Chapter 5

A Prime Suspect

The deputies drove out to Tamarack Trailer Park, a spit of a place under a mountain in a no-man’s land just a half-mile west of West Riverside. It is more identifiable as being on the eastern outskirts of East Missoula. They were armed with a search warrant, and it was midafternoon as Patrolman Larry Weatherman pulled into the macadam drive and up to the Nance trailer. The focus of the search would be Wayne’s room, and he hoped they wouldn’t have any trouble.

Just as he expected, Wayne wasn’t at home. He was still in school. Wayne’s mother, Charlene, answered the door.

“Mrs. Nance,” Weatherman said, the words coming out flatly, “we’re here to take a look around. If it’s okay with you.”

“You have a warrant?”

The deputies showed a folded sheet of paper.

And there was no trouble. Charlene pushed on the door, letting them in, and as they walked inside, their eyes scanned the living room.

“We’d like to see Wayne’s room,” they said.

She understood. By now it was no secret to her that her son had been sighted near the Pounds home and that he had drawn further suspicion by playing hooky on the day of the murder. Besides, there was nothing she could do.

Wayne’s room was a mass of organized clutter, and as Weatherman viewed the scene, his first order of business was to look for white clothesline rope.

Though he was low on the totem pole at the sheriff’s department, as a rookie Weatherman had been recognized by his superior, Ray Froelich, and by Sheriff Moe as a promising detective. It was Weatherman who had found the rubber glove out behind the Pounds house. With that feather in his cap, he was assigned to be part of a team with Deputy Northey to run down the source of the ropes. They had gone to every hardware store in town, hoping to match the individual color of the rope’s inner core. When they finally tracked down a sample of rope with a matching inner core at a hardware store in the Holiday Village Shopping Center on Old U.S. Highway 93, no one there remembered selling any of it.

Harvey Pounds couldn’t help them either. He couldn’t say whether it was from the house or not. He told them it might have been pulled out from under the kitchen sink. He wasn’t sure. He did, however, recall that about a year earlier, he and Donna had noticed that some clothesline was missing from the line out back. It seemed insignificant then, and it gave Weatherman little insight now as he pored through Wayne’s things, looking also for a mate to the surgical glove.

The single glove had been sent to the FBI in Washington, where it was hoped that the stain that appeared to be blood would be identified and typed. At this point, there was no guarantee that it would yield any forensic truth, so the search for the mate had become a high priority.

In a call for help from the community, Sheriff Moe asked residents of the West Riverside area to be on the lookout. Dogs may have carried it away. Photographs of the single glove were put on display at the courthouse. The appeal netted two samples. One, which someone found along South Avenue, was of extreme age. A second, discovered near the Bunkhouse Bridge downtown, wasn’t of the same type.

Weatherman was a towering presence in Wayne’s small bedroom, standing at the center of the four walls, his eyes piercing methodically through his eyeglasses at all the trappings of a teenage boy’s life. There was something odd here, he realized, though he said nothing. Charlene was lingering quietly in the doorway. Weatherman began to understand that the high school senior whose life was before him was more than just a pack rat. There seemed to be a settled order to things. The Weekly Readers, which had to be holdovers from Wayne’s elementary school days, were neatly stacked up. Why would he keep those?

Then he saw it: a black, grip-type gym bag. It appeared to be of the same type described by one of the eyewitnesses. Weatherman grabbed it to make a closer inspection, and before even pulling open its zipper he could tell there was something inside.

The detective was anxious. He knew that hard physical evidence was crucial. In fact, the whole problem so far was that they had none, no tangible thing to carry into court that would prove, as an unimpeachable witness might, who had murdered Donna Pounds. Wayne’s mother showed a heightened nervousness as Weatherman opened the bag. Inside, Weatherman and the other deputies found a variety of .22-caliber bullets and shell casings. They recognized them as the same brand as the ones used in the murder weapon.

“We’ll be taking these,” he muttered, turning to continue his search.

Then Weatherman found the jackpot. He opened a dresser drawer and his eyes fell on a pair of Wayne’s underpants. A large dark-colored stain was visible, and his experienced eye told him it was blood. Anyone could tell, by what was now a rust-colored stain, that they had been washed since they had been soiled, and he hoped that the FBI would be able to determine—if this was human blood on these shorts—whose blood type it was.

“We’ll take these, too,” he said matter of factly.

Charlene spoke up. She didn’t object to the removal of things from Wayne’s room. She instead volunteered that she had recently washed that pair of underpants.

Weatherman and the other deputies thanked her and left. They had to get back to the courthouse with this evidence. Weatherman was sure that Sheriff Moe would request a blood sample from Wayne and that this new evidence would demand that Wayne be interviewed.

“You know, I’m the sheriff’s number-one suspect,” Wayne blurted out.

It didn’t register right away to Stan Fullerton, his biology lab partner, what he was talking about. The two of them were surveying the open carcass of Rana pipiens, the North American leopard frog. It was dissection time.

“What do you mean?”

“The sheriff’s detectives have had me in and interviewed me.” Wayne had his classmate’s attention now.

Fullerton now knew exactly what he was talking about. The Donna Pounds thing. There was a lot of talk about it in school. Students were upset about it. And Fullerton, in a flash recalling Wayne once telling him about hanging cats on a clothesline and skinning them alive, also knew where Wayne lived—out there by the Poundses.

“Well, you didn’t do it, did you?” he asked Wayne point blank.

“No,” Wayne answered, head down, picking now at the exposed heart of the frog. “See, one, two three chambers. A three-chambered heart.” After a pause, he continued, “They’re just bringing in everybody out there and talking to them.”

That’s how Wayne ran it by Stan Fullerton, a senior with curly hair that he groomed the only way he could. Trouble was, the end result was a lot like a Julius Caesar hairdo—thus the nickname Julius.

Stan thought it a strange thing to mention, that you were a suspect in a murder. Isn’t that something you wouldn’t want known? Wayne seemed proud of the fact, brazenly talking about it even though a local radio talk-show host was running a vigilante campaign to find and punish the killer. And a group of leading citizens and officials, who had started the Missoula Reward Fund to help solve the Siobhan McGuinness murder, now was offering a similar thousand-dollar reward for information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of Donna Pounds’s killer.

But Stan was not one of Wayne’s closest friends, and not the first classmate to have a private audience on the subject of his involvement in what by now was easily the most sensational murder case in modern Missoula’s history.