Chapter 23

A Dead End

It was a case of hitting one dry hole after another. The focus was still on Dale Dye’s Number-1 suspect, Dave Davis, but it was getting nowhere. The diehard crew of detectives assigned to the investigation were meeting again this morning, just as they had met every single morning for four months now.

Dale Dye led the session, as he always did, relentlessly talking over the case, poring over the details, reconstructing M.O.s, never veering from his hypothesis that whoever had done this had known the Shooks. Because he had been enlisted from the start, Greg Lakes was there, too, but unlike most of the others he was reaching a different conclusion. He no longer saw any reason to suspect that Dye’s prime target had anything to do with the murders. It wasn’t because his wife had brought him around to her thinking. It was a combination of things, including the realization that if Dye had tried this hard on this one line of thought, how come he had nothing to show for it?

Greg had chugged coffee with these guys day in and day out. Now it was well into March and, with the morning seances still going nowhere, Greg’s contribution to the brainstorming amounted to a new effort to talk Dye out of his prime suspect. Now two months had passed since the sheriff had gone public with his suspect, but he wasn’t even close to making an arrest.

On February 26, 1986, Sheriff Dye told the world that he had a suspect. While disclosing nothing more than that, except to catalogue all the things he wasn’t going to disclose, including the possibility that he would seek a “gag order” to further restrict the press and the public, Sheriff Dye asserted that the suspect met the test of his hypothesis that the killer knew the Shooks. He wouldn’t speculate about when his office could make an arrest, but he knew well enough that the clock already had started on the Ravalli’s County Sheriff’s Department’s duty to stop the unknown sociopath who was still menacing this idyllic, small Western town.

Dye was determined to get his man and he didn’t want help from anybody. When District Judge James Wheelis issued the search warrant enabling Sheriff Dye to search Davis’s home in Missoula, the judge also sealed the affidavit. That guaranteed that Dye would not be compelled later, after the search was done, to disclose any information about what he found or hoped to find. The judge and the Ravalli County attorney’s office were very secretive. At first they wouldn’t divulge that a warrant even existed. Eventually they relented, and a few days later, the Missoulian reported that the warrant had been executed.

The headline over the short story on page eleven read: “Sheriff Keeps Lid on Investigation into Shook Double Murder.” As expected, Sheriff Dye would not say what it was he had been looking for. Only the sheriff and the detectives on the case knew he was searching for rope, any kind of rope. As a result, yet another account of the Shook homicides was published without mention of the ligature marks on the victims, who had been restrained before they were stabbed—the murderous signature that remained etched in Captain Weatherman’s memory of the Donna Pounds case. Only Sheriff Dye also knew, along with the tight circle of detectives, that he was looking for a .22-caliber firearm. Because the gunshot wound was still confidential to Dye’s own department. And without that knowledge, Captain Weatherman could make no parallel with the murders Debbie Deer Creek and Chryssie Crystal Creek, both of whom had been shot in the head.

Dye didn’t have a shred of physical evidence that tied Dave Davis into this thing, and the three times that Davis was interviewed by the sheriff, Dye had come away empty handed. The meetings took place in a small room at the Missoula County Courthouse. At their first encounter, the sheriff simply interviewed Davis. Dye wanted to find out about Dave’s relationship with Teresa. He wanted to establish if this man, who talked freely about his close friendship with Teresa Shook, was a viable suspect. Afterward, Dye wasn’t sure. He asked Davis if he would meet again, if the sheriff had more questions. Davis saw no problem with that.

But when that second meeting took place, Davis started to see where the sheriff was headed. Dye was trying to get him to incriminate himself. This was an interrogation, not an interview. So when Sheriff Dye requested to see Davis a third time in the small room in the courthouse, Davis brought along an attorney. This time, Dye’s prime suspect refused to cooperate any further.

Sheriff Dye lacked any physical tie-in with Davis. So he had no evidence to use as a pry bar against Davis’s alibi, which was simply that he had been at home alone on the night of December 12, 1985. His wife was out of state at the time. That was his alibi.

Sheriff Dye never tried to go for a lie-detector test, but that didn’t mean he had given up on Davis, or on any other possibility, however remote. In late April, after a Missoula radio station reported that Sheriff Dye was investigating a link between the Shook murders and the slayings of a couple and their eleven-year-old son in a Billings, Montana, motel room, the sheriff was forced to conclude that there was no tie-in. Authorities in Billings had a suspect in custody. The couple had been killed by lethal injection. Their son had been forced to drink water laced with a drug. The only similarity was the multiple deaths.

“No progress to report,” he told the Missoulian. “I will have nothing to say until I have something positive to report.”

By late springtime, the investigation had been reduced to a virtual nonentity. The morning seances were now history. Greg Lakes still popped in to see Dye every morning, sometimes just sticking his head in the door as he passed.

“Anything new?” Greg asked.

“Nope,” came the answer.

After all the intelligence had been exhausted and every investigative lead had tapped out, Sheriff Dye admitted he was stumped. His prime suspect had even left the state, which he was free to do. Dye was ready to try anything, even psychic power if it would help.

Through a network of law-enforcement colleagues, he located a woman who had worked with several police agencies on the East Coast, and she agreed to come out to help him in return for transportation costs. It was a good deal. He got a psychic on the case and he wasn’t blowing his budget in the process.

When the woman arrived, she was driven to Greg and Mary’s home, where she stood in the corner of the Lakes’s kitchen. She made three connections.

First, she said, the individual who murdered Mike and Teresa has had an injury to his hip or leg. Second, she said, this individual works with wood, some type of wood furniture, or in a lumber mill. (Of course, Sheriff Dye knew, that wasn’t too uncommon an occupation in the Bitterroot or anywhere in western Montana.) Thirdly, she issued a prophecy. She told the sheriff that he wouldn’t solve the crime until September. That intrigued him.

Later, because Dye briefed her on case, she asked to talk to Merilee Davis, the suspect’s wife. Merilee was a tidy, slight brunette, whose co-workers thought harbored a preoccupation with her state of health. For example, when her allergies acted up, she would explain that she cleansed them from her body by fasting. And those who knew her didn’t necessarily share Merilee’s ideas about links between astrology and health.

The psychic’s interest in Merilee was casual. The two women sat and talked about jobs, friends, and her relationship with her husband. (It was a marriage that was not meant to last.)

When the subject of work was discussed, Merilee told the woman that she worked at a furniture store in Missoula—Conlin’s Furniture, to be exact. She was a saleswoman who had been employed there for more than three years.

And when there seemed to be nothing more to say, the woman thanked Merilee for taking the time to talk.

It wasn’t until more than six months had passed that Sheriff Dye ran out of reasons to keep the Shook murder scene under wraps, and he let the families into the house on McCarthy Loop. The grandparents on both sides had run out of patience long before. Here it was now June, and they still hadn’t been allowed to go into the house. They didn’t want to be sticking their nose in where it didn’t belong, because more than anyone else they wanted the killer caught. If doing things Dye’s way was necessary to that end, they would certainly go along. But still, six months seemed an eternity, and they weren’t the only people in town who had begun to talk about the way Dye was handling the case. The topic of conversation in the cafes and roadhouses and at suppertime in Ravalli County dwelled on how Sheriff Dye had bungled the case. It was too bad. After all, he didn’t not want to solve it, they all knew that.

Teresa’s parents went in first to get her things. Then Bob Shook took over the rest. Mike’s mother, Georgia, couldn’t bring herself to ever go back to the house. It was Bob who became the family representative. He already had started dealing with the finance company in Denver that carried the installment loan on the furniture, and with the insurance agent who had written the homeowner’s policy. There was a lot of smoke damage. Every surface in the house was covered with a dusting of black powder. The white porcelain bathtub was gray. The new furniture was smoke damaged and there was some of Mike’s blood on the underside of a front fabric flap on the sofa.

Later that summer, Bob would sell the sofa, loveseat, chair, and ottoman at auction for three hundred dollars. The agent readily offered to pay the difference from the original cost.

Friends of the Shooks organized an auction to benefit the children, and placed fruit jars for donations on store countertops in Hamilton and Missoula. In all, some twenty thousand dollars was raised by the community and set aside for the children. Every bit of legal work was done free of charge. Mike had life insurance, too, and the children would collect Social Security. The house would be cleaned up and sold, the proceeds earmarked for the children’s education.

When he started removing Mike’s guns and fishing gear, and his personal effects, Bob Shook remembered what Karlene, Mike’s former sister-in-law, had mentioned about the statue of the bugling elk.

“You guys might just as well take that statue,” she said to him.

But where was it? It was no big deal, just another detail, but when he couldn’t find it, he noticed too that the knife he had given Mike was missing, and that the silver dollars weren’t in the top dresser drawer where Mike always kept them.

What was he going to do? Ask Teresa’s parents if they had taken the things? After all these months of difficult feelings, which had escalated over arguments between the in-laws over who would get custody of the children, finally it was decided they would live with Mike’s sister and brother-in-law, who already had four of their own children. The matter almost ended up in court. But it didn’t, and now it was settled. The orphans would live with their cousins as brothers and sisters.

Bob would tell his wife that the things were missing, but that was to be the end of it. At this late date, he wasn’t going to go out of his way to tell Sheriff Dye about it. What good would it do? Both Bob and Georgia Shook had become more than a little hardened on the subject of Dale Dye. They knew that his investigation was well intentioned, but they also had figured out that he had a severe case of tunnel vision, which had taken him nowhere. But the most bitter part of it for them was the way he had shut them out. Sheriff Dye hadn’t even told them that Teresa, their own daughter-in-law, had been shot. They didn’t learn about it until weeks after the funeral, and they had to find out the hard way.

Soon after Megan had returned from Denver, Georgia and her sister were driving the two-and-a-half-year-old back to Georgia’s daughter’s home. As they drove south from Hamilton along Route 93, Georgia mentioned to her sister that they were getting near the newly built home of a couple who had been mutual friends of Mike’s and Teresa’s, and she began to wonder aloud.

“I wonder if Mike and Teresa had seen the new house,” she said, trying to remember.

“No,” Megan piped from the back seat. “Mom is dead. She got shot in the leg.”

As her grandmother and great aunt wheeled around in horror, looking at Megan, the little girl had placed a hand on her ankle. She was showing them where. The car fell silent.