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by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Wayne Nance was a truck driver that hailed from Missoula, Montana. As a teenager he displayed disturbing behavior such as skinning live cats, using hot coat hangers to brand himself with occult symbols, since he was a self-described satanist, and having a very violent temper. ![]()
Wayne Nance was born on October 18, 1955, in Missoula, Montana. His mother Charlene was a waitress, and his father, George Nance was a long haul trucker. He had one brother.
Nance, Sr. served prison time for the 1968 armed robbery of a Missoula Super Save store where he pistol-whipped an employee. Did Wayne Nance learn violence at home, or was he just born with these instincts? Whatever the case he was only a teenager when he went hunting for a victim close to home. The year was 1974, and Nance was a neighbor of the Pounds family and a friend of their teenage children. On April 11, Harvey Pounds who was a preacher, arrived home to find his wife Donna dead in the basement of their home. She was bound, gagged and had been shot five times in the back of the head with her husband's .22 caliber Luger, which was found jammed in her vagina. Later examination found she had been sexually assaulted. Harvey Pounds was considered a suspect since it was his handgun used to kill his wife, and there were rumors he was having an affair. However after questioning Donna's husband, the police interviewed a young neighbor named Wayne Nance who was seen lurking in the victim's backyard only hours before the crime, as well as heading towards the Tamarack Trailer Park where he lived. At this time, Nance was a senior at Sentinel High School, where the Pounds children attended. Inside Nance's room they found a bloody underwear and a bag of .22 caliber bullets. They questioned him using a polygraph and he passed it. Without the aid of DNA comparison the evidence was deemed circumstantial and he was released. Not coincidentally Wayne Nance immediately joined the Navy after this incident, and left the area. ![]()
What crimes Wayne Nance may have committed in the next four years is anyone's guess. On November 29, 1977 he received a general military discharge on the grounds of misconduct after he was found with stolen items, LSD, marijuana and illegal butterfly knives.
Was it coincidental that not long after Nance returned to his hometown, dead bodies start to show up? It was a cold winter day in February 1980, when railroad workers found a skeleton close to I-90. resting against a chain-link fence. The badly decomposed remains were those of a teenage girl who had been stabbed several times in the chest. She was Caucasian, had brown hair and she was wearing a flower-print, peasant dress. There were indications that she had been sexually assaulted. The police did not know who she was and since she was rolled down a steep embankment off Beavertail Hill they dubbed her "Betty Beavertail". In 1985, she was identified with dental records as Devonna Louise Nelson, a 15-year-old runaway. Strangely this was the year Nance's mother, Charlene was killed in a one-car accident on Deer Creek Road in April, 1980. His mother's car skidded out of control and struck a tree. The vehicle was traveling at such a high rate of speed it was torn in half by the impact. At the time of her death she was a waitress at the Cabin Lounge in East Missoula, and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In the coming years, for some twisted reasons it seemed Nance chose this spot as the dumping grounds for his victims. ![]()
In 1983, Janet Lee Lucas, 23, was living with a boyfriend and her 5-year-old son at Sandpoint, Idaho. She left home to get a pack of cigarettes and didn't come home. Her boyfriend tracked her down to a bar where they had a fight. He left, but she never came home. Her son was adopted after his mother went missing. The years rolled forward, and nothing else was heard from her again, however that didn't mean she had not been found.
In September, 1985 a bear hunter found skeletal remains south of Missoula. Examination of the bones revealed she had been shot at close range. There were no clothes or personal effects which indicated she was probably dumped nude in the woods. Forensic analysis indicated she had light brown hair, stood about five feet tall and weighed a little over a hundred pounds. Examination of her teeth indicated she had a history of smoking, and a type of oral surgery done in the Asian countries. She was not a teenager. Her cause of death was two .32 caliber bullets in the skull. Jane Doe 3UFMT was dubbed Christy Crystal Creek. In 2021, Christy Crystal Creek was identified as Janet Lee Lucas via DNA sample from one of her molars taken 30 years before. It was determined the forensic anthropologist who had analyzed her teeth originally had made a mistake which confused the investigation. The DNA sample led to a cousin, and from there to one of her siblings. However this verification was decades in the future, and in the meantime her family, including her twin brother were left wondering what had become of her. ![]()
In December, 1984 a photographer was in the eastern, rural area of Missoula county known as Deer Creek. He came upon what looked like leg bones and the top of a skull protruding from a shallow grave. The woman's remains had to be chiseled from the frozen earth, and it was believed she had been dumped there during the previous summer.
Like the remains of Christy Crystal Creek, she was nude and had been killed with three shots to her head. Initially unidentified she was given the moniker Debbie Deer Creek. In 1986, she was tied to Nance through one of her hair strands that was found caught in the door hinges of his car, but at this point she was still unidentified. When police conducted a search of Nance's home after his death, they found a series of photo-booth pictures of him and an unknown woman that would not been given a name until 2006. Then DNA profiling proved she was Marcella Bachmann, 16, who used the name of Robin. Like Devonna Nelson she was a runaway and a trucker had dropped her off after she left her mother's house in Vancouver in 1983. She had headed straight to the Cabin Bar, where Nance worked occasionally as a bouncer. He had "taken her in". By September 1984, two weeks after their paths had crossed, Nance started spreading the word around that she had left the area. Marcella's brother Derek had been searching for her all those years, but her name had mistakenly been removed from the missing person's list in 1986, due to a report that she had been sighted in Seattle. Her brother at one point thought his sister had fallen victim to Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer. Only three miles from where Marcella Bachmann's body was discovered, a second skeleton was found in September, 1985 which would be dubbed Christy Crystal Creek a.k.a Janet Lee Lucas. ![]()
On December 12, 1985, Ravalli County Sheriff's Dept. found themselves with an unsolved double homicide. The murderer gained entry to the house owned by Mike and Teresa Shook.
Teresa Shook, 32 was found in the bedroom and her husband Mike was in the living room. Both of them had been stabbed several times. The house had been set on fire and their three small children along with another child they were babysitting were rescued by a family friend, the father of the child they were caring for on that night. When Nance was later identified as their killer it turned out he had delivered furniture they had bought in Conlin's Furniture four months before their death. Certain items were missing from the house. One was a ceramic statuette of a bugling elk and a Kelgin knife. Several months later, after Nance became the prime suspect for the horrendous crime, a search warrant was served at the home Nance shared with his father, where both items were located along with a photo of George Nance dated January 1986, receiving the elk as a Christmas present from his son only days after he had murdered the owners of the statuette. ![]()
Doug and Kris Wells arrived at their home around midnight of September 3, 1986 and found a strange pickup camper parked in front of their house. When Doug looked inside it he found a man lying down in the front seat. They went inside, and when Doug went outside a few minutes later to leave out the trash he found Nance standing in the front yard.
Nance asked him for a flashlight, and when Wells went inside the house for it he was struck from behind by Nance. When Kris came outside Nance had a gun and he forced her to tie up Doug and then took her upstairs, where he tied her up as well. He then returned to Doug, who he dragged down into the basement and tied to a post. He then proceeded to beat him savagely, then he took an 8-inch knife and plunged it into his chest. Nance returned to the bedroom where he found that Kris had loosened one of her hands, and was attempting to call 911. He tied her up again and returned several times to the basement to check on Doug, to make sure he was dead. On his way to check on him one more time, he encountered Doug in the living room. Doug had freed himself, and retrieved a rifle he kept in the basement and had one bullet loaded in it. He then took aim, and shot Nance once in the side. Nance staggered back to the bedroom, while Doug beat him about the head with the rifle, eventually breaking the stock on his skull. Nance took his .22 caliber handgun and fired off three rounds, hitting Doug once in the leg. In the altercation Nance dropped his handgun and Doug took it and fired off several rounds hitting Nance in the head. He went into convulsions, and died the following day in the emergency room of St. Patrick's Hospital. He was 30 years old. The Wells both made a full recovery from their injuries. Due to the circumstances of his death, Wayne Nance was never tried or convicted of any of the crimes which are attributed to him, even though a search of his home provided more than sufficient evidence to tie him to many cold cases in the area. Police found he taken many photographs of Kris Wells, including some he carried in his wallet. He had hidden behind some bushes and taken them while she went on her regular jogs. He had even compiled a photo album with notes such as: "I love you", "I am crazy about you" and "I want you to live with me." During the investigation police were stymied when Nance's family and even his co-workers refused to talk about him, except to comment he was mostly a loner. But there were disturbing clues prior to his death that pointed to a dark psyche. Several female customers complained about harassing phone calls they got from him after receiving a delivery from the store. He also took photos of the female workers in the furniture store. He was reported as using a peephole he had found. He blamed other staff members, and when questioned they insisted he was the one who showed it to them. ![]()
However, most of the police's information came from when they revisited the 1974 investigation of the murder of Donna Pounds. Classmates said Nance would recite Jabberwocky in an instant. He was known for sketching two-headed creatures with bloodied fangs. He was fascinated with "sacrificial, dagger-style knives."
After the attack on the Wells, Nance was considered a suspect in the stabbing and sexual assault of Siobhan McGuinness, 5, whose body was found in a gully near Turah. Her killer was identified in 2020 with DNA evidence. His name was Richard Davis who died in 2012, and like Nance is a suspect in other unsolved and undiscovered crimes. Nance was also a suspect in the Easter, 1976 beating, sexual assault and stabbing of Verna Kvale, 37, a Missoula special education teacher found in her house with a knife in her nude body. Her case was solved in 2006, when Neil B. Morris, 55, a former funeral home director shot himself with a shotgun just 27 hours after giving a DNA sample. He had been involved in an affair on and off for sometime with Kvale prior to her death. Despite being exonerated as a suspect in several cold cases, no doubt Nance took to his grave not only the identity of his victims, but what many suspect is the knowledge of additional victims that have never been found, including when he traveled with the military from 1974 to 1977.
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Stranger Than Fiction StoriesM.P. PellicerAuthor, Narrator and Producer StrangerThanFiction.NewsArchives
February 2025
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