Chapter 12

On the Prowl

It was a hot July night. Like anyone else would have in the summer of 1980 in Missoula, Montana, Denise Tate had left the windows open and the front door ajar so what little breeze there was could find its way inside and keep her trailer a little cooler. She was going out. When she got back, at least it wouldn’t feel like an oven inside.

The date was July 3, a Thursday night, and later, when she arrived back home, she was pleased to discover that the place was comfortably cool. But she was upset, very upset, about what she found in her bedroom. She didn’t notice that anything was wrong until she had started to get ready for bed, hoping for a good night’s sleep.

What was that down at the corner of the bedpost? As she moved closer, she could see the ropes. Puzzled, scared, she looked up, then all around. She listened. Nothing. Then she walked around to the other side of the bed and saw that someone had tied ropes to the bedpost and frame on that side, too. She decided to undo the ropes, lock herself in and go to bed. She was alarmed, but she was also tired. She would call the sheriff’s department in the morning. This kind of thing, she thought, ought to be reported, even if it was a practical joke.

The next day, Captain Weatherman was dismayed to learn that she had casually disposed of the rope. He didn’t doubt the woman’s story for a minute. But he was sorry to once again be without physical evidence. He listened to her explain how she had found the bedposts tied. He asked her to describe exactly where the ropes had been placed.

On the bedposts, she told him, then looped around the frame. He understood, and it wasn’t hard for him to envision what it had looked like, because he had seen ropes tied to a bed that exact same way. It was six years ago. That’s how the murderer had done it in Donna Pounds’s bedroom. The ropes had been tied to the posts and then laced around the bed frame itself.

The next image to fill his mind was the face of Wayne Nance. But then the picture of that fresh-faced high school senior, with the piercing eyes and the red curly hair, faded from the nether reaches almost as quickly as it had materialized. Weatherman had no idea where Wayne was these days. He wasn’t on Weatherman’s mind, really. He didn’t pause to connect Wayne with this suspicious incident, nor did he think to connect him with the Beavertail Hill Girl. Weatherman was still wrestling with the paucity of means to identify the poor girl’s bones. He was intrigued by this repeat of the ropes on the bed, but that was the end of it.

Dusty Deschamps would have had occasion to at least wonder about Wayne in the first half of 1980, because Wayne’s mother, whom he would never forget from the grand jury days, had just died in a newsworthy, violent crash not a mile from Deschamps’s own home. Deschamps lived across the river from Bandmann Flats, between East Missoula and Pine Grove, high on a ridge overlooking the valley. Charlene’s crash had for a while been the talk of the neighborhood. People even drove out to the Ponderosa pine that stood at the end of the long curve in the road, curious to inspect the massive gash made by the speeding Cordoba. Deer Creek Road was also a favorite for neighborhood joggers and walkers, who could see the damage each time they passed.

Stan Fullerton, the high school classmate who had listened to Wayne brag about being a suspect in the Pounds murder, was one of the deputies who responded to the accident call. Fullerton had joined the sheriff’s department in 1977, after graduation from Spokane Community College. He hadn’t seen Wayne since high school, but he hadn’t forgotten the cryptic farewell that Wayne had drawn in his yearbook—the picture of Stan in the likeness of Julius Caesar with the hilt of a knife in his back. Now Fullerton was at the accident scene. Here was Wayne’s mother, a dead woman wrapped around the wheel of an almost unidentifiable car.

From the highest level to the lowest, there were law-enforcement officials who knew Wayne to be strange, to have been a prime suspect in a sensational sex murder that involved binding with ligatures of clothesline rope, tied in a specific way. In the years since the grand jury had looked into Missoula’s four unsolved homicides, the stabbed body of a young girl had been dumped within the county’s borders, not five miles from the place where little Siobhan McGuinness had been found. Now, a woman had found ropes tied to her bedposts when she came home alone. But no one thought for very long about where Wayne Nance was hanging out in the summer of 1980. If anyone had asked, his father, George, would have told them that Wayne was bouncing at the Cabin, along with his younger brother, Bill.

Rick Davis told the story of what happened one terrible morning in 1968 to his Marine artillery squad, dug in on an unimportant hillside in the jungles of Vietnam.

“It was 4 A.M.,” he began.

Wayne listened.

“We got overrun. It was four o’clock in the morning and all of a sudden all hell breaks loose. When it was over, there were a lot of dead guys lying around. There was this guy I shot, I mean I was eighteen years old.”

Wayne listened. Rick had paused.

“I blew the top of his head off. His brains were splattered all over the gun pit. And I walked in ’em. We walked in ’em. They stuck to the Vibram soles. On my boots. We had twenty-five dead bodies on the hill, they were NVA.”

“Viet Cong?”

“Yeah. North Vietnamese. And the guys started mutilating ’em.”

Rick is a man of few words, and he hadn’t told the story to very many people since he came home from the war. But he told Wayne, even got into some detail about the mutilations, because Wayne had become someone he thought he knew pretty well. Since they had worked together as bouncers at the Cabin, they had enjoyed an honest camaraderie. By telling this piece of his past to Wayne, Rick was hoping to add another dimension to their friendship. Rick wanted Wayne to know what the war had done to him, what posttraumatic stress disorder was all about.

But Rick was disappointed. In fact, he didn’t know what to make of Wayne’s reaction. Most people would be stunned, and some would try to comprehend and be solemn about it. But Wayne got into it. He laughed, titillated by the gory detail. He wanted to know more.

Rick chalked it up as another example of Wayne’s otherness, that quotient of his character that set him apart, however obliquely, from his peers. One day he was Old Reliable. The next day he would be a fleeting enigma. On Halloween, which he insisted was his birthday, rather than October 18, Wayne turned into a little kid. He put on makeup and dressed up in elaborate costumes that he was able to just throw together with convincing cleverness. He had a knack for the dramatic moment, and it pleased him immensely when nobody knew who it was in disguise. The next day, he would be Wayne, the Professional Bouncer.

Wayne was good at bouncing. He pressed to the fore at the right moment, exerting just the needed amount of force, avoiding a scuffle. On three or four occasions, Wayne and Rick had had their hands full. The incidents happened quickly, as they usually do. But they never found themselves dragged into a long fight, and that was the right way to do the job.

Wayne had always told Rick that he had a real fear of getting into it with somebody.

“I get real violent,” he told Rick. “I don’t want to lose my temper. So it would be better, since you’re the better talker, so you get in first and try to talk the guys out of it. I’ll cover you.”

Wayne always did stand off in a corner, covering Rick, and while Wayne insinuated that he was a tough guy, he never said it outright to Rick. Yet for some reason Rick was aware that Wayne wanted him to think he was tough. It didn’t matter. Wayne could handle himself well enough, except, it seemed to Rick, when it came to women.

Whenever Rick observed Wayne talking to women at the Cabin, it appeared just as it should: the gestures, the laughs, the trying to talk above the country-and-western crescendos. Some of Wayne’s admirers were archetypically good looking, but he would invariably pass.

“What’s wrong with him?” some of the girls would ask Rick. “Why doesn’t he get the hint?”

Rick didn’t know what was wrong with Wayne. In response, he would scoff at the remote possibility that they might not be Wayne’s type.

Wayne liked petite blondes. But when he talked to Rick about a girl, there was never an occasion when he would simply say that he was attracted to her, or that he liked her, or that she was neat and he would like to get to know her. That was all verbal foreplay to Wayne.

“I really want to do it with her,” Wayne would say, with the braggadocio of a twelve-year-old pumping up in front of his pals.

“Okay, Wayne, end of conversation,” Rick would say, knowing where Wayne was coming from, not wanting to ply further.

Wayne made comments like that about a lot of women at the Cabin. He didn’t, however, tell anyone, especially Rick, that he had been in some of their houses, even made detailed diagrams of the interior layouts. He had even been inside the houses of some of the women whom Rick knew personally. The proof of his illicit visitations were the secret hand-drawn floor plans he kept in his room at home.

Dory Schmid had just moved from the small town of Manhattan, Montana, into a one-bedroom apartment that was part of a three-unit building just off the road about a mile east of East Missoula, across from the Greenwood Trailer Park, and just west of Pinewood. In her late forties, she was living alone and at the time was between jobs. She and her husband, Bill, had been having problems. Much of the trouble had to do with his drinking, which was one reason he was staying with his parents in Lolo, just a few miles south of Missoula. The other problem was that his father was dying of pancreatic cancer. Bill and Dory’s daughters were young women now, out on their own, and Dory’s son from her first marriage lived just down the road from her new apartment.

For three full days, Dory had thrown herself into cleaning the new apartment. And she was doing a terrific job, because she was a commercial-trade cleaning woman by profession. She knew how to bring up a shine on heavily waxed floors, and how to sing along as she worked, shaking out rugs and polishing tabletops, because as Dory Modey or Dory Barnes, Dory Schmid was also an aspiring country-western vocalist and song writer. Those were the stage names for this older, but still attractive, slender, blonde live-wire.

On the third night she was there, she got a call from her mother-in-law.

“Please come down, Dory. Take Bill home. Just for one night,” she asked her daughter-in-law. There were some things she wanted to talk over with his father, and she wanted the privacy of being there alone with him.

“It’s just for one night,” she repeated.

Dory understood. She also understood that her mother-in-law’s son was a handful. But she would do it. So she drove the fifteen miles south and got him, wondering how it would go. On the way back, she began to find out. One of the first things Bill insisted upon was that they stop for a six-pack. Dory complied. She didn’t want to get into it. This was a one-night deal.

Dory also didn’t show any reaction when Bill threw an open can of beer on her newly scrubbed and waxed kitchen floor. She didn’t say or do anything when, at seven o’clock, Bill fell asleep on the floor. Maybe it was because of the dream she’d had the night before, a nightmare that had run around in her head all day. Somebody was beating Bill on the head with a club and she was trying to cover him up with a pillow. All day she had tried to figure what it meant. Now she would be patient.

By the time she got into bed, she had to crawl over Bill, who had taken the outside half. She was jammed up against the wall, but it was okay, and she had no trouble falling off to sleep, listening to her soused husband’s heavy breathing.

It was past midnight when she awoke, hearing Bill cussing.

“You sonovabitch, what are you doing in this apartment?”

“What do you mean, what am I doing in this apartment?” Dory answered him, trying to rouse him from his delirium. “Wake up. Wake up.” She elbowed him. “This is my apartment.”

Then, as she sat up, she saw the man standing in the arched doorway of the bedroom, the man her husband was yelling at. In the dim bedroom light, all she could make out was a silhouette, but she could see the clear outline of a wild head of hair, a lot of curly hair.

Bill was still railing.

“Me and my wife don’t need you in this apartment.”

“Oh, I got the wrong place,” answered the voice of the intruder, who had walked through Dory’s unlocked front door.

“Get the Sam Hill out of here,” Bill shouted.

The intruder started to turn, staggering a little. Bill didn’t move off the bed. Dory stayed put, too, listening with sharpened ears as the footsteps retreated down the hall, past the kitchen, and into the living room. She didn’t hear the door close, but she lay back down. Bill dozed off. Dory stared up at the ceiling, panicked, very happy that Bill lay beside her, her ears pricked for the slightest sound. Just as she began to relax with the thought that they had gotten rid of this character, she heard the sound of the couch as it struck the wall. It had rolled back on its casters.

“Bill,” she whispered. “He didn’t leave.”

Bill had had enough of this. He was mad now, and he lifted his six-foot frame off the bed, pulled on his boots, and headed out of the room.

“Well, he will this time.”

Dory was scared. In a flash, she remembered the dream from the night before, and she slipped across the bed and followed Bill out. She headed for the kitchen and grabbed a knife. Just in case, she thought.

Bill towered over the intruder, who was lounged, half-asleep, on the couch. With one hand he yanked him up.

“You sonovabitch, I said out, and when I said out, I meant out.”

The intruder mumbled something.

Bill had him by one arm and was opening the front door with the other, and out he went.

“What in the Sam? Who was it?” Dory asked Bill.

“Oh, some fuzzy-haired character with glasses,” Bill muttered, falling back into bed. “Some kid. He’s probably drunk, and probably got the wrong apartment.”

The next morning, as Dory’s eyes glanced out the bedroom window, the intruder they didn’t know lay huddled on the ground below, wrapped in a jacket. Dory never saw his face, but she could now see the mop of curly red hair that had been silhouetted in the doorway. Dory’s unwanted guest, they would later learn, was Wayne Nance.

“For God’s sake, Bill, what is that? Is that the guy out there?”

“He’s just sleeping one off.”

Dory felt a chill. She knew she had been alone in the apartment for three nights. Maybe Bill’s presence surprised this guy. It was God’s answer, she decided.

Rick stayed in touch after he left the Cabin in September of 1981 to take a job at Conlin’s Furniture, where he worked in the warehouse and made local deliveries. On two occasions, when Rick and his wife, Laura, were moving, Wayne helped them out.

What Laura, a computer programmer at the U.S. Forest Service, could make of Wayne, based on having heard Rick talk about him and from seeing him in person occasionally, could be boiled down to one observation: Wayne was too nice. He would always make flattering comments about what she was wearing or about something in the house, but he sort of overdid it. She thought he was one of the most polite people she ever had met. Rick respected Wayne for being so gracious and he also didn’t think it was out of character when Wayne declined Laura’s offer to fix dinner for all of them, or even stay for one beer after all the heavy lugging of furniture. He had spent many hours with this guy. He had been to Wayne’s house, seen the outrageous inventory of crap in his room, knew that Wayne was Wayne, whatever that meant.

After a few months at Conlin’s, in February of 1982, Rick mentioned to Wayne that a job was opening up. Maybe he should drop in and fill out an application.

An astute reading of Wayne’s job application would show that he had no employment history for the past two years. He didn’t list the Cabin among his former employers, and he left blank the years that he attended the University of Montana, where he had flunked himself out. To the question: Were you ever injured? Wayne answered yes. He wrote down five words: “right hand no after effects.” Was that a veiled reference to the pentagram scar on his right forearm? The badge of courage not to be forgotten?

None of this mattered to Louise Lightener, Conlin’s assistant manager. She was looking for someone to work in the warehouse. She knew nothing of the suspicion that had once surrounded Wayne, the teenager, who was now twenty-seven years old. All she saw was a young man who had gone to local schools, had been in the Navy, had attended the University for awhile, and who lived with his father. He came highly recommended by Rick Davis. Rick Mace, the warehouse boss, who had come to know Wayne through Wayne’s brother Bill, also vouched for him. So Wayne was hired. It was a part-time position. He would be paid four dollars an hour and he would help unload the three semitractor trailers that arrived each month from Conlin’s South Dakota warehouse. By summer’s end, in September, when Rick Davis again moved on, this time taking a job behind the counter at Rice’s, one of Missoula’s ubiquitous secondhand stores, Wayne took Rick’s place. Now he was working full time in the warehouse and making local deliveries in one of Conlin’s trucks. In time, Conlin’s would mean more than just a paycheck to Wayne.

Five mornings a week he would get into his small brown pickup and head for work at Conlin’s, leaving behind the dismal environ of Minnesota Street. Conlin’s would give Wayne the socioeconomic leap his father and mother had failed to provide. Behind the wheel of a company truck, delivering to any of Missoula’s middle-class neighborhoods, the view through his windshield was uncannily suggestive of a scene right out of a TV commercial for a bygone era. There, on Crestline Street or Strand or Beckwith, as if encased and preserved against time, was the proverbial American ideal. Elderly couples stroll along quiet sidewalks, the man sporting a pork-pie hat, the woman wearing a light sweater. The chick-a-chuck-a-chick of lawn sprinklers seems the only intrusion, and even that’s somehow monotonously comforting. The yellow clapboard house is perfect. So is the white banister-railed porch, trimmed with hanging flowerpots and all around a freshly cut and edged, weedless lawn. Isn’t this the way it’s supposed to be? This American Gothic model of a place.

And the store would serve as a base of operations. What better way to gain entry to someone’s home than as the furniture delivery man whom the delighted customer greets with a “Hello” and a “Come right in”? It wasn’t uncommon for customers, if they knew the saleswoman well enough, to hand over the house keys, so the delivery could be made even if they weren’t planning to be at home.

The Conlin’s sinecure would open new doors for Wayne, but none of his coworkers would know it. To his newfound family, Wayne was the unbearably shy new guy in the warehouse who hardly made eye contact. He was the squarely built redhead with all the tattoos, which went on display when he doffed his shirt on hot days, wringing out the sweat after a big job. There was a spider, a snake, a bat, the grim reaper’s scythe. His muscle-molded shoulder was imprinted with a dragon. To look at him, Wayne was a veritable Illustrated Man. But on the inside, he remained an unknown.

The guys in the warehouse and the women on the salesfloor would become direct objects of Wayne’s obsessive attention. In ways, he would treat them as family, mixing love and hate together, as families sometimes do. The more he misled them with his guile, the more he was free to overindulge his estranged world view, living out—many, many times over—his anxious, recurring, and violent sexual fantasies.

It was April 27, 1983, a Wednesday night. Janet Wicker had come home from work to the Cobblestone Apartments, a new complex of townhouse-type dwellings nestled right in the bowel of Hellgate Canyon, just east of Missoula proper, bounded by the old Route 10 that paralls Interstate 90 and the Clark Fork River. As she parked her car and made for the front door, it was already getting dark. She looked forward to seeing her husband, who would be home soon.

She unlocked the front door, and as she was stepping inside, reaching for the inside light switch, she was grabbed by a hand that came out of the dark. The masked man who stood before her had been waiting inside. He had climbed to the balcony that was off the upstairs bedroom and gotten inside, and the first thing he said to her was that he wanted money.

Janet screamed.

“Shut up,” he ordered. “I want money. I’ll tie you up if you don’t cooperate.”

She screamed again.

And the man came at her.

“Shut up. Shut …” His words stopped and the fists came. He swung at her, knocking her to the floor.

She tried in vain to fight him off, kicking and screaming, trying to get away.

“Shut up!” he ordered one more time, this time from behind the shiny steel blade of a knife he had pulled from a sheath on his belt.

“Shut up. Or I’ll stab you. Just shut up.”

Frozen, Janet was quiet. She listened as the man told her all he wanted was money. That he was going to take her upstairs. That she should cooperate. All he wanted was money. He kept saying it as he led his frightened prey up the stairs at knifepoint.

Maybe that’s all he wanted, Janet wanted to think, as she obeyed. But Janet Wicker never got the answer to that question. Just as the masked man had gotten her upstairs, they both heard the front door open. Her husband was home.

The man with the knife was gone in a flash, dashing across the second-floor balcony and over the railing. When he hit the ground, he ran for the riverbank, racing eastward in the direction of East Missoula, which was approximately one-half mile away.

Janet’s husband called the police, but by the time they arrived, the suspect was long gone into the night. Janet had never seen the face of her attacker. Without a suspect, or a lead, there would be no arrest. Wayne, who had made a hand-drawn map of the Cobblestone Apartments, showing the floor plan of the Wicker’s apartment and its proximity to other nearby apartments, had also carefully delineated an escape route in a series of tiny footprints that led down to the river. He saved it after the foiled attack, stuffing it into the treasure mound in his room in his father’s house on Minnesota Avenue.

Though sheriff’s deputies would not inquire at the time about it, they would later learn that many residents of the Cobblestone Apartments, including the Wickers, had ordered furniture from Conlin’s and had had it delivered to their homes.