True Crime Campfire - Creep: Serial Killer Wayne Nance Pt 1

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

In the 1970s in Missoula, Montana, there was a brief epidemic of unsolved violent murders that shocked the small city down to its roots. A dark rumor spread quickly—the deaths must be the work of some sinister Satanic cult, secret rituals performed in the service of demonic powers. This was not the case. The murders were unconnected, the motives behind them having nothing to do with the big bad devil… except for one, in which the killer proudly declared his occult allegiance to anyone who asked. But that was just a cover for overpowering violent fantasies that this weak, strange man would never try too hard to resist. After this first murder, he’d kill again and again. Join us live at Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp in Equinunk, PA, September 10-13th! Visit ⁠badmagicproductions.com⁠ for more info and to buy tickets.   Tickets are on sale now for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027. Sources: John Coston, To Kill and Kill Again https://archive.is/Yxz4J#selection-4661.90-4661.114 https://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/cold-case-research-yields-id-of-1984-murder-victim/article_a01dbe0d-5c2d-5181-9927-460950a1ddd1.html https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/vicap/homicides-and-sexual-assaults/richard-william-davis Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfire https://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/ Facebook: True Crime Campfire Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=en Email: [e-mail] MERCH! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In the 1970s, in Missoula, Montana, there was a brief epidemic of unsolved, violent murders that shocked the small city down to its roots. A dark rumor spread quickly.

The deaths must be the work of some sinister satanic cult. secret rituals performed in the service of demonic powers. This was not the case. The murders were unconnected, the motives behind them having nothing to do with the big bad devil, except for one in which the killer proudly declared his occult allegiance to anyone who asked, but that was just a cover for overpowering violent fantasies that this weak, strange man would never try too hard to resist. After his first murder, he'd kill again and again.

This is part one of Creep, serial killer Wayne Nance. So, campers, for this one, we're in Missoula, Montana, December 24, 1984. As you might expect for Montana in the winter, it was a bitterly cold day. But there can be beauty in the cold, and as the wildlife photographer climbed the wooded slopes, he turned and saw the small city cradled on the valley floor, surrounded by deeply wooded hills, everything covered in snow and glowing beneath the overcast sky. The frozen river snaked through the scene like a mirrored ribbon. The wildlife photographer walked on, the air sharp as broken glass in his lungs.

He stopped, his eye catching on something out of place, a long black object jutting out of the ground up ahead, which was only lightly covered in snow underneath the trees. It looked almost like a fallen branch, but not quite. He walked closer, but it wasn't until he was almost right on top of it that he realized what he was looking at. A naked human leg jutting up out of the frozen ground at 45 degrees, blackened by the cold. He could clearly make out the knee, ankle, and foot. Suddenly scared, the photographer looked around, but he was utterly alone in the stillness of the winter forest.

He took careful note of where the protruding leg was beneath a big spree. Bruce about a hundred yards along a dirt road, and then he hurried back to his car and went looking for a phone. The police were familiar with the general area where the leg had been found, because the wide, grassy area just beneath it was a long-time make-out spot for local teenagers, although less so in the dead of winter. They found the spot easily, but removing the buried body would be more trouble. The ground was frozen rock hard. The picks and shovels they'd brought didn't get them anywhere. The officers put up a tent over the body,

put a portable propane heater in there, and left it there for a day and a half. The heater helped, but not a whole lot. It took hammers and masonry chisels to get the body out of the ground. It belonged to a naked young woman whose skull had been fractured by three gunshot wounds, each one almost certainly fatal by itself.

She'd been buried in a shallow grave. Most likely, animal activity had pulled one leg above the surface where it had frozen. She had no ID on her. The officer in charge of the investigation, Captain Weatherman, called her Debbie Deer Creek for the moment after a nearby stream. Her autopsy provided two features that could potentially identify the victim. She had perfect white teeth with no fillings at all, but one incisor was slightly rotated.

That was distinctive. So was her hair, which had two layers of dye over its natural light brown. First, a darker brown, and then Auburn. If similar hairs were found somewhere else, they could be matched with a reasonable degree of confidence. The autopsy also told investigators approximately how long Debbie had been in the ground. Three months. There were no local missing persons matching her description, and detectives thought she might have come from out of state. They were right about that, but Debbie Deer Creek's real identity,

wouldn't be known until decades later in 2006. Her death coincided with the time when the Green River killer, Gary Ridgway, was active, and as part of his plea deal, Ridgeway had to help investigators find the bodies of his victims. To try and identify one of these bodies, Seattle detectives looked into unsolved missing persons cases involving people of approximately the same height and age, which brought them to the mother of Marcy Bachman, who had run away from a volatile home in Vancouver, Washington when she was 16 years old. They got a DNA sample from Marcy's mom. It didn't match the Green River case, but they put the results into a national database, and when Missoula detectives later added DNA extracted from the Deer Creek victim's femur, they got a match. We don't know a whole lot

about why Marcy ran away. We don't know where she was for most of the year, but one night in late August, a big rig pulled up to a stop in the parking lot of Tabor's truck stop in East Missoula, and the driver yelled at Marcy to get out. I guess she'd been hitchhiking, and the driver asked her for something she wasn't willing to give. The truck growled away, and Marcy was left alone in a town she didn't know, pulling a threadbare trench coat tied around her as a shield against the chill of a rocky mountain summer. East Missoula was a small, hard-scrabbled town of mostly trailer home squeezed between the highway and the interstate. The truck stop restaurant behind her was closed. Across the street was the Reno Inn, but that seemed a little too neat and clean for a teenage

runaway who had maybe a couple of dollars to her name. Just on the street was the cabin, a scruffy, dimly lit western joint that seemed a little more promising. There was a bouncer at the door, a short, muscular young guy with glasses and red hair, wearing a Star Wars t-shirt that he'd cut the sleeves off of. His name was Wayne Nance, and he gave Marcy a big smile as she got close. He was sympathetic when Marcy told him a trucker had just kicked her out, not only let her into the bar, but came in with her and bought her a beer. Marcy had been traveling under the name Robin, and that was the name she gave Wayne as he sat down beside her at the bar and got to know her. It was clear that Marcy had nowhere to stay, so Wayne said she could stay at his place. Marcy was pretty cute, so on the surface there was nothing unusual about any of that,

just a skeezy guy trying to take advantage of a vulnerable young woman. It was her vulnerability that made her attractive to Wayne, but not because it might make it easier to get her into bed. She was alone, a stranger in town. Nobody would kick up a fuss if she went missing. By this point, Wayne Nance was already a murderer with multiple victims in his past. One person who took note of Wayne and Marcy leaving together was the bartender at the cabin, Julie Slocum. She'd been a good friend of Wayne's for years and had a crush on him, but he'd shown zero romantic interest in her.

He was always complaining that he ended up with fat broads, and as Julie had a kind of zafting figure, she figured that, That was why he wasn't into her. But this new girl, Marcy, was curvy too, and Wayne was asking her home after just meeting her. Wayne never asked girls over to his place. It drove Julie kind of nuts. She liked Wayne because he was sweet and thoughtful. He'd scrape ice from the wind shields of everyone at work.

He'd always remember her birthday and give her a card and a present, same on Valentine's Day. Sometimes he'd show up with flowers for her for no reason at all. This was how Wayne was with the women in his life, solicitous and helpful, always there to lend a hand if they needed one. Wayne's house was actually his dad's house. George Nance was a long-haul trucker and currently out of town. If he hadn't been, Wayne might not have brought Marcy home because his dad kept him on a pretty tight leash, which Wayne apparently enjoyed. He had a weird hero worship attitude toward his dad, who was an old school. cool blue-collar tough guy who'd done time for armed robbery. If George told Wayne to jump,

Wayne would ask how high. If he was having fun at a party and heard his dad was back in town, he'd run straight home to see him. Wayne's mom, Charlene, had been a waitress who was maybe too fond of a bottle of bourbon and could go from zero to yelling in half a second. If George was out of town and Wayne was out later than he was supposed to be, Charlene would lie and wait for him to come sneaking back in and start whacking him on the head with a baseball bat. Something that continued well into Wayne's 20s. Holy shit. I used to be scared to Miss Curfew because my mom might give me a look. And then my dad might give me the same look and it was like the worst thing in the world.

Jeez and crackers. Wayne's bedroom was ridiculous. The window was blacked out with a sheet of dark plastic. He'd had a brief stint in the Navy that we'll touch on later, which if nothing else had taught him to his bed without a single wrinkle on it. Everything else, as weird as it was, was carefully ordered. He'd told Julie one time, Everything has a place and a place for everything.

Knives and daggers were carefully lined up on a desktop and in the drawers. Some bought, some made by Wayne himself. Swords and maces hung from the walls, along with the club Wayne had made and hammered nails into. Wayne liked pointy things, and they didn't have to be man-made. He also had a collection of birds' feet and claws of all kinds. Can we add, like, loose, sharp object collection to our list of glaring red flags? I think it's probably fine to collect knives and swords.

Like, you know, the master sword is on my list of, like, you know, my wish list. But just leaving them out and the fresh air is probably, like, one of those McDonald triad thingies. And the club with the nails in it's like, Damn, dude. And then bird feet and claws on top of that. So just like you walk in and just every surface is covered in something that could kill you. It's just okay, man. We get it. You're badass. A telescope he'd stolen from the Navy sat beside a set of weights and stacks of Playboy and Penthouse magazines. On the walls were posters of Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian and Stallone as Rambo. Not that unusual for a teenage boy in 1984.

for, but Wayne was 29 years old. On strings across the ceiling hung a metallic constellation of pull tabs from beer and soda cans. One wall was almost entirely taken up by shelves of cassette tapes. His bookshelves apparently held every book he'd ever read, going all the way back to elementary school, but they were dominated by books on Satanism and the occult, as well as Viking history and mythology. Nerd! In his drawers, along with his knives, he kept a collection of fake police badges.

Is it me or is this guy basically Mack from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Like right down to the cut-off sleeves. I bet he's given ocular pat-downs to everybody who comes into the bar. It's just so funny. Although I guess Mac was more Catholic than Satanus, but whatever. He also collected maps he'd drawn himself, some of Missoula and nearby. trailer parks. He also drew detailed layouts of his friend's homes, and not only his friends. Wayne's day job was in the warehouse of Conlon's furniture store, where he also helped with

deliveries. Most houses he delivered to, he'd pay attention when he was inside and make maps of them later on. I'd say that's a red flag. Yeah. Oh boy. Other than a few exceptions, the Navy stuff, the cassette tapes, the modern posters, Wayne's room was more or less the same as it was. It was a was when he was in high school, which included the green rubber sheets on the bed. His dad would later claim these were for a skin condition Wayne suffered from. Now, I am obviously not a dermatologist, but I'm skeptical. I think there's a pretty good chance that the skin condition was one called I wet the bed a lot. When George Nance came home on that summer evening and found that Wayne had moved a girl in, Marcy, he apparently took it in stride. Like, hey, dad, a girl

lives here now. She slept in Wayne's room and did the housework, and George bought her some new clothes in exchange. The fact that she was only 16 years old doesn't seem to have caused him any concern at all. At the warehouse, Wayne bragged about how insatiable Marcy was and how much sex he was having, which none of the guys there took seriously. Wayne was no one's idea of a ladies' man, awkward and shy around women he found attractive. He was only really comfortable around women who were older than he was, like most of the ladies who worked in sales and admin at Conlands, or much younger like Marcy. He showed the warehouse guy's pictures he and Marcy had taken in a photo booth together, but he never brought her over to meet them. Wayne didn't take Marcy out or introduce her to anybody,

partly because he didn't want to get spotted by his actual girlfriend, Joni Del Comte. Joni was 18, and it just graduated from high school, and Wayne was kind of a storybook boyfriend. Every time he came over, he brought flowers. A talented artist, he painted pictures just for her. They had picnics beside clear mountain streams in the woods. And one night in August, alone in Joni's house while her mom was out, they had sex for the first and only time. Despite all his bragging in the warehouse,

Wayne was not a love machine. The sex was over almost immediately, and right afterward, Wayne got up and started getting dressed, obviously embarrassed and not looking Joni in the eye. He just said, good night and walked out. The war is over and both sides lost. Kingdoms were reduced to cinders and armies scattered like bones in the dust. Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight. But in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins. This is old school adventuring at its most cruel.

Your torch ticks down in real time. And when that flame dies, something else rises to finish the job. This is a brutal rules-light nightmare with a story that emerges organically based on the decisions that the characters make. This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s. And man, it is so good to be back. Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the Shadow Dark every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on YouTube.com slash the Glass Cannon with the podcast version.

dropping the next day. See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dark. From the parents behind law and order comes a mystery the whole family can enjoy. Patrick Pickle Bottom Everyday Mysteries. Step into the whimsical world of Patrick Picklebottom, a precocious 11-year-old,

with a love for reading and an uncanny ability to solve mysteries. Inspired by the beloved children's book of the same name, this podcast vividly brings Patrick's tales of deduction and everyday adventures to life as he unravels baffling enigmas and solves clever cases. Patrick Picklebottom Everyday Mysteries is perfect for kids and is just as entertaining for grownups who love a good mystery. The whole family can listen now wherever you get your podcasts. A couple weeks later, in early September and with Marcy now ensconced in his adolescent bedroom,

Wayne sat with Joni in the backyard of her mom's house. She knew a breakup was coming. Wayne fake blubbered his way through the words, I'm getting too serious about you. I don't like how I feel when you aren't with me. I'm not the type to have a family, and I don't like being so serious about somebody. We have to break up. It's the old, it's not you, it's me.

I don't deserve you. All of that BS. Joni had decided to play it cool and was like, uh-huh, okay. Which made Wayne mad, although he hit it at the time. He just bitched later on about how Joni seemed completely unaffected.

I threw her away as if she was a used tissue and she wasn't even upset about it. What the hell? She probably got to look at those rubber sheets, Wayne, honey. I mean, if I had to guess. Also, like, you never beg for him back once they broke up with you. Come on. Like, she has some dignity, Wayne. Like, if Wayne was replacing Joni with Marcy, any kind of domestic bliss didn't last long.

He and Marcy went to Julie Slocum's birthday party on the night of September 28th. That was the last time anyone except Wayne saw her alive. A few days later, Wayne was in a sullen mood at the furniture warehouse. He was always moody, and most of the guys steered clear when he was extra gloomy, but one of them poked him. Hey, what's the matter? Didn't you get any last night? Wayne didn't even look up. She's gone, he said.

He said Marcy had run on. off with a trucker, but later that same day, he changed the story, saying he'd taken her to the bus station and put her on a bus out of town. He told the same story to Julie when she asked where Marcy was. What had actually happened was that Wayne had driven her out to the woods, maybe for one of his romantic picnics, then made her strip naked at gunpoint beside the shallow grave he'd already dug. Then he shot her three times, once in the back of the head and twice in the temple, and buried her. When they pre-dig the grave, that is a deep. that every time it comes up in a case, it just gives me just full body.

It's so creepy. Just the thought of him out there in the woods alone, digging. Yeah. And her knowing nothing about it back home, just, oh my God. And I can't imagine her seeing the grave. Oh, my God. Yeah. It's just nausea.

Nightmare. Yeah. It's not necessarily helpful to try and figure out motive when you're talking about killers like Wayne Nance. He killed because he liked it, because it satisfied some deep down urge. He'd probably been planning to murder Marcy ever since he first laid eyes on her the day she approached the door of the cabin. And this wasn't his first time. Marcy was at least the third woman he'd killed, and it's very likely that the count is higher than that. In the new year, Julie Slocum was at home with her new boyfriend when a crime stopper's report from the sheriff's department came on the TV about the body recently found in the woods.

a young white woman whose hair had been permed and died Auburn. Julie felt her heart go cold. God, that's that girl Robin, she said. But what her unconscious mind really sprang toward was, it's Wayne. He did this. But as we tend to do, she immediately started convincing herself that that was crazy. Wayne was one of her best friends, had been for years. Of course he wasn't the killer.

Julie went ahead and called crime stoppers just to try and find out, if the body the police found really did match Marcy, the girl Julie had known as Robin. As will become the common theme in the story, the detective she spoke to completely biffed the conversation. The police were limiting the information they shared about the crime, which is understandable, but the cop Julie spoke to somehow managed to convince her that the body they dug up in Deer Creek was nothing at all like Marcy. Oh, my Lord. I know. After the call, Julie was relieved and felt bad for ever thinking Wayne could be involved in the crime.

No, ma'am. The person that matches the description of the body is not the body. Like, what do you mean? This was a missed opportunity big time because plenty of the cops in Missoula remembered the name Wayne Nance from when he'd been the suspect in horrific murder 11 years previously. Wayne had been 18 years old and still in high school, a weird, creepy kid with ghost pale skin and a sharp,

shock of bright red hair. He was smart, but the only class he excelled at was art, a talent he mainly used to draw violent scenes with swords and monsters. And that's not unusual subject matter for boys, but Wayne had been drawing the same stuff since before he was a teenager, getting more and more technically skilled, but not more curious. He wasn't a troublemaker at school, but he liked making people uncomfortable. He'd twisted a piece of wire into a pentagram, heated it up, and branded himself on the arm. Then he proudly walked around showing it off to people at school. Even after, it got all infected and pussy.

Ugh, freaking dork. He wore a plastic shrunken head around his neck on a raw-hide string and always had a big hunting knife hidden somewhere. He claimed to be a Satanist, but like almost everybody who makes that claim, this was mainly just edge lord bullshit to shock people. Ooh, look at me, I'm scary. I worship the devil.

He probably went out into the woods at night and said some weird shit to get the thrill of being a very naughty boy and all, but he soon ditched the devil in favor of a new obsession with Norse mythology and history. This was a better fit with his fascination with swords and knives and Conan the Barbarian and all that stuff. Shamey went ahead and branded himself over what turned out to just be a passing whim, but oh well, dumbass. As we'll find out, that was the least of his worries. The teenagers who spent more time with Wayne saw enough to be scared of him. He and his classmate Bill Van Canagan both got after-school jobs at Taco John's restaurant, across the street from their high school. One of Wayne's few friends at school was a loser named Dale Nicholson,

who was already married after getting his girlfriend pregnant, and who always had a 22 pistol and a pint flask of gin hidden in his pockets. These are high school kids. Lord, have mercy. One night, Nicholson showed up to the restaurant, drunk, pulled Bill out of there and started shooting up the place, firing at the chicken brooster, the lights outside, and the plate glass window. Bill started to think Nicholson could kill someone, and Wayne was getting even more intense and creepy.

I had this dream, Wayne told Bill one day. I was visited by a spiritual entity. It was a queen. She was from the dark side, and she told me, gave me specific instruction on how to become, how I could become a warlock. This was a gift from the queen. I obtained it on instruction from the queen, and he pulled out a cheap pentagram medallion he was wearing around his neck.

This is stupid, Wayne, Bill said. I'm team Bill. No, Wayne insisted. I have been ordained a third-degree witch. My goal is to become a warlock. I'm moving up in the ranks. I'm in a coven. I mean, third-degree.

He skipped over first and second-degree. They saw the talent in him. Obviously. I'm sure it won't surprise anyone to hear that Wayne was not in a coven. That would require people being willing to spend time with him. He was just an obsessive nerd who enjoyed giving people the Wiggins. In the fall of their senior year, he bragged to Bill about how he and Dale Nicholson had given the homecoming floats

a Viking funeral by setting him on fire, which Bill thought was bullshit until he read in the paper that the floats had in fact been set on fire. The would-be arsonists were incompetent, though, so hardly any damage was done. But I'm sure some of you who are familiar with serial killers have noticed that Wayne was possibly a bedwetting fire starter. These are two corners of the famous McDonald triad, which some experts consider to be predictive of future violent behavior. Now, McDonald is controversial now, but the third pillar of the triad, cruelty to animals, is still widely considered a predictor of violent tendencies. Ever since elementary school, Wayne's classmates had heard him brag about abusing and killing animals,

although there wasn't any evidence of his actually doing it. Psychologically, it's bad enough that a kid that young would think that was something to flex about. Given the nature of Wayne's crimes, I think there probably was animal abuse in his past, although the only actual reports of it came out after he was already notorious and have to be taken with a grain of salt. Like, a deputy said he'd once seen a... a teenage Wayne naked under a bridge, masturbating over a bloody altar surrounded by the bodies of animals he'd slaughtered. And, you know, I mean, I'm not trying to be a skeptic or anything,

but I just don't know if that passes the smell test for me. Not because Wayne wasn't enough of a dork to do something like that. He absolutely was, but the deputy apparently saw this, thought, oh, there's something you don't see every day and just went about his business. Now, I've never lived in Montana, so I might be honest. off base here, but I don't get the impression that it's a state with a real relaxed attitude toward naked teenagers jerking off in public over satanic altars. So if it had happened, I'd think the cop would have brought him in. And, you know, he didn't. So nice try,

officer. Good story for the pub, but shut the hell up. People always do this after serial killers get arrested. Everybody comes out of the woodwork like, oh, I knew him and he was blah, blah, blah, blah. No, shut up. Yeah. Yeah, I've been to Montana a couple of times, and that's something that would make the front-page news for weeks. Well, yeah, there's like seven people in the whole state. You know what I mean? Like, somebody would have noticed. There's seven people, and three of them know or are related to Jeffrey Starr.

So, like, yeah, we know that they wouldn't be talking about it. Because God knows they need to stop talking about Jeffrey Starr. And a stupid cattle farm. And also, like, Wayne Nance, we don't know. was 100% the type of person that he would, he is enough of a dork to do this, but he would also not do this, that type of thing without a witness, I don't think. Oh, yeah. He'd want somebody to see him do it for sure. Yeah. No, no, no animal slaughter and subsequent masturbation without. Now, Jeffrey Starr, I could see absolutely. I could see, you. He probably does that shit on the

regular. It's probably just a Tuesday for Jeffrey. No, allegedly. Obviously. Don't sue us It's a joke, you freaking alien weirdo. Please don't sue us. On top of his usual black magic nonsense, Wayne started telling people that he was determined to kill someone before his 19th birthday.

Wayne's actual birthday was October 18th, but he'd long ago decided to tell people it was on Halloween instead. Oh, my God, he's such a douche-back. It sucks at people like this. Like, they're such dwebes, and yet they're so scary at the same time. It's just those two things don't go together. It's so strange. And they're not scary because of these things.

That's what kills me. No, hell, no. This is the douchebag part. Yeah. Yeah. And, like, I'm sorry, little kids are out walking around dressed like Dora the Explorer, getting snickers. I know. It's hardly a night of terror and the super.

He probably called it Samhain or All Hallows in Eve or something like that. Oh, my God. He 100% did. He was like, he was really upset that kids were out dressed like Frankenstein. He was really mad. That like there were little Ironman and Batman running out outside. But, you know, anything that upset him is I'm a big fan of. That's, that's all I have to say. But I guess in his head, his birthday that gave some semi-occulty reasoning to his promise to murder someone before then. But we should be clear about what was going on here. Wayne wanted to kill someone because he was a psychopath who had increasingly detailed violent sexual fantasies. Whatever occult weirdness he happened to be into at any given time didn't affect that.

And his actual crimes didn't include any ritualistic elements, only his own signatures. Wayne started telling people he was going to kill someone months before he actually did. An extremely generous interpretation might be that he knew his fantasies were getting out of hand and this was as close as he could get to asking for help. But I don't think that was what was going on. I think Wayne ran his mouth because he didn't consider other people to be fully real and capable of action. And no one took him seriously because Wayne had been saying weird, dark things since he was just a little kid. but he was deadly serious about this.

Wayne was friends with a kid named Kenny Pounds, who had already left school to join the army. Kenny's dad, Harvey, was a shoe salesman and a fundamentalist preacher with his own radio show, and his mom, Donna, worked part-time at a Christian bookstore. In addition to Kenny, they had two daughters, Kathy, who was 12, and Karen, who was 20, and still stayed at home.

Wayne had been a frequent visitor at their house four years. Because he was largely incapable of having an unexpress thought, most people who knew him knew that he absolutely hated Karen Pounds. It's not clear why. Karen was pretty and maybe Wayne had made a move on her and been shot down. Or maybe he just hated her because she was beautiful and bright and his own life was a grim swamp full of slugs Niels. Edge Lord frogs. Yeah. That's what he is an edge lord frog. he is an edge lord frog that actually describes him to a T like if you look at a picture of him

think edge lord frog and it would it'll click yeah this spring denham gets a softer lighter update introducing old navy's drapey denim wide leg a new fit that moves with you it's everything you want denim to feel like for summer easy breathable and effortlessly cool with a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. Hey, I'm Ashley, host of crime salad. And every week, my husband Ricky joins me as my partner in crime. We know the true crime space is crowded. So we skip the loud, bubbly small talk and get straight to the facts of the most gripping cases. If you want to see what we're all about, check out our

recent two-parter deep dive. She saved him. Can You Save Her? Covering the baffling Rebecca Zahow case. If you want a true crime podcast that feels authentic and respects the details, come check us out. Search Crime Salad wherever you get your podcast. On March 30th, Donna Pounce had been writing along with a friend as the friend made some Avon deliveries and got dropped off at home around 1.30 p.m. Kathy was at school and Harvey and Karen were both still at work. As Donna walked into the master bedroom, Wayne Nance, a boy she'd known for years, stepped forward and pointed a gun at her. He was wearing rubber gloves. The gun was Harvey's, a 22-caliber imitation luger that he kept in a hidden drawer in a bedroom cabinet. Kenny Pounds had shown Wayne the

hidden drawer long ago, and the two boys had taken the gun into the woods to shoot it. Wayne fired the luger once into the corner of the room to make sure she knew he wasn't playing around, then made her get on the bed and take off her pants. He brought a black gym bag with him and took out some white clothes line, which he used to tie Donna's wrists and ankles onto the bedposts. He took out a knife and cut off Donna's underwear, then tossed her maxi pad onto the floor and raped her. Afterwards, he untied her, then tied her wrists together and forced her down to the unfinished basement. There, he made Donna get down on her knees, tied her ankles together. and gagged her with duct tape.

From behind, like a coward he was, he shot her five times in the back of the head. Donna's body fell forward. Wayne shoved the gun between her legs, then left, turning off the basement light as he did. Harvey Pounds found his wife's body when he got home from work at around 6 p.m.

and immediately called the police. As hard as it is to believe, the horrifying scene he discovered could have been worse. In both Kathy and Karen's bedrooms, Wayne had tied lengths of clothesline to the bedposts so he could restrain them more quickly, but while he waited for them to come home, he'd either gotten cold feet or just bored and left. He'd discarded the rubber gloves as he walked home, one of which was found. This case should have been solved. A neighbor said she'd seen Wayne Nance in the Pound's backyard that day. Another neighbor saw someone who matched Wayne's description walking around the neighbor.

with a black gym bag. When police searched Wayne's bedroom days later, they found a pair of underpants with a large stain on the front, blood from Donna Pounds's period. The underwear had clearly been washed, and Wayne's mom Charlene volunteered that she'd been the one who washed them. Apparently, she'd had no questions about her son's wife fronts showing up in the laundry basket covered in blood. In a black gym bag in Wayne's room, the cops found 22-caliber bullets and shell casings.

They'd also found a single pubic hair on top of the bloodstain on the pound sheets, but that wouldn't be any help to them. Instead of paying to send it to a trained forensic pathologists in Great Falls, the county attorney had let a local guy handle the examination and cataloging of the hair, and he'd just lost it. And the day after the murder, when Bill Van Canagan got to school, Wayne was sitting on a concrete block overlooking the parking lot, pretending to be in a trance like he sometimes did.

As Bill walked past, Wayne said, It's been done, all dramatic like that. What are you talking about, Bill said. It has been done, Wayne said again, and showed Bill the pentagram on his arm, weeping with pus. Then he started cackling like a maniac, and Bill just hurried on to class. That creepy little story, by the way,

comes from our main source for this episode, the book To Kill and Kill Again by John Coston, who interviewed Bill. So all this evidence let the police zero in on their number one suspect. Donna's husband, Harvey. Oh. Yeah, I guess we should point out, like, DNA evidence wasn't a thing. Like, we know that was Donna's blood.

We know now, but they, you know, couldn't prove that back then. To be a little more fair to the Missoula investigators than they probably deserve, Harvey Pounds looked a lot like other killers we've covered. He was having either an affair or something close to it with one of his parishioners, and his hard-line religious beliefs made divorcing Donna pretty much impossible. He'd been on a 45-minute lunch break when Donna was killed, plenty of time in a small city like Missoula to drive home and killer. After the murder, Harvey started spreading rumors that there had been satanic elements to the murder,

and that the killer had used the clothes line to draw a peace sign on the floor, which I guess to him was just as bad as Satanism. And Harvey Pounds didn't seem shaken up at all by his wife's death, just went on with life and was matter-of-fact about the whole thing. Now, this is the kind of thing we're talking about when we say people react to death in different ways. Harvey Pounds was innocent, but you wouldn't know it. The sheriff kept pestering the county attorney for a warrant to bring Harvey in because he was sure he could get a confession out of him.

And maybe he was right, because getting a confession is a very different thing than proving guilt. They certainly weren't going to get one from Wayne, who sat through his police interviews with dead-eyed calm. Harvey and Wayne were both given polygraphs. Harvey's was inconclusive. Wayne's showed he was telling the truth. Yeah, there's a reason those things aren't admissible in court. Wayne's bloodstained underpants were sent to the FBI for analysis, but Charlene had done a thorough job washing them and the technicians couldn't get a blood type from the stains. The lone rubber glove found near the crime scene didn't provide any fingerprints and the pubic hair from the scene had vanished. No one was charged with Donna Pounds's murder and right after he graduated high school,

Wayne joined the Navy and left town, having gotten away with murder. He left behind a city that was working itself into a panic about the devil. Dona Pound's death came between two other violent, unsolved murders. Earlier in 1984, in February, a five-year-old girl named Chavonne McGuinness had been abducted, sexually assaulted, stabbed, and left to die in the cold beside a country road. The year after Donna's death, a special education teacher, Verna Cavali, was found naked and dead in her apartment bedroom. She'd been sexually assaulted and stabbed in the chest with a butcher's knife, which was still buried hilt deep in her body when she was found. No arrests were made in all three murders, and with the help of Harvey Pounds, rumor spread that all three victims had been killed by a

hidden satanic cult operating in the area. Satanic panic wouldn't take off nationally until the 1980s, but there had always been local pockets like this. Not helped at all by the front page story in the Missouian newspaper about the rumors, which referenced other cult murders around the country, but had a typo that dropped the R from country, so it read around the county instead. There was no murderous satanic cult. The three murders were unconnected. In 2020, genetic genealogy identified Chavon's killer as Richard William Davis, a man who was never suspected or convicted of any violent crime and who had been passing through Montana when he killed her. He'd later become a born-again

Christian and lived with his wife in rural Arkansas where, terrifyingly, he was a volunteer for Big Brothers, Big Sisters of America. Oh my God. He died. He died. in 2012, eight years before his crimes came to light. And Verna Cavalli's murder was solved in 2006 when cold case detectives obtained a DNA sample from Neil Morris, a funeral director and former boyfriend of Verna. The day after he provided the sample, Morris went out into the parking lot of Garden City funeral home in Missoula, put a sawed-off shotgun in his mouth, and killed himself.

Jesus. And Donna Pounds, of course, had been killed by Wayne Nance. She was almost certainly the first person he had killed, but she absolutely was not the last. We'll cover Wayne's later crimes as well as his own bad end in next week's episode. So we're going to leave it there for Part 1, Campers. But before we go, don't forget about our two amazing live shows coming up. First, we've got Summer Camp, September 10th through the 13th, an amazing four-day festival in Equinoct, Pennsylvania, hosted by Dan and Lindsay Cummins of Time Suck and Scared to Death.

We'll be performing live alongside them and the podcast, Astonishing Legends, in addition to an amazing roster of awesome stand-up comedians and local bands. Go to badmagicproductions.com for more info and to buy tickets. Then we've got our true crime cruise, Crime Wave 2.0, February 8 through the 12th, 2007. If you want to come on vacation with us and some of the biggest true crime and paranormal podcasts in the world, like Case File, True Crime Garage and Scared to Dead, here's what you got to do. Tickets are on sale now, but they are 90% sold out at this point. So if you want to go, make sure you go over to crimewave at sea.com slash campfire and book your cabin ASAP. You'll get $100 off plus a private meet and greet with us. The great thing is you can pay all at once or set up a payment plan and pay it off over time. So get on it right now. That's crime wave at C

slash campfire. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know we'll have part two for you next week. You guys are getting two-parters in a row. You're welcome. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely Patreon supporters. Thank you so much to Sarah, Caroline, Dustin, Anna, V, Perry, and Ross. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode, ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more, plus tons of extra content, patrons-only episodes, and hilarious post-show discussions. And once you join the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker, a rad enamel pin, or fridge magnet while supplies last, virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire. Goodbye, Kyle. Did the sound of those words call to you like Pavlov's dog? Then you might enjoy our podcast, Turtle Time. Every week you can join me, Riley Hamilton, and my co-host, Amy Scarletta, as we cover the most pressing Bravo news and dig into the new episodes to answer important questions like, who the hell is Adrian Maloof in this world?

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