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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. Episode 150. I am your Norwegian host, Samas Roseland Weyborg Thun. Tonight, I have a very special message to all my dear listeners.
This episode, which is quite the milestone at 150, also marks the first episode that I record and publish as a newly minted father. My wonderful wife Thea gave birth to our beautiful baby boy Tiedemann Friday, the 25th of June.
Mother and child are doing very well, and my wife and I are so happy to experience the joy of parenthood. As you might understand, having a newborn at home takes up quite a bit of time, so this episode will be slightly shorter than usual. I hope my dear listeners can forgive this, considering the situation.
We travel, as we did earlier, back in time in this episode, which is part two in the Missoula Mauler series. The era is the golden age of serial murder, the 1970s and 80s. Last time, we ended up in Doug and Chris's bedroom after Doug had courageously managed to defend against and ultimately kill Wayne Nance.
In order to see what transpired before this dramatic ultimate fate of the Missoula mauler, I'm going to show you who Wayne Nams was and his life and crimes in the 1970s and 80s. Enjoy.
As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are...
Jennifer, Jesus H., Juliet, Kathy, Kevin, Kylie, Lisa, Lisbeth, Marilyn, Meow, Operation BP, Russell, Sabina, Samira, Skortnia, Shauna, Tony, Trent, Val, and Va. You are the backbone of the Serial Killer podcast, and without you, there would be no show.
You have my deepest gratitude. Thank you. I am forever grateful for my elite TSK Producers Club, and I want to show you that your patronage is not given in vain.
As mentioned in the last episode, going forward, all TSK episodes will be available 100% ad-free to my TSK Producers Club on patreon.com slash theserialkillerpodcast. No generic ads, no ad reads, no jingles. I promise.
And of course, if you wish to donate $15 a month, that's only $7.50 per episode, you are more than welcome to join the ranks of the TSK Producers Club too. So don't miss out and join now.
Imagine, if you will, dear listener, the Rocky Mountains in August of 1984. It is late at night, and although the air is mild, the harsh glare from the yellow lights flooding the truck stops' huge and almost empty parking lot causes a general sense of unease. Watch as a young and attractive girl slips out of the cabin of a massive truck.
As soon as her feet touch the asphalt, the truck revs its motor and drives off. The girl looks around with a tired expression on her face and hugs herself as she stands at the edge of the parking lot. Above the girl, the sign of the truck stop reads, TABORS. At the other end of the parking lot is the restaurant. It too is almost empty and looks bleak and uninviting.
The girl is completely broke. She can't even afford a bear, let alone a meal. However, across the road sits a far more inviting prospect for the girl. A cowboy roadside bar. The name of the place is The Cabin, and the girl, whose name is Robin, hurries over to it. The cabin was located in East Missoula, and was known locally as being a place you went if you wanted to get into trouble.
Women trouble, drinking trouble, or fighting trouble. At the time, the cabin employed a handsome and muscular bouncer, who Robin immediately started to flirt with. She explained to the bouncer that she had been ruthlessly kicked off a trunk after a stupid argument with the driver, and that she did not have any money. She had on a trench coat, but she had opened it up before approaching the bar.
Underneath, her curvy body was easy to make out under skimpy clothing. The bouncer especially noticed her very large breasts. Robin had no trouble charming the bouncer and he personally escorted her inside, bought her a beer and started talking to her in order to learn more about her.
Soon, some would probably say very soon, the topic of conversation turned to where the girl would be spending the night. As the bouncer had deduced, she had no place to sleep, so he suggested she could crash at his place. It would be his treat, and he lived no more than a couple of blocks away from the bar. Robin jumped at the opportunity, and soon the pair left.
The name of the bouncer was Wayne Nance. Nance's home was quite handsome. It was a one-story ranch-style house on 715 Minnesota Avenue. He shared the house with his father. This night, his father, George, was out trucking, so Nance had the place to himself.
Nance was very devoted to his father, to the point that his co-workers thought it weird and somewhat creepy. He had been just as devoted to his mother as well, Charlene, up until she died in 1980. Even though Nance was 29 years old and had served in the Navy, if his parents ever called and told him to do something, he obeyed.
Nance's day job was as a worker at Conlin's Furniture, a very large warehouse store in Missoula. The day after Nance had brought Robin home with him, he had a day off. A bar girl who was secretly in love with Nance was extremely jealous and wanted to find out all she could about who this random girl was.
She knew Nance well and used the knowledge of him having a day off to pay Nance an afternoon visit. He invited her in, and the bar girl, Julie, feigned overt politeness and pleasantries with Robin as she sat down in one of Nance's easy chairs. The conversation was stilted and awkward. When Nance left the room, Julie immediately started interrogating Robin.
Asking her where she was from, was she looking for a man to marry, did she want kids, and so on. Robin was so charming that Julie was rather won over by her, and the rest of her visit was far more pleasant. For the first couple of weeks after Robin's arrival, Julie stopped by regularly. By then she could see that Nancy's father, George, had welcomed the girl as well.
Everything seemed perfectly proper and Julie, who actually loved Wayne Nance and wanted him to be happy, accepted Robin. What did seem odd to her was that Nance eventually had started to brag, in graphic detail, about his sex life with Robin while at work. Nance told Julie that Robin was a nymphomaniac who wore him out.
He had gotten blisters on his penis from all the intercourse, and he was getting tired of it. He told a completely different story to his male co-workers at Conlins. To them, he bragged about how great his sex life with Robin was. Even though Nance bragged about his sex life with Robin, he did not involve her in his public life.
Almost no one at Conlon's or the cabin had met Robin, and those who had, except Julie, had only met her briefly in passing. Wayne had good reason to keep Robin hidden away, for most of the summer he had been dating another, much younger girl. Her name was Joni Delcomte. She was a curvy brunette, the daughter of Jan Dell, a country and western singer of some local renown.
and Joanie didn't know anything about Robin. Joanie was 18 years old, fresh out of Missoula's new Big Sky High School, when she started dating the 29-year-old Wayne Nance. To her, he seemed like the nicest guy she had ever met. He was the kind of man she dreamed about marrying someday. She first saw him at a rodeo, when Nance and his buddy came over to sit with Joanie and her girlfriends.
Nance was charming, and he seemed sweet. When he asked her to go out, she eagerly accepted. They went to the movies and took long picnics together. For the majority of their dating time that summer, they hung out at bars and nightclubs, including the cabin. There, they listened to Joanie's mother perform.
What made her believe that Nance was the best boyfriend a girl could ever hope for was his incredibly attentive manner. Every time he came over to her house, he brought flowers. He always arrived when he said he was going to come. He painted pictures for her. He carved her name in a small rock.
He was quiet and considerate, and even though Nance was more than ten years her senior, to Joanie they were just two young people in love. Nance took her up a dirt road off Deer Creek, where they would wade barefoot in the clear mountain water. They frolicked on the warm grassy steam bank, picnicking and making out, drinking Miller Lite.
Joanie had no way of knowing that Robin was back at the house, doing housework for Wayne and his father, waiting for Nance to return. One night, when they were alone in Joanie's house, the making out session got more serious. It was the first time they had ever made love. But to Joanie, it seemed it was over just as it had begun.
Wayne acted strangely. Just as soon as Wayne ejaculated inside her, he was getting up and getting dressed. He wouldn't look her in the eye. He seemed embarrassed.
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as a family man with three kids i know first-hand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care but it's good to have some things that are non negotiable for some that could be a night out with the boys chugging beers and having a laugh for others it might be an eating night
For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.
If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Everyone needs someone to talk to, even psychopaths, even your humble host. Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp.
Visit BetterHelp.com slash SerialKiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash SerialKiller. Joanie had hopes of marrying Nance, but her hopes was futile. He would never invite her over to his house, and two weeks after their first lovemaking session, he broke up with her. A short time after his breakup with Joanie,
Robin was seen alive for the last time by anyone. The date was the 28th of September, 1984. Nance had brought Robin to a party at his co-worker Julie's place. After the party, everyone around Nance noticed him being in a perpetual dour mood. When one of his conlands co-workers asked about Robin...
All Nance would say was that she was gone. When Julie pressed him about Joanie's whereabouts, Nance said that he had, quote-unquote, put her on a bus. He refused to elaborate on the matter. Julie didn't find it hard to believe that Robin had left town on a bus, but she was troubled by the fact that Nance seemed to be dodging her.
Julie's romantic ideas about Nance aside, she still thought of Nance as one of her best friends. After all, she was one of the privileged few who had ever been allowed into Nance's room. She had been impressed by that, as much as she was by the navy corners on his bedspread. There wasn't a wrinkle on it. To her, the organized clutter seemed neat.
It was sort of a museum of Nance's life. Mementos of his mother, mementos of his navy days, plus all the handmade knife and dagger paraphernalia that verified to her that Nance really was an accomplished artisan. He collected real bird's feet and claws of all kinds. To the smitten Julie, it was the perfect answer from this man she adored, eccentricities and all.
The only dominant theme reflected in his exhausting array of stuff was an obvious interest in medieval weaponry. Knives were lined up in rows on tabletops and in drawers. Swords hung from the walls along with Nance's own handmade weapons, like the wooden club accented with nails. There were brass knuckles resting next to a hoard of vitamins. It also seemed he never threw anything away.
Felt-tip markers lay next to his toothpaste. There was a plastic bust of a black woman, a U.S. Navy telescope, bodybuilding weights, Playboy and Penthouse magazines. Some opened, many still preserved in their plastic-wrapped seals, were stacked in heaps. The bookshelves seemed to contain every fragment of Nancy's life from childhood on. There was an implied order to Nancy's rules.
julie did not understand it but she was fascinated just the same nuns had arranged small table-top shrines the bookshelves were stuffed with paperbacks on the occult mythology satanism and viking literature and history the only window was covered by a sheet of black plastic for added emphasis
Nance collected an assortment of fake detective badges, and he collected, drew, and kept maps of Missoula and the surrounding towns, as well as handmade maps of local trailer parks, maps of a nearby apartment complex, and diagrammatic layouts that he himself had drawn of the homes of some of his friends. He had clipped a newspaper ad showing a group of women hairdressers at a local beauty parlor.
and taped it to his dresser after drawing circles around some of the faces of women in the picture. There were posters of Conan the Barbarian and sage-like quotations from Leonard Nimoy. Along the walls and across the ceiling, he had strung string after string of soda and beer can pop-tops. Nance's vast collection of cassette tapes nearly filled an entire wall.
Beneath the trim navy-cornered bedspread, Nance slept on a green rubber sheet. Julie did not know about that oddity, and she did not know that Nance occasionally looped the bedposts with short rope ties. If Nance had told Julie about this detail, she might have had a different reaction than simple fascination. But he did not.
All that mattered to Julie was that Wayne Nance was a friend who took better care of her emotional well-being than any boyfriend ever had, and it saddened her that he avoided her for weeks after she grilled him about Robin's disappearance. Maybe, she thought, Robin did blow out of town on the same restless inspiration that had brought her to Missoula in the first place. But that was not the case.
The truth was that Robin had not left at all. Robin was discovered on a very cold, windless, overcast Christmas Eve afternoon in 1984. The frozen Clark Fork River appeared as a giant white serpent, ice-packed, its undulations still to the eye, but its waters flowing endlessly westward beneath the ice-pack.
draining the high elevation ridges of the Sapphire Mountains, a north-south range of the Rockies some ten miles southeast of Missoula. The river angles through Bonner and Milltown, through Hellgate Canyon into Missoula and beyond to Idaho, eventually to join the tributary system of the mightier Columbia River.
The man who plugged his way above this vista of winter's majesty on a Monday afternoon was a wildlife photographer. He was stalking photo opportunities, pausing frequently to check light readings, glancing upward to the trees for birds, and keeping a keen reconnaissance behind his steps. He was on the slight rise known as Bonner Dam, and he was quite alone.
Everybody else was downtown in the stores, getting off work early or huddled inside against the Arctic temperature. As he scanned the lower trees of this wooded place, his eye caught something. He couldn't make it out at first, so he walked closer. It was something sticking out of the ground, and it was black.
Approaching, he could see that it did not resemble the typical downed tree limb or dead-snapped pine trunk. When he got right up to it, he recognized it, and then he reeled back in horror. It was a blackened human leg, protruding from the rock-hard ground at a forty-five degree angle. There was the knee, there the ankle, the foot, blood raised to his head.
In a reflex, he anxiously looked back along the vague trail he had just descended. It was still dead quiet. There was no one there. He made rapid mental notes about exactly where the grave could be found as he clambered back down the ridge and across a field to his car, sheltering his camera against the cold inside his coat, very eager to call the sheriff's department.
He would tell them, the protruding leg marked the grave. It was under a large spruce, about one hundred yards from the top of the dam. It was along a little-used dirt lane. For the following two nights, on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day, the grave of the girl named Robin was enshrined in a police tent, eerily pitched in the black wilderness.
The only sound was the periodic blast of hot air from the thermostatically controlled propane heater. It had been installed since the ground was so solidly frozen it was impossible to dig the body out otherwise. Even after two days of heating the frozen ground, the detective still had to use chisels to get the corpse out. It was easy to make a sex determination.
The dead woman's large breasts were still present and intact. The skull, lead inspector Weatherman could see, was fractured from the impact of bullet wounds. As the first bullets had entered, it would have precipitated a rapid expansion of the gases within the cranium, exploding the bone apart. After the site was excavated with the same kind of care given to an archaeological dig,
Detective Weatherman was disappointed that no bullets were recovered. That told him that it was most likely that a young woman had been killed elsewhere and then dumped here. He dreaded to think what it meant, now that he had two unidentified bodies, both young females who had been killed and dumped on the eastern edge of town.
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We come to the end of part two in my expose on Wayne Nance. Next episode, number 151 in number, will continue his saga. So as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. Finally, I wish to thank you, dear listener, for listening.
If you like this podcast, you can support it by donating on patreon.com slash theserialkillarpodcast, by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, facebook.com slash theskpodcast, or by posting on the subreddit theskpodcast. Thank you, good night, and good luck.
