Chapter 9

The Great Escape

Ronald MacDonald had been to the sheriff’s department. He knew exactly why Wayne was being asked to consider taking a lie-detector test. Now, as he sat behind the desk in his spartan law office, he was taking a closer look at the subject himself, who sat across from him. Wayne was cool and matter of fact.

“Will you be my lawyer?” Wayne wanted to know.

“Well, Wayne, let’s talk about that,” MacDonald began.

It was the third time Wayne had visited Mac-Donald’s office since the Pounds murder. First Wayne had called up to make an appointment. He came alone and described briefly to MacDonald that he was being asked to take a lie-detector test. Wayne hadn’t come to him on a referral from another attorney, and MacDonald wasn’t surprised that Wayne had picked him out of the phone book. In his three short years out of law school, MacDonald had made somewhat of a name for himself trying criminal cases. In the first year he tackled what later turned out to be the number-two story in the state for that year. The following year, he succeeded in getting some evidence suppressed in a major case, which landed him more publicity—a lot more than anyone would expect for someone who had been practicing law for such a short time.

“As I told you when you came in the first time,” MacDonald continued, “I wanted to look into this a little, to find out exactly why they want you to take a lie-detector test.”

At that first meeting, Wayne told the lawyer that he was a neighbor and friend of the Pounds family. He said that he knew Donna Pounds and was a friend of her son, Kenny. He said that he had been in the Pounds home many times and that he had been in the neighborhood the day she was killed.

MacDonald theorized to himself that the sheriff’s department wouldn’t move to a lie-detector test until it had pretty much garnered whatever physical evidence it could. He initially concluded that Wayne must be a collateral witness whom the sheriff fully expected to exclude as a potential defendant via a routine polygraph test.

MacDonald was intrigued by the fact that Wayne had come by himself. Where were his parents? But his principal observations of Wayne lingered elsewhere: Wayne seemed so disconnected from any concern that he could be a prime suspect in such a violent murder, so oblique to his circumstance. Wayne’s nonchalance tracked with MacDonald’s first response that it wasn’t a serious matter. The kid obviously wasn’t sweating it.

After Wayne raised the subject of satanism, telling MacDonald that it was something in which he took an academic interest, displaying a shade of agitation and indignation that his study of the subject had made him a target of the investigation, MacDonald nodded. The lawyer was aware of what he viewed as the dubious speculation around town that there was a satanic link to Donna Pounds’s murder.

“Could you bring me some materials to look over?” he asked Wayne.

“Sure.”

Later, when Wayne dropped off a handful of books and pamphlets, MacDonald thanked him and told him he still hadn’t found time to inquire further at the sheriff’s department, but that he would by their next meeting, which was then scheduled. It was during this second visit that MacDonald got his first shocking view of Wayne’s pentagram tattoo. The first time he had seen Wayne, a green Army fatigue jacket and long-sleeved flannel shirt covered Wayne’s forearm. This time, Wayne, in a short-sleeved shirt, showed off the pentagram.

By now MacDonald was beginning to see Wayne as one of the typically disenfranchised teenagers who could be found on every street corner in America during the spring of 1974. The Army fatigue jacket, the untucked shirt draped over a pair of well-worn Levi’s, and the cloddy boots were all of a type. Wayne was coming from a counterculture position, a boy dressed in the garb of a dirthead to certify his antithesis position, to show that he was not a belonger. MacDonald presumed that Wayne had adopted the satanic interest as a sort of conversational currency, which could be used to sustain interpersonal relationships. And it was something that people were, at the time, interested in.

As a potential case, this one had what lawyers call largesse. It was big enough to pose significant downside risk for any defending attorney. But Ronald MacDonald wasn’t afraid of that. He wasn’t afraid of the scale of this one, because much of the energy in his practice in the early years of the Seventies was directed at the presumption of innocence. Didn’t the high school kid who had called and made an appointment in fact personify the Everyman around whom all of America’s legal structure is built? Moreover, he was privy, as a frequenter of the courthouse corridors, to Sheriff Moe’s predisposition to arrest Harvey Pounds for the murder of his wife.

But MacDonald decided not to represent Wayne. The decision was made during his visit to the sheriff’s department, where he met with deputies who were working on the case. Sheriff’s Deputy Weatherman had shown MacDonald the crime-scene photographs. Then Weatherman explained what evidence they had collected in Wayne’s room: the black bag, the .22 shells, the bloodstained but now-washed underpants. Then he learned that Wayne was also under some suspicion in the murder of Siobhan McGuinness, and that’s what stopped MacDonald. He knew the little girl’s mother, and he had been instrumental in helping the family cope with funeral arrangements after the tragedy. There was no way he would represent anyone who might be remotely connected to that hideous crime. It was strictly personal.

By the time Wayne walked up the two flights of stairs to MacDonald’s office on Higgins Avenue, coming for his third meeting, the decision had been made. MacDonald would meet with him today, but he would not represent him. The occult books Wayne had dropped off rested on the windowsill, staring out into an alleyway. MacDonald made a mental note to remind Wayne to take them when he left.

After Wayne came through the door and sat down, MacDonald realized again that this eighteen-year-old suspect in a murder case was here without his parents, and it surprised him once more, especially knowing now what he hadn’t known before. This was not a collateral witness. Wayne was a prime suspect.

In the days since MacDonald had last seen Wayne, the figure in the work boots and the fatigue jacket seemed to be emerging from a chrysalis stage, developing the prowess of a professional crisis manager. It was unprecedented in MacDonald’s short but active career to see anyone deal with this kind of criminal dilemma the way Wayne did. Ninety-nine out of a hundred times, the client wants to hand the matter over, go home, and not have to deal with it. But not Wayne. Instead, he was calling the shots.

It was as if Wayne were conducting himself as a businessman might, coming to MacDonald with a secretive deal, which he didn’t want anybody to know about. Wayne seemed to want to isolate certain aspects of the deal. He was letting MacDonald know at the front end that the attorney’s role was limited.

There was no reference to parental involvement. There was no mention of any other attorney. Wayne was here to collect data. He had come to someone whom he had heard would know something about evidence testing and lie-detector tests, and it was essential to pick this expert’s brain. He was going to assimilate whatever he gleaned on his own. He was going to make his decisions on his own, and he certainly wasn’t handing MacDonald any of the variables that were on the surface—in terms of how he might handle it.

MacDonald asked him whether he had bought any rope. He asked him questions about his interest in satanism, and in particular about the pentagram mark on his arm. But Wayne directed the conversation elsewhere. Without spelling anything out in response to MacDonald’s question about the rope, Wayne left the attorney with the impression that the rope issue wouldn’t lead anywhere. He seemed confident of that. And the pentagram, which he talked about extensively, was equally meaningless. The satanism stuff, MacDonald should understand, was something that interested him. He was studying occult literature in an English class at school. The Pentagram was something he carved into his arm to goof on his friends. It wasn’t something to be taken too seriously. What Wayne wanted to know about was the lie-detector test.

In MacDonald’s experience with polygraph tests, he had come to observe among those who claim innocence at the outset a certain patterned reaction when it is suggested they consider taking such a test. The reaction is frequently of one vein, and it is immediate: “Well, I know a lot about that and I’m not going to do that, because all these things are wrong with them and they make mistakes and …” Not Wayne.

He wanted to know if it could be beaten. Does it sometimes misread? Do drugs or alcohol affect it?

He asked MacDonald for an exact description of how it worked. He wanted to know what MacDonald thought of the operators. He wanted further to know whether the proficiency of the operator had something to do with the validity of the results.

MacDonald was struck by the marmoreal whiteness of Wayne’s skin, the shock of thick curly red hair, and the combination they made with his darting, interrogative, and anticipatory eyes, flashing through gold wire-framed glasses, always avoiding contact. Wayne was manifestly cerebral as he quizzed MacDonald, betraying no body language that might signify what it was he was trying to get at, that might suggest some sense of familiarity, some bit of human frailty. To MacDonald, it was as if Wayne were looking off in the distance at an imaginary chalkboard on which he had written the components of this case. And instead of sitting down to start at the foundation of this problem, and proceeding to comprehend its entirety step by step, MacDonald could see that Wayne was impatient about getting to the point. He could see that his mind was taking things that he had already exposed himself to and adding and subtracting what MacDonald was saying, always having a conclusion right on the tip of his tongue, a running subtotal of his status. Donna Pounds was a nonentity. They weren’t even dealing with death in the abstract. She had no persona, even though he knew her. Not even a poor Mrs. Pounds, MacDonald thought to himself.

The impression Wayne left was that if he were involved in this murder, he alone was going to take care of it. He didn’t really need help from anybody. For now, matters were more or less in his control. He was being asked to take a lie-detector test. He could decide whether or not he was going to do it. He could postpone making that decision, but he also felt pretty comfortable that the sheriff’s department hadn’t developed anything that could get to him. He was confident he was going to be all right. As long as he stayed on his toes.

If he had committed Donna Pounds’s murder, MacDonald was certain that Wayne was not about to tell anyone about it. He wasn’t going to trust anyone, including a lawyer, and MacDonald was also certain he wasn’t going to be that man. As he sat there, answering Wayne’s questions, trying to divine Wayne’s approach from the scorecard he couldn’t see, MacDonald also realized that if this were himself at age eighteen, there would have been no way that he could have accomplished what Wayne was doing here.

In the end, MacDonald told Wayne that he wouldn’t be his attorney.

“The circumstances are very serious,” he advised him. “You shouldn’t do anything without an attorney.”

As Wayne got up to leave, MacDonald recalled how precise Weatherman had been in stating why they thought he was involved, and the gruesome photographs flashed across his mind. There was something seriously wrong with this kid, he thought, because guilty or innocent, he knows he’s a prime suspect and he’s unaffected by it. Why, he wondered, if he’s being suspected in the murder of a woman, the mother of his friend? For it to turn on him in this way, wouldn’t there be some indignation, some defensiveness, some demand that he not be treated this way?

Wayne didn’t seem to mind.

Across MacDonald’s desk, resting on the windowsill, were the books that Wayne had left.

In the week that followed Easter Sunday, Bill Van Canagan and Greg Baringer were back at school and still working alongside Wayne at Taco John’s. The situation was fast becoming intolerable. Wayne seemed more and more out of control. He repeatedly threatened Bill with little menacing looks or remarks that were packed with double meaning. Bill might have shrugged it off, except that he knew Wayne was toying with him, playing off a fear that had been implanted on Good Friday.

For Greg, it was actually worse. Wayne had threatened to kill him. There was no reason given. It was just going to be. The two of them, Bill and Greg, and their friends, began to weigh what they knew about the murder of Donna Pounds, and about the murder of Siobhan McGuinness, in terms of the timing of Wayne’s advancement in the cult, in terms of the fact that they knew that Nick Nickelson, a self-proclaimed shaman who packed a pistol and got shitfaced a lot, also just happened to drive an old Cadillac, which was the same kind of car that had been sighted at the scene of the McGuinness murder. The city police had turned Missoula upside down looking for such a car. Had they somehow missed Nickelson’s Cadillac? Because he didn’t live within the city limits, but out east of Missoula in the county.

Telling Wayne’s parents would be a waste of time, they knew. Before any of them had gotten driver’s licenses, Ryan Ushijma used to go to the movies with Wayne. Wayne’s father, George, would drive them. George always made Ryan walk in front of him—so Ryan couldn’t stab him in the back, he would say. It was a bigoted reference to Ryan’s Japanese heritage. It wasn’t funny. The plain oddity of it, however George may have meant it to be, registered indelibly on Ryan’s mind, and it was unsettling.

Just as unsettling as it was to think that Wayne, with his Good Friday pronouncement, had cryptically taken Bill into his confidence, thus masterminding Bill’s inescapable role as the one who might squeal, the one who could become the betrayer, the next sacrificial lamb. Was it an apocalyptic message of death, veiled by Wayne’s weirdness? Bill and Ryan and their friends didn’t have to catalogue the kinds of things Wayne did: They were all of a kind. His synthetic persona had become one-dimensional. He was the antihero. He was untouchable. And he killed Donna Pounds. They had to tell the principal, and Bill would do it.

Don Harbaugh looked over his horn-rimmed glasses at Bill Van Canagan, seated opposite him in the principal’s office. Casting a dubious glance at Bill, Harbaugh was the affable, activist principal of Sentinel. He was quite at home in the superheated atmosphere of the Sentinel volcano, whose daily eruptions regularly spewed emotionally charged teenage debris in all directions. Today, he wasn’t being any more circumspect than usual.

“There’s a kid in our school who says he killed Donna Pounds,” Bill blurted out.

Harbaugh’s pulse quickened. Of course, he knew of the murder. In fact, he already had had some inquiries from the sheriff’s department about Wayne. He had cooperated with the deputies who wanted to know whether Wayne was in school on a given day. He also tried to get some sense from them whether Wayne was a viable suspect, but he wasn’t ready for this.

“What do you mean, Bill? I mean …”

“Wayne Nance is telling me he killed her,” Bill barked, his voice rising above conversation level. He could see the glint of disbelief in the principal’s eyes.

Harbaugh had been around students all his life and was familiar with teenage emotional highs and lows and with their tendency to sensationalize. But not Bill Van Canagan. Harbaugh had been Bill’s adviser all year. He knew him well. Here was the president of the student body. This was not the kind of student one would dismiss out of hand.

“Everybody’s scared of this. And he’ll kill me,” Bill continued.

Harbaugh quizzed him thoroughly. What he said. Where he said it. Wasn’t he just pulling Bill’s chain? Did Bill believe it to be true? Who knows about it? By the time they had run out of more things to discuss, Harbaugh leaned into his desk, placing one hand on the phone.

“Bill, you’ve got to talk to the police.”

Bill considered it, but he didn’t pick up the phone. He knew the price of betrayal. Plus, Harbaugh seemed less than wholeheartedly receptive to what he had just told him. So how much would he back him up?

The meeting was over.

The next day, Harbaugh made sure he knew as much about Wayne Nance as he could. He talked frequently to the sheriff’s department. He talked to Eric Visser, a student who associated with Bill and his friends. He talked to other teachers and counselors. Always he suspended judgment.

“We have a duty to protect the student body as a whole,” he told his colleagues, “but we also have a duty to protect the individual student.” Harbaugh was far from convinced that there was anything to the story. Everybody knew there was lots of stories going around. There was no doubt in Harbaugh’s mind that Wayne had told other students that he was involved in witchcraft, that he aspired to be a warlock. But Wayne was regularly in class, where he was supposed to be. He was not a model student, but he was not a troublemaker.

After the sheriff’s department advised him that there was more than one suspect, but that some people in the department thought Wayne could have done it, Harbaugh’s antennae sprang to full attention. As it got into May and the Class of 1974 was beginning to see graduation day coming just around the corner, Harbaugh got another call from sheriff’s deputies. They wanted permission to excuse Wayne from school so he could make the 230-mile round trip to Kalispell, where he would take a lie-detector test.

Harbaugh summoned Wayne into his office.

“They’ve called, Wayne,” Harbaugh said, “and they want to take you out of school. Here’s what’s going on …”

They discussed the facts of this day off from school. As far as Harbaugh could see, Wayne definitely understood what was happening, and seemed also to express an understanding of Harbaugh’s role, a sympathy that struck the principal as not suiting the moment.

“You have certain rights, Wayne,” he told him, trying to walk the line. If he were innocent, this was a terrible rap being forced on an eighteen-year-old kid, he thought to himself. After all, he had no cause to suspect Wayne of anything like this.

But as time went by, and Harbaugh quizzed more and more teachers about Wayne Nance, it became harder and harder to hold the line, not to see that something more was involved here.

On the night of the senior prom, with the festive mood that is supposed to accompany this senior-year social finale, Wayne’s classmates were huddled in conversation. What should they do about Wayne? Their teachers still seemed to be of one opinion: that their fears were unfounded. After talking to his father about it, Bill knew what he had to do. It was time to call the sheriff’s department.

Bill dialed from home, and after he explained why he was calling, and that he had talked to certain fellow students about this, including Ryan Ushijma, he was told a squad car would be along shortly to pick him up. When it pulled up, Ryan was inside, and they were both driven downtown.

As they walked from the car to the courthouse, they were told that Wayne’s mother, Charlene, was inside, in a different part of the office. She was being interrogated, too, but their presence would be kept a secret. Bill and Ryan were already nervous, and now they were being surreptitiously led to a separate office in the same building. What if she spotted them? The fact that they were being tape-recorded added to their apprehensions.

Sheriff’s deputies listened as Bill and Ryan gave the account of Wayne’s Good Friday edict, told them that Wayne had threatened to kill Greg Baringer, related Wayne’s growing involvement in the occult, right down to his rank of third-degree witch, and described the trance-like states that he conjured.

Then one of the deputies spilled his own bizarre story about Wayne.

“You know,” the deputy told them, “last night, we found Wayne under a bridge out in Milltown. He had some kinda altar set up. And a small fire, and he had killed some cats, sacrificed ’em, I guess. He was completely naked. Buck naked. And he was playin’ with himself—masturbating—and appeared to be like he was in some kinda trance.”

Kenny Pounds was walking along with three of his Army buddies, returning from supper, when he saw the Red Cross patch on the man’s arm. The man was standing near the entrance to his barracks at Fort Bliss, and he asked for Kenny Pounds.

“Yeah.”

“Can I talk to you, inside?”

Kenny’s first thought was about his father, whose bad heart was a constant, mortal threat. It was his father. His father had died.

“There’s been an accident at home. I can’t say any more than that, but you are requested to go to Missoula immediately.”

“Is it my father? What happened?”

“I’m sorry, I’m not authorized to say anything more. Just that there’s been an accident and you are requested to go to Missoula immediately. I’m sorry.”

When Kenny left El Paso, steeling himself for his father’s funeral, he was trying to medicate a bad cold that lately just seemed to get worse and worse. By the time he got to Missoula, his bad cold was diagnosed as a case of mononucleosis, and he was told that it was his mother, not his father, who was dead. He didn’t go home to West Riverside. He went from the airport directly into the hospital, where he stayed until Monday morning, the day of his mother’s funeral.

On that day following Easter Sunday, Donna Pounds was laid to rest in Victor Cemetery in the Bitterroot Valley, in a Valhalla near Stevensville where she and Harvey had hoped to find happiness together. The springtime she had longed for would be especially wet this year, because the snowpack in most of western Montana’s river basins, including the Bitterroot, was double the average. There would be heavy flooding when it all melted, but for now, the hardpack snow on the ground that received Donna Pounds served to endlessly extend the boundaries of this white grave. It was as if she were being swallowed by everything around her.

Two Baptist ministers officiated for the more than three hundred mourners, who included a brother from Bozeman and a brother who lived in Missoula, and Donna’s parents along with a clutch of aunts and uncles from out of state and other nieces and nephews. The Reverend Robert F. Penner, pastor of Bethel Baptist Church, described Donna as “the epitome of modesty,” a Christian soldier who devoted her life to church work through youth and women’s groups.

Standing at some distance were Sheriff’s Deputies Northey and Harold Hoyt, a senior detective. They were watching to see who showed, thinking, “Was the guy who did this waiting for the two girls to come home? Was he going to do the same thing to them? Maybe Mom came home and interrupted this guy planning all this out.” Northey looked over at Karen, the eldest. He had seen her only days before, recognizing her as the bright, young, down-to-earth waitress at the Travelodge Motel restaurant. Many of the deputies stopped in there for coffee or something to eat.

Karen, Kenny, and Kathy Pounds stood by their father. The children were inconsolable. They didn’t know that their father would become a suspect. They didn’t know that Wayne Nance was under suspicion. Kenny, who stood beside his high school sweetheart, Valerie Chaffin, now a junior at Sentinel, couldn’t clear his mind of the knowledge that the only people in the world who knew where the Luger was kept were his father and mother, himself, and Wayne Nance. Kenny and Wayne had been friends since the third grade, when they lived in the same trailer court, Tamarack. Wayne was a year ahead of Kenny at Bonner School, and then at Sentinel. Kenny had shown Wayne the hidden drawer in his parents’ bedroom. They had taken the gun out, handled it, even fired it once and put it back. They were not best friends, but when there was nobody else around, Kenny could always find Wayne sitting around in his trailer by himself.

After the funeral, while trying not to invade the personal tragedy but hoping to comfort her boyfriend, Valerie started to tell Kenny what was being said about Wayne at school. That morning, some of her friends had told her that everyone was talking about how Wayne had been bragging that he would kill someone before he turned nineteen. Now somebody was dead. Was Wayne the suspect Sheriff Moe was talking about in the paper? No one believed it, really. They knew Wayne was weird, but not that weird. Anyone who knew Wayne at all knew that if he really were going to kill anyone, it would be Kenny’s older sister, Karen, who was two years older than Wayne. Although no one knew why, Wayne despised Karen. He made that much known. Maybe Karen, an attractive brunette, had turned him down.

Kenny listened to Valerie. But he wanted to forget. The aftermath of the hit that came when he landed at the airport was still weighing him down, a complete pressing of his torso, in no particular location, just everywhere a weight. What Valerie told him about Wayne seemed just as pathetic an explanation of his mother’s murder as the fact that Wayne knew where the gun was hidden. So what? It was too easy to suspect Wayne.

Kenny wanted to get away from all the friends and relatives who had gathered together after the funeral to sing hymns. His father had become withdrawn. Now Kenny wanted to get out. He drove Valerie home. Then he went to a friend’s house where they drank beer. Dale Nickelson was there. And Wayne showed up, and they all sat around together, talking around the big issue of Kenny’s mother’s murder. Kenny was keeping a close eye on Wayne, watching for any indication, looking directly at Wayne at times. He wanted to catch Wayne looking away quickly, at some brief telling moment, or to get any kind of sign that would enable him to say “Yes, he possibly did it,” because he knew where the gun was, because of what he was saying at Sentinel.

Wayne gave him no such sign.

The whole problem was a lack of anything concrete that pointed inescapably at Wayne or at Harvey. The polygraph examinations of the two suspects had failed to focus the investigation. When Harvey was hooked up to the electromechanical device that measured his cardiovascular and respiratory response, and his galvanic skin reflex while he was asked questions about his wife’s murder, the chart produced by his answers told investigators that nothing could be concluded about whether he was lying or telling the truth.

Wayne’s chart indicated he was telling the truth.

An even bigger problem was the physical evidence. The ropes had led the investigation to every hardware store in town, but to no avail. The pubic hair they had hoped to match was now a mere hypothetical: It was simply gone, misplaced by the pathologist who shouldn’t have done the autopsy in the first place. Dusty Deschamps took the blame for not spending the money to send the body to Great Falls, to Dr. Pfaff, the forensic pathologist. When the FBI in Washington finally weighed in, at least they knew that the blood on Wayne’s underpants was human, but it couldn’t be typed because of the good washing the pants had been given by Wayne’s mother. The FBI was unable to find any fingerprints on the single amber rubber glove.

By late May, all there was to the Donna Pounds murder case was misty circumstantial theorizing, and that told Deschamps that no warrant would be issued for the arrest of anyone. No matter how desperately Sheriff Moe and Deputy Sheriff Phil Nobis wanted Harvey Pounds, they couldn’t have him. He had returned to work at Yandt’s, abandoning the dream he had shared with Donna to move south to Stevensville. Wayne never did hire an attorney, and a few days after graduation, on June 19, 1974, he joined the Navy to see the world—and to get out of town.