewhere, were in any way related. Weatherman was certain by now that the Beavertail Hill victim wasn’t a local girl. Perhaps as soon as the end of the week he would know the identity of this latest victim. In the meantime, he decided to call her Debbie Deer Creek, after the creek that flows down off the mountain to join with the Clark Fork.

An autopsy performed by Dr. Ronald Rivers produced two distinct, forensic identifiers, which gave Weatherman hope. The dead girl had perfect, pearl-white teeth. There were no fillings or restorations, and Dr. Rivers also recorded that one of the victim’s lateral incisors had rotated outward. This would be invaluable in the search for the girl’s identity, because it would be unique in the dental-chart catalogue of missing persons. The second key to identifying the girl was her hair. Debbie Deer Creek’s dark-auburn hair had been dyed. While hair samples are not usually considered a final arbiter in forensic matchmaking, the series of color-changing dyes in this case showed up like layers of paint on a car. Her natural light brown had been first dyed a deeper brown, and then a dark auburn.

Dr. Rivers estimated that the body had been in the ground for approximately three months. In that time, no one who fit the girl’s description had been reported missing in Missoula County, which led Captain Weatherman to think that she was from out of state. And no one called the sheriff’s department after the Missoulian ran a brief news item about the discovery of a body on Bonner Dam. The newspaper’s story about the photographer’s find was limited to a few paragraphs on an inside page under the headline “Body Found East of Town.”

On Thursday, the day after the body had been carved from the frozen earth, Captain Weatherman broadcast a nationwide description of Debbie Deer Creek’s body to other law-enforcement agencies. He had run a description of the Beavertail Hill skeleton through national police computer networks every six months, and he was still waiting for a response. And just as he had commissioned an anthropological reconstruction of the Beavertail Hill Girl, he commissioned one for Debbie Deer Creek. It would be done by Dr. Michael Charney, a forensic physical anthropologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He would place the new plastic likeness on the top shelf of the bookcase in his cramped, windowless office, right next to the now-aging bust of the Beavertail Hill Girl.

Captain Weatherman isn’t a man to give up easily on a homicide. He would sift the evidence, rethink the motives. He would wait, if that’s what was called for, for as long as it would take. He was not going to give up. It wasn’t just professional pride. There was the sense of duty to the families of these murdered girls who would have no way of knowing what had become of their children.

The tall, bespectacled captain, who chooses his words slowly and carefully, displays an inordinate degree of humility for someone in charge. Like many others who have chosen a career in law enforcement, it was his lifelong goal. Born and raised in Anaconda, Montana’s copper town, his father and his uncle worked in the smelters. But Larry Weatherman had bigger dreams. After graduation from high school and a Navy tour in Vietnam, where he was in the first battalion raids at Danang, he returned to Montana to marry his high school sweetheart. He was graduated from the University of Montana with a degree in sociology and went immediately to work for the Missoula County sheriff’s department. Now, as chief of detectives, he represents a new breed of Western lawman.

The respect he is accorded by his detectives is evident as they pass him in the narrow corridors at the sheriff’s department, nodding to the man in charge who walks with a deliberate, slightly gangly gait, and seems to be always engrossed in thought.

When Weatherman joined the department, in the early years of the Seventies, Missoula was so quiet after dark that some nights of the week the only deputy sheriff on duty in all of Missoula County was the jailer. Nobody was on patrol. Things were different then. As in 1950s and 1960s, the Missoula of the 1970s saw very few violent crimes against persons that didn’t involve families. They were easy cases. The killer always seemed to leave a trail a mile wide right to his front door. By the time Weatherman joined the department, the tide was going out on those simpler days. There used to be one or two homicides a year, at most. Some years there were none. The murder rate in the busiest years would peak at four or five a year. Still, they were cases that got solved. But now, with the addition of Debbie Deer Creek, Weatherman would add yet another case to his growing number of unsolved murders, all of which dated back to the early winter of 1974. There were a total of five. Debbie Deer Creek would make six. Five of the victims were women, and the cases either appeared to be or definitely were sexual homicides.

For Weatherman, it all seemed to date back to one cataclysmic crime. It occurred on April 11, 1974. The rookie Weatherman was summoned to a murder scene that would redefine the meaning of homicide for him and everyone else in this quiet Western university town. It was a brutal sex murder. The victim was a minister’s wife.