Sadly, it is not often that a serial killer gets a taste of their own medicine. Doug Wells, however, made sure suspected Montana serial killer and rapist Wayne Nance certainly did.
Photo by Thomas Kinto on Unsplash
At ten minutes to midnight on 3rd September 1986, Kris & Doug Wells were returning home from an evening with friends to find a truck that they did not recognise, half parked on the side lawn of their property.
This annoyed Doug so after entering the house he went to retrieve a flashlight. Upon inspection, Doug could see someone huddled in the front of the van and he concluded that they were just “sleeping one-off.”
He decided to let it go but before heading up to bed with his wife, he needed to take the bin out, for its collection the next morning.
When he went back out onto his drive, he noticed two things. Firstly, the truck was no longer there. Secondly, there was someone huddled in the bushes outside of his home.
Doug called for the peeping Tom to identify himself, which he did. It was Wayne Nance, a delivery driver and member of the warehouse team for Conlins’ Furniture, the store his wife managed.
Nance and Doug were not exactly friends, Nance was vocal about his dislike of Kris’s husband and Doug, in turn, knew that Nance was obsessed with his wife. Something he had warned Kris to be careful about, despite her assurances it was just a silly crush.
Doug demanded to know what Nance was doing in the bushes outside of his home. Nance told him that he was passing by and had spotted someone lurking outside of the house so he had come to investigate.
Doug, remembering the strange incident with the van, believed Nance and he turned to go back into the house to once again, retrieve his flashlight. When he did, Nance struck him over the back of the head with a baton, splitting his head open.
Despite the severe head injury, Doug was not going to go down easily and a fight ensued, the commotion of which had awoken Kris, who rushed downstairs to the confusing sight of her husband, wrestling with one of her employees. She yelled at Nance to stop, demanding, quite rightly, what the hell he thought he was doing.
Nance then pulled out a gun and he made Kris tie up her husband, double-checking that the ropes were tight enough when she had finished. The couple could see that the intruder was highly agitated, he was pacing up and down and at times talking to himself. He told them that he had “done something bad” and that he needed money “to get out of town.”
Kris, believing Nance and his notorious temper, to be completely capable of doing something violent and rash, obliged with his demands, telling him exactly where he could find cash in the house.
Nance assured the couple that he would not hurt them and he even took the details of one of Kris’ girlfriends, promising to call and alert her to their situation, as soon as he was far enough away.
He then explained that he would need to tie Kris up and separate the couple. Doug pleaded with Nance not to tie up Kris but Nance did not listen, reasoning that she would immediately call the police if he left her untied. Although they didn’t like it, it did make sense and the couple were still believing that, as long as they went along with everything the man wanted, he would leave them alive.
It was around 12.30 am when Nance carried Kris upstairs and tied her to the bed, using a sock and a pair of tights to gag her. He then went back downstairs to deal with Doug.
After forcing him to the basement and tying him to a pole, he viciously beat the defenceless man before stabbing him in the chest. Confident that Doug was no longer a threat he went back upstairs, planning to rape and most likely, murder Kris.
That, however, was not going to happen.
Role Reversal
Nance had missed Doug's heart by inches and although serious, the wound was not immediately fatal. In a mix of adrenaline and anger, Doug somehow managed to rouse himself from the brink of unconsciousness and remove his bindings. He grabbed his Savage 250 rifle, loaded with only one bullet, and rushed to his wife’s aid.
Doug, not knowing how long he would remain conscious for, knew that he needed “Wayne to come to him.” He made sure to make a noise on the stairs, drawing Nance out of the bedroom and enabling Doug, a gunsmith by trade, to aim and fire. He recalled seeing Nance “disappear” but believed that he had missed until he heard Nance mutter “oh god I’m a dead man.”
Doug had hit Nance in the side, seriously wounding him, but like his own injury, it did not prove immediately fatal. Another tussle ensued between the two men, and an enraged Doug overpowered Nance, relentlessly beating him across the head with the butt of his rifle.
Nance, was now crawling away from his intended victim, begging him to stop. But Doug didn’t stop, even when he broke his rifle, he didn’t stop. Wayne would have a total of 60 wounds from the beating Doug provided, one can’t say he didn’t deserve it.
Kris, who had managed to free herself from her bindings, joined in the beating, furiously punching Nance in the head and chest until her husband pulled her away.
Nance, who had huddled in the corner of the bedroom, managed to draw his gun, and fire off two shots. The first of which missed and the second, of which hit Doug in the leg. Then, in a series of rather unfortunate events for Nance, just as he fired for the third time, a blow from Doug would skewer the shot, the result being Nance firing an accidental “suicide shot” into his own head.
Kris called the police at 1.22 am, their 90-minute ordeal at the hands of a crazed Nance was over.
Nance would die of his injuries at St Patrick Hospital. Doug would, thankfully, survive.
Soon after this attack, it became clear that this was not the first time at the rodeo for Nance.
It is important to note that, because of his death, Nance has never been tried and convicted of any crimes, however, the cases that follow are the ones that are commonly attributed to him by authorities due to the available evidence Donna
On the 11th April 1974, when Nance was just 18, the 39-year-old mother of one of his friends was raped and murdered in a violent home invasion, in Missoula, Montana.
Donna Pounds had just arrived home, to what should have been an empty house. But lurking in the master bedroom, experts have theorised, was Nance. He was armed with her husbands’ .22 Luger, with which he fired what appeared to be a warning shot, at the bedroom wall.
Nance was wearing latex gloves, one of which was found at the scene and carried with him a black gym bag, from which he produced a white clothesline, which was used to tie Donna to her bed. Nance then raped her before forcing her downstairs into the basement, where, at point-blank range, he shot her five times in the back of her head.
He then inserted the barrel of the gun into her vagina and disappeared.
Donnas husband Harvey, would come home that evening to the sight of white clotheslines tied to several of the beds in the home. He also noticed his gun holster was not only out of the secret and locked drawer where it was kept, but it was also missing the gun.
At 17.59 Harvey called the police to report the horror that had awaited him in the basement.
Nothing Concrete
Examinations would estimate that Donna had been murdered between 13.00 and 15.30 that afternoon.
Three eyewitnesses would come forward saying they either saw Nance or someone who looked like Nance in the area that afternoon. One said they saw him in the garden of the Pounds residence. Another said they saw him leaving the house with a black gym bag and heading in the direction of the Tamarack Trailer Park, where Nance lived with his parents George and Charlene.
The Pounds son, Kenny, had shown Nance exactly where his father had kept his Luger and Nance was a regular at the house.
When questioned by police, Nance admitted that he had not gone to school that day, and instead had stayed home, in order to work on a school project, which was to build his own tomahawk. He had been out in the area, he said, foraging for the materials that he would need.
This is a plausible enough explanation but when police spoke to Nance’s teacher, they learned that whilst it was a genuine project, it had actually been set earlier in the year and had already been completed.
During a search of Nance’s room, the police would find a black gym bag containing .22 calibre bullets and casings and in a dresser drawer they would find a bloodstained pair of Wayne’s underwear, which his mother admitted to the police, she had only recently washed. Tests would confirm this blood to be human but nothing further.
However, with a complete lack of motive, the 18-year-old, who had bragged about wanting to commit a murder before he was 19 years old, was still not as attractive a suspect as the murdered woman’s husband.
Harvey, a shoe salesman, Christian DJ and Deacon of Bethel Baptist Church, was having an affair, with a member of his congregation no less. Unfortunately for him, his infidelity gave him probable cause in the eyes of the police.
He would obviously have known where to find the murder weapon, he told police that he and his wife had had sex the night before she was murdered, to explain any semen that might be found and again, unfortunately for Harvey, he lacked an airtight alibi. At the time in question, he said he had been eating his lunch at his desk, a 45-minute window in which police could not find a corroborating witness. A 45-minute window, that police concluded was more than enough time to commit the atrocities at his home.
Again, however, the crucial bit of concrete evidence that pointed inescapably at either suspect was simply not found.
General Discharge
Later in 1974, as the Pounds case grew cold, Wayne Nance enlisted in the United States Navy. His Naval career, although beginning well enough, was not to end well and on 29th November 1977, he would receive a General Discharge on the grounds of misconduct.
The problems for Nance started to appear after a Grand Jury had been called in 1976. Even though, after a month of deliberations, and the failure to indict either of the suspects for the murder of Donna Pounds, Nance did not return to Naval Duties in the same mindset that he had begun them. He was found with stolen items, LSD, Marijuana and illegal butterfly knives. One could say being called to the Grand Jury had rattled the 22-year-old.
Devonna
After briefly returning home, where his father had tried to explain away his sons' sudden removal from the Navy, Nance paid a short visit to Seattle, Washington in 1978. In July of that year, whilst Nance was in the City, 15-year-old Devonna Nelson would go missing.
Her body would be discovered by the crew of a slow-moving freight train at the bottom of an embankment, just on the outskirts of Missoula, in January 1980. The body was badly decomposed, essentially skeletal and resting against a chain-link fence.
Her hair, now detached from her sun-bleached skull, was strawberry blond, she had no shoes or underwear and her dress was hitched up around her neck.
The post mortem revealed that the body had been there for around a year and a half and that she had been stabbed in the chest.
The discovery of her remains, over 475 miles away from where she was last seen, did not immediately lead to an identification and the body on the embankment would remain a Jane Doe, nicknamed, Betty Beavertail, until 6th February 1985.
Could it merely be a coincidence that Devonna went missing at the same time that Nance was in Seattle?
And another coincidence that her body would be found on the outskirts of the City where he lived?
One thing is for certain, if their paths did cross, She would not be the last teenager to go missing after being in Wayne Nance’s company.
Marcella
On Christmas Eve 1984, a wildlife photographer would stumble upon a decomposed leg protruding out of the frozen ground at a 45-degree angle.
Forensic examinations would reveal that the body was that of a young female and she had been shot three times, once to the back of the head and twice to her temple. The coroner estimated that, from the state of decomposition, she had been dead for around 3 months.
The body would remain a Jane Doe, nicknamed “Debbie Deer Creek” until DNA tests confirmed her identity in 2006.
Debbie was Marcella Bachmann, a 16-year-old runaway from Vancouver, Canada.
When police conducted a search of Nance’s home after his death, they found a series of photo-booth pictures of him and a girl who would later be identified as Marcella Bachmann. A strand of her hair was also found in Nance’s truck.
It transpired that Marcella had been “dating”, a then 29-year-old Nance, throughout the August and September of 1984.
Marcella had been hitchhiking, when she was left in Missoula after an argument with the trucker who had been her ride. Nance had been working as a bouncer at a local bar called The Cabin, when he spotted the teenager, bought her a drink and took her home.
Marcella disappeared from Nance’s life just as suddenly as she entered it. A birthday party on the 28th of September 1984 was the last time anyone saw her. When quizzed by co-workers over his dour mood and the whereabouts of “Robin” as everyone knew her, he would simply say “she’s gone.” If pressed further his story varied between her running off with a trucker or him “putting her on a bus.”
In reality, she was buried in a shallow grave, merely two miles from Nance’s home.
A Forensic Anthropologist at Colorado State University would compare the photo booth pictures of “Robin” as she was known until 2006, and the skull of “Debbie” and confirm them to be one and the same.
Police would therefore conclude, that Nance was the one responsible for the murder.
Janet
On 9th September 1985, whilst hiking along a logging road, a bear hunter would come across the skull of an adult female, 3 miles (as the crow flies) from where Marcella Bachmann had been found. Police would find, yet more skeletal remains upon a thorough search of the area.
Examinations would conclude she had been dead for around a year and that she had been shot in the head twice. Due to the proximity to where their other Jane Doe had been found, police theorised at the time, whoever had killed one, had killed the other.
Try as they might the identity of “Christy Crystal Creek” as she became known remained a mystery. She was believed to be of Asian heritage and had dentistry work unique to Asian practices.
Miraculously, after 36 years as Christy Crystal Creek, she was finally identified on 23rd May 2021.
Janet was originally from Spokane, Washington and had last been seen in Sandpoint, Idaho in 1983. She would have been 23 when she was murdered. Police are still looking for a timeline of events that lead her to be in Missoula, Montana.
The identification of her body hopefully gave her son, who was 5 when she went missing and who had spent much of his adult life searching for Janet some degree of closure.
Now that Janet has her name back, hopefully, what happened to her will soon be revealed.
Other than the location of the body, there is nothing else, yet, to tie Wayne Nance to her murder.
The Shook Family
On the 12th December 1985, the Shook family would be disturbed by a violent knock on their door. Mike and Teresa’s, initial confusion as to who it could possibly be, saw one of the children, 4-year-old Luke, rush to the door and open it before either of his parents could react.
A man, armed with a gun, brazenly walked into the house and introduced himself as “Conan the Barbarian” he then demanded money and made promises that no one would be hurt if they complied with his demands. He then fired off a shot, which hit Teresa in the leg. The post mortem examination would reveal that the perpetrator had tried to dig the bullet out of her leg, a task in which they had failed. This led to the belief that the shot was most likely not meant to have hit Teresa and was intended instead, as a warning shot, the same as the Donna Pounds case.
A scuffle would break out in which Mike would suffer a blow to the head, be tied up and then stabbed in the chest and left to die where he had fallen.
Teresa was forced upstairs and tied to the bed whilst Luke had been taken to his older brother Matts room and 2-year-old Megan had been placed in her crib in her parents' room. Then, with baby Megan next to her, Teresa was raped before being stabbed to death herself. Her body would be found clothed, sans her underwear, with a pillow over her face.
Around 10 pm a neighbour saw a pickup truck, which matched the description of Nance’s vehicle, a maroon, Toyota 4x4, leaving the Shooks property.
Two hours later, the perpetrator would return, rob the family of an Elk statue, a stag handled hunting knife and a silver dollar collection before attempting to set fire to the home.
The fire smouldered but did not catch, however, the intended ignition material would release cyanide gas into the airtight house, slowly gassing the children, trapped inside.
Thankfully, they would survive.
The case remained cold until after Nance’s death when,
The bereaved relatives of Mike and Teresa had not been allowed back into the home to retrieve any keepsakes and possessions and to sort through their affairs until 6 months after the murder. Bob Shook, whilst cataloguing everything would notice that the Elk statue, the silver coin collection and the stag handled knife, were all missing.
He did not, however, alert police to this, not until he saw coverage of the Wells crime on the TV and hearing that Nance had worked at Conlins, the store he knew, his son and daughter law had furnished their new house from.
Bob recalls telling law enforcement “You know that sounds like the same thing that happened up here. That’s where the kids got the furniture.”
Bob Shook, frustrated with the snail's pace of the investigation into his sons' murder, would take matters into his own hands and contact the Missoula Sheriff himself and tell him to be on the lookout for the statue, the coins and the knife.
Less than 12 hours later, the items were identified as being those stolen from the Shook’s property, a fairly easy task as the Elk statue, was a one of a kind piece, handmade for the couple, by a family member. Nance had not exercised caution and gotten rid of his loot, in fact, he had, rather brazenly given it to his father as a Christmas present.
The stag handled knife, was also custom made and had also been a Christmas present, given to Mike by his father Bob, two Christmases earlier.
Detectives could not find the delivery receipt that proved it was Nance who had delivered furniture to the Shook’s, merely 2 1/2 weeks before they were murdered, it had mysteriously disappeared. However a delivery receipt from the same day did bear Wayne’s initials and his colleague confirmed that they had delivered in Hamilton, where the Shook’s lived, on the day in question.
The bullet that had been lodged in Teresa’s leg, was confirmed to have been fired from George Nance’s gun, to further implicate Wayne in the murders.
Harassment
Several female customers had complained to Conlins about harassing phone calls they had begun to receive after getting a delivery from the store. One of the customers had even singled out Wayne as being the caller. Another had changed her number and to her relief, the calls had stopped. She then made another order with Conlins and the calls began once more. The next time she changed her number she vowed to never use the store again.
Nance had to be told by Kris, to stop taking photos of his female colleagues, something he had inexplicably begun doing, much to everyone’s annoyance.
He also reported a peephole to Kris that “he had found” and blamed it on other members of staff. When questioned, these employees insisted it had been shown to them by Wayne, not the other way around.
Nance would be found to be in possession of a large collection of photographs of Kris. Some had been taken from the bushes along the route Kris would go for a jog. Others he had collated into a photo album, along with notes such as “I love you” “I am crazy about you” and “I want you to live with me.” He also had a picture of Kris in his wallet. The innocent crush had been so much more nefarious than that.
Justice
No one knows, for definite, exactly how many people had their lives snuffed out by Nance. Law Enforcement estimates that he is responsible for at least four murders, Donna Pounds, Marcella Bachmann and Mike and Teresa Shook. He is the only suspect in the murders of Devonna Nelson and Janet Lee Lucas.
George Nance, defended his son after his death, telling police to “quit trying to pin all the crimes in Missoula on him.”
For most, however, it was obvious. Those who knew Nance admitted that if you thought hard enough, looked a little bit deeper at his idiosyncrasies, he was perfectly capable of doing everything that he was suspected of.
The community treated Doug Nance as a hero, a fund was set up for the couple, to cover loss of earnings, his medical bills were sorted for him.
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