One Degree of Separation

And no, I'm not writing about one degree of separation from Kevin Bacon, though I have that as well.  I have met Dennis Quaid at a gas station I worked at here in Bozeman, and he's working on some project or other with Kevin Bacon.  But that's kind of beside the point.

No, this is about one degree of separation from a serial killer.  In a recent discussion about Dillon at Montana Cowgirl's joint, a commenter brought up his encounter with a Sheriff Dale Dye in Hamilton, and how that proved that Dillon is a little crazy.  Only one little problem; Dillon is not Hamilton, and Dale Dye was never a Sheriff in Beaverhead county where Dillon is the county seat.  Dale Dye was Sheriff in Ravalli county when I matured there, and Hamilton is the county seat.  To those unfamiliar, Hamilton is in the middlen of Ravalli County, a long narrow strip of fertile earth between the Bitterroot wilderness and the Sapphire mountains, south of Missoula.

I grew up in Stevensville, the first community in Montana, having moved there when I was barely 10.  Stevensville, as with the other communities in Ravalli county, was a normal small Montana rural town.  Except Darby, which was and remains a little ... off.  By 'normal' I mean that very thing, which is why I laugh at those usually urban dwellers who paint small towns with the brush of Mayberry USA.  Stevensville wasn't Mayberry, it was normal.  We had a bar owner in town who was an unbelievable bully.  Everybody knew he was dealing drugs out of his place, as well as other nefarious things, but he was aided by the inaction of the town cops.  The latest of those 'fine officers' as I grew up is now the mayor of Stevensville starting in January, and what a twit he is.  The bully kind of shriveled up when an ex-NFL football player bought the bar across from his.  Funny how that works.  We had (and have) the yearly celebration of our town's industry, the Creamery Picnic.   The junior high math teacher ran away after being caught banging the wife of the junior high science teacher.  He ended up in Polson for a while.  None of my female classmates cared because they thought the math teacher was creepy.  He'd stand at the bottom of the stairs between class, especially on Friday when girls were required to wear dresses.  There were the usual rumors that the senior prom queen was sleeping with the good looking chemistry teacher.  Our town's prominent business men were often corrupt and usually licentious.   There was never a lack of apples or of plums to be had for the taking come August or September.  They were everywhere, and the apple orchards provided some damned good hunting.  The county Sheriff's department spent its time investigating high school fights and keggers, with the occasional theft and violent domestic dispute.  We had a high school literature teacher who was a total stoner radical, and he hooked up with the totally flighty teacher who was buxom and also a total stoner.  I hope they went away to live a life of wanton sex in a commune somewhere.  We had a totally smoking hot drama coach.  I lost my virginity in her apartment, though not with her.  I was apartment sitting.   We had a vice principle who thought himself a drill Sargent in the marines.  He kept flexing his neck in the oddest way.  The Mormons ran the school board, and the older richer families ran the town.  It was what one would realistically expect.  It was all pretty normal.

My classmates went on to become town drunks, business leaders, religious leaders, Microsoft and Boeing employees, housewives, high powered sales folk, ranchers and whatever in the hell I've become.  But it was normal, and where this story really starts is when I was a Junior in high school.  We had a history teacher for two years who was an ex-Washington Redskin.  He's the one who went completely off one day about how the NFL is rigged.  I'm certain he was hired for his teaching skills ... right.   He left.  To replace him, we got Mike Shook.  Mr. Shook was a likable guy, and completely white bread.  My friends and I often joked that he was an android.  He spoke in level tones, his motions could be predicted as mechanical and his shirt was always untucked in precisely the same place and same manner.  In truth, he was one of my favorite teachers in high school, which is saying something considering how deeply I loathed that whole experience.

In 1980, with the blessings of a volcano, I graduated, and my classmates and  I went on our merry.  After five years, I married a good friend who was a classmate of mine.  This is where I came two degrees from a serial killer.  My first wife told me of when her family lived in Bonner, outside of Missoula.  Their neighbors were a pastor and his wife.  One day, she was brutally (and I can't mean that more forcefully) murdered.  The investigation all focused on the pastor, but no evidence could be found to link him to the crime.  Sadly, even his children thought he had committed this criminal act.  The whole tale was pretty tragic, and yet little more than an anecdote to me.  The victim's name was Donna Pounds, and that crime occurred in 1974.   That is believed to be the first act of murder committed by Wayne Nance, a serial killer.  He was 18 at the time.

If one does the Google on Nance then you can find a brief blurb, repeated in several places.  There are inaccuracies in it, and in some of the pastings I've found, complete fabrications.   I'm certainly not going to proclaim my accuracy in telling here, because that isn't my focus.  I'm simply going to recount what I know, and what I remember.  If one want's the full tale of Wayne Nance, then I recommend this book.

1984 found me living in Hamilton, Montana, managing a convenience store.  That is the only job that I've ever been fired from, and I can proudly state, I was fired from it ... twice.  That's where I got my first real education about the 'good-ole-boy' network.  There is a ton of backstory here, but I'll just hit the highlights.  The business was owned by a couple of frat-buddies, one of whom was heir to a gas distributorship and the other just a trust fund baby looking for businesses to own.  So he bought a convenience store in Missoula, and, as the General Manager would tell it, "he fell into a pile of shit and came up holding a bag of gold".   The General Manager himself was a product of white male privilege and a 'good ole boy'.  That's how he got hired away from a much more national chain of stores.  The owner (the useless one) bought more stores, including the one in Hamilton.  The GM hired me away from the larger chain, and I literally walked through the door as the guy I replaced walked out the back in tears.  He was reforming alcoholic, and he had been fired.  I was asked to quit, or be fired,  after four months even though I had the best numbers in the company because I 'wasn't paying attention to the details'.  We apparently weren't dusting our canned goods enough.  Turns out, the owner (the useless one, TUO) met a young man in Columbia Falls who impressed TUO and TUO wanted to make a place for him in the company.  So the GM made a place for him, and he legally robbed them blind.  The managers worked hourly at that point, and he was billing for up to 120 hours a week.  That's 80 hours of overtime.  For the mathematically slow, there are only 168 hours in a week.  When the store remodel began, he fell apart and was actually fired.  So, in one of the stupidest moves of my life, I went back to the company, got through the remodel, fixed the inventory problems and had the tightest payroll in the company.  That was June.  I got married in August of 1985, and was 'fired' again in August of 1986, on my last day of work having already given my notice.  There's a whole big bunch of terrific backstory there involving my younger brother and a good friend, but the short version is this:  I was fired because the GM accused me of spreading rumors that he was balling the young woman who he picked as my replacement.  (I laughed at the GM when he told me why I was 'being fired'.)  The manager in Darby got fired for it as well.  I did no such thing.  And he was.  He got caught charging motel rooms on the company credit card.  She got fired.  He was asked to stay but resigned in shame anyway.  That is the good ole boy network.

In that decade between the murder of Donna Pounds and my residing in Hamilton, Dale Dye was the Sheriff of Ravalli county for much of it.  He was a publicity hound, espousing righteous lawmanning and do-goodery.  His deputies were good people, but he was really just kind of an ass.  The vast bulk of their jobs were breaking up keggers and arresting drunks.  Wayne Nance, on the other hand, was kind of a busy boy.  He worked many odd jobs, and committed at least 3 murders in that time.  He is painted as a "an independent truck driver", but in fact, he woprkd delivery for a company that would rather not have its name associated with Wayne Nance.  It was a delivery to the Shooks that led him there, and a delivery to the Welles that led to his demise.  It was in 1985 that I came one degree away from a serial killer.

For reasons that will become obvious, I remember that it was late in that year that the news broke of the Shook's murder.  A Stevensville high school teacher and his wife Theresa had been slain in their home near Hamilton.  Mike had been tied to a chair and stabbed to death.  Theresa was tied to a bed, raped and stabbed to death.  The two children had not been "sleeping upstairs" as this took place.  They had been locked in a closet.  As the final act in his crime, Nance put a mattress against the closet door and lit it on fire, hoping to burn the house down (and the children alive).  Nance obviously didn't think about civil liabilities or the CPA, or he'd have known that mattresses are designed not to burn very well.  The smoke caught the attention of the neighbors, the fire folk and police were called and the scene was discovered.  I've often thought of those two kids, and I sincerely hope that they've found good lives beyond this tragedy.

This was shocking news for Hamilton, and I presume, the students at Stevensville.  What was more shocking was the honest reporting of the crime.  The Ravalli Republic and the Missoulian pulled no punches.  They reported the facts in their fullest.  There was no mystery about the horror of this crime.  They also reported, just two days later, that Dale Dye had refused FBI help, and had claimed jurisdiction over the crime scene.  What a pompous ass.   It is my certain opinion that he thought this was a bunch of drunk high school kids or some such nonsense.  He couldn't have been more wrong, and that arrogance led to future violence.

About 4 days after the murder, I was at work, and the lunch crowd came in, as they always did for their hot dogs and chili dogs and nachos.  Several men began to talk about the murder and then start to talk louder.  It might surprise many to find that convenience store employees behind the counter are a little too busy at times to see what's really happening.  When I woke to the danger was when the first guy went to his truck and got his hunting rifle.  Then another.  They got more people into the conversation and more damned guns.  I remember clearly the very moment that it dawned on me that a lynch mob was forming in my store.  I was fricking scared, and that's no lie.  In what was possibly the stupidest move I've ever pulled, I went around the counter and informed these guys that they would have to remove their guns from the store, that Mike Shook was a teacher of mine and that they had no idea who they would even use those guns against.  It was weird.  The mob melted much faster than it had formed.  Impotent anger can be a powerful demotivator, when pointed out.  But note this, much of the discussion at that point was the sure and certain knowledge that Dale Dye was incompetent at dealing with this, and he had mightily fucked up in refusing federal help.  He was voted out in the very next election.

I tried to talk to my wife (at that time) about this.  It was obvious to me that there was a connection between Pounds and the Shooks, well before that connection was made by law enforcement.  But she was a classmate of mine, and a student of Mike Shook.  We never really discussed what happened.  In 1986 when Nance finally met his end we still didn't and wouldn't discuss it.  She seemed to think I was aggrandizing this whole thing.   No.  The truth is what it is, and it was horrible.

Comments

[Montana Cowgirl]

First take on this. Way better story than anything in the excellent book "Downtown Owl"http://www.amazon.com/Downtown-Owl-Novel-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/1416544186 which I loved. Have you guys read this? It's about small town scandals and teachers. Dark comedy and conspiracy theories. But no serial killers...great story.

[Mike and Iris]

It is truly a small world my friend... My father was good friends with Wayne Nance's father, one of my coworkers was friends with Wayne's friends and actually knew him well. She said he was very protective of her (scary)... and you forgot to mention we used to party in the same area of the East Missoula forests that Wayne was disposing of his bodies.... at the time he was doing his killings.

[Montana Cowgirl]

Thanks for the story, you are most welcome for the links. Seriously this is a good one.

[mr benson]

Good stories. I think you'd find many large cities share the same vices and corruptions as you observed growing up in a small town. It's really the people, not the system itself, that makes the results good or bad.

[Lincoln74]

I am the commenter who referred to Dale Dye of Dillon and was mistaken because the encounter I had was indeed in Hamilton.My mistake. At the time I was living in a cabin just north of Darby on ,I believe, Rennick land. The deputy i had my initial encounter with had a 59 or 60 Chrysler for his official car. Great story from the late 60's. My mistake about the place.

[Jon's Mom]

Thanks for the well written story; I can still remember how truly frightened we all were until he was caught, and how (even now) we keep our wits about us, mace handy, and our doors locked. You'll be pleased to know that the Shook kids fared better than could be expected. After they got out of the hospital and were healed of their injuries from the fire, etc., they were adopted by relatives, had their names changed, and were raised in a happy home in Stevensville.

[Heather]

So weird to be reminded of this awful time in the Bitterroot valley. I was 11 when my father came home to tell us Donna Pounds had been found murdered. He was a minister, a friend of Harvey Pounds, and we all knew and loved Donna. I remember I had to retrieve something from the back of our station wagon that night as the conversation continued in the kitchen. I was crawling into the darkened car, it was late in the night, and as I reached for whatever it was I had to have, a sonic boom reverberated through the valley. We used to have them regularly here. I knew I'd been shot and killed by the same demon that had taken our sweet Donna. Funny, yet horrible. My scream from outside was the only thing that elicited a laugh from anyone that night, as it was obvious to anyone there what had happened. To this day, if I hear a sonic boom, I remember Donna. So wonderful to hear the Shook kids got a second chance from loving family.

[JD]

Interesting story. I knew Wayne Nance when I was in the US Navy. I met him several times. It was back in 1975, I was stationed on the USS Robison DDG-12, when he came aboard to say goodby to his shipmates. If memory serves, Nance had been discharged before I got stationed on the ship. He had gone crazy in the shop and had thrown an LS-386 (a comm. unit) around the shop, doing much damage. Thank God Mr. Wells had a weapon. Just one more reason the keep yourself armed.