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That's $50 off with code LISTEN at BlueNile.com. Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. Episode 151. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Roseland Weyborg Thun.
Last episode ended revealing the first known depraved action of Wayne Nance, the murder of his girlfriend Robin. The cliffhanger was the mention of more unidentified bodies found dumped at the edge of town. In this episode, we further explore those bodies. Enjoy. As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are...
Andrea, Boo, Brenda, Cassandra, Chris, Christy, Cody, Colleen, Corbin, Fawn, Gilly, James G., James H., James S., Jennifer, Juliet, Caitlin, Kathy, Kevin, Kylie, Libby, Lisa, Lisbeth, Marilyn, Meow, Mickey, Operation BP, Russell, Sabina, Samira, Scott, Skortnia, Shauna, Tony, Trent, and Val.
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 2. So don't miss out and join now. January 1918. A dead girl. At a time unidentified. The corpse of a young girl just 15 years old. She had been strawberry blonde.
Her almost completely decomposed body was found tossed, like garbage, along the Interstate 90 highway. Detective Weatherman nicknamed her Beaver Tail Hill Girl. The coroner had determined that the girl was killed by being stabbed in the chest. Her body was too decomposed to determine whether she had been stabbed in the heart or in the lungs. If she had been stabbed in the heart,
her death would have been almost instantaneous. Being stabbed is one of the absolutely most painful ways to be killed. As the cold metal enters your flesh, adrenaline surges, which in turn causes you to be very alert to the pain. Usually, a knife wound is not immediately fatal, so the pain lasts long. And unless the killer strikes an artery, the blood loss takes time.
Unlike a bullet wound, most people know what being cut by a knife feels like. Most everybody has had experience in cutting one's own finger while whittling a piece of wood, chopping vegetables, or simply being clumsy. It's a familiar feeling, searing and acute. Now imagine that pain multiplied to the extreme.
That is the feeling of being slashed by a knife by someone trying to kill you. The beaver-tail hill girl could have been lucky and have her heart stabbed. If your heart is stabbed, it stops almost immediately, and blood very rapidly ceases to circulate through your body. When people are afraid of dying, most are usually afraid of the pain leading up to the point of death.
And unfortunately, usually, it takes a long time to die, and you are conscious the whole painful time. However, as soon as blood stops being circulated to your brain, you lose consciousness. This is why most firing squads are directed to aim at the heart of the condemned. Yes, technically, unconsciousness can be achieved quicker by shooting someone in the brain,
But there are far more ways for that to go wrong than by simply shooting the heart. If the beaver-tail hill girl was stabbed in the lungs, her death would have been extremely agonizing and painful. First and foremost, she would feel the pain of her skin, muscle and lung being cut open. That pain would remain throughout the ordeal. Then her lung would start to fill up with blood
and she would start to drown in her own blood. This, in turn, would cause her to cough, making the blood come up through her mouth and nose, further choking her and naturally causing distress. It is a cruel and malevolent way to kill. The girl's killer had not just killed the girl. She was found with her dress around her by now, skeletal neck, and no underpants.
She had been raped before being killed. Imagine, if you will, dear listener, the year 1974. See before you the wife of a Christian minister. She is a handsome 49-year-old woman. Everyone knows her as kind and generous. She is a housewife, but she also spends time volunteering at the local St. Patrick's Hospital. Her name was Donna Pound.
and she was married to Harvey Powell. Harvey was 44 years old at the time, a fundamentalist Christian and a DJ at a local radio station where he railed against the evils of the world. He was also a deacon at the Bethel Baptist Church where he and his wife regularly attended service. Donna was a devout Christian lady.
But unlike her husband, who did not miss any opportunity to preach fiery speeches about his faith to anyone at any time, she was not inclined to shove her beliefs down anyone's throat. The Pounds had put their house on the market as part of the plan to relocate south of Missoula in the beautiful Bitterroot Valley.
Harvey's employers, at his day job selling shoes, noticed that his preoccupation with the church was undercutting his performance. In fact, while they didn't say to his face, he really wouldn't be missed if and when he accomplished his move south. On a snowy day in April, Donna had been on a trip.
She had been along for the ride with a friend, an Avon lady, who was making drop-offs to customers. Now they were headed back to West Riverside, a small settlement, not even a town, about six miles east of Missoula.
As a name for a place, West Riverside has an upscale ring to it that suggests there is more to be found in this pancake of land under the mountain than a clot of trailer homes arranged singly or in rows and an odd man out single family house. The car turned left onto Tremper Street. Donna said goodbye to her friend who drove off. Then she headed into the house.
a one-story stucco ranch. The door was open, as it should be, so the real estate agents could come and go, and the house was empty, also as it should be, with her daughter Kathy still in school and her older daughter Karen at work. It was just after 1.30 p.m. The house was quiet, except for the audible hum of the calvinator in the kitchen. It would be her last hour of life.
Someone was waiting for Donna in that empty, silent house. Authorities think that the assailant waited for her in the master bedroom. He was wearing gloves, and in his hand he held her husband's .22-caliber Luger. He would have used a gun to force her into submission on the bed if she recognized her husband's gun, which she probably did.
She would have realized that her attacker had gotten it from a hidden, built-in cabin drawer in their bedroom. He fired at least once into the corner of the bedroom. The slug disappeared somewhere near her sewing machine. It would have been intended to show her that he meant business. The gloves he wore were made of amber-colored latex rubber.
He ordered her onto the bed where he tied her wrists and ankles to the bedposts with short sections of white knotted clothesline that he produced from a black gym bag. After removing her slacks, he then pulled a knife and cut off her undergarments, slitting off her underpants down the middle. He removed her sanitary napkin and dropped it on the bedroom's linoleum tile floor.
Then he vaginally raped her. After he had ejaculated inside her, the assailant pulled out and zipped up. Then he untied her feet and led her, still naked from the waist down, into the unfinished basement, forcing her to kneel on her hands and knees under the stairwell in what was a semi-finished furnace room. There,
After retying the rope restraints on her ankles and taping her mouth shut, he stood behind her. No one knows if he said anything to Donna, but he fired off a shot of the luger into the back of her head. Her body fell forward into a crouch. Then he squeezed off four more shots into her head, obliterating her skull and causing brain matter to splatter onto the floor. Her killer then shoved the gun between her legs
and inserted the barrel into her vagina, where he left it. The house again fell silent. No one in the neighborhood heard any of the gunshots. The killer ascended the stairs and turned off the basement light, leaving Donna Pound's body in the dank, dark cellar. The next person to enter the Pound's home was 12-year-old Kathy. She came home from school and had brought a friend.
Usually, Donna would be home waiting for her children. Oftentimes, she would have prepared a snack, especially if they brought friends. Kathy didn't worry too much about her mother's absence, but took a quick peek into her parents' bedroom to see if she was there. She wasn't. Instead, Kathy saw the messy bed with ropes tied to it. This was a time before the internet.
and TV was far, far more innocent than we are used to in the 21st century. So a child of 12 would not immediately think of bondage games and sex when seeing ropes tied to her parents' bed back then. Instead, she simply thought it weird, and perhaps they were trying to fix the bed or using the ropes to move it or something.
She closed the master bedroom door and went back down to her friend to watch TV and wait for her parents to come home. Harvey Pound came home around 6 p.m. He greeted his daughter, who was huddled on the couch with a friend. He did not think anything was amiss until his daughter said, and I quote, "'I don't know, Dad, why, but there are ropes on all the beds and the rug is messed up in there.'
His daughter didn't seem worried, though. She spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, and her attention was fixed on the TV.
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This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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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.
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Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. As Harvey peered into Kathy's room, he found ropes tied in half-hitched knots to the bedposts of her bed, too. Then he stepped down the hall to look in Karen's room, where it was the same, ropes tied to the bedposts.
As he turned, his eyes caught a glimpse of the bathroom. He could see more rope had been oddly laced around the base of the toilet. The same piece of white clothesline reached up and had been looped over the hinge pins on the bathroom door. Harvey's heart was pumping faster now. He skipped Kenny's room at the farther end of the house and headed for the master bedroom. His eyes fell first on the ropes.
and then on a bloodied sanitary napkin on the floor. Donna's clothing was strewn on the floor. A pair of underpants, slit in half, stared at him. A single shoe had been left at the foot of the bed. Then his gaze locked on the empty holster that belonged to his luger. There it lay in plain view on the bed. He could see that the gun had been cut off the holster
Someone had sliced through the leather to remove the weapon, which he didn't immediately see. His mind started racing, but his immediate thought was that he had to get the children out of the house ASAP. As he came down into the living room, he told the children to head on over to Kathy's friend's house. Predictably, his daughter started protesting as she was in the middle of watching a favorite TV show.
Harvey cut her off and asked if she please could just do as he said to do it for him. He would call on her later. The moment girls had left, he checked his son's room too. There were no ropes there, but Kenny's guitar was on the bed, which was unusual. His son took pride in his guitar and would never leave it laying around haphazardly. There was only one place left to check, the basement.
It was exactly 5.59 p.m. when he telephoned the Missoula County Sheriff's Department to report what he found down there. The body of Donna Pounds was not moved for hours. Sheriff's Deputy Harry Northey was by now searching for and collecting evidence in the house, focusing on the four bedrooms.
He collected the lengths of rope that had been tied to the bedposts in the master bedroom on the two girls' bedrooms. In one of the girls' bedrooms, there were rope ties on only three of the bed corners. Nor they collected the bedding from the master bedroom and combed the rooms clean. At first, the police had a typical suspect. In almost all domestic violence and homicide cases, the husband is the perpetrator.
It's so common in our 21st century jargon, one could have easily have called it a meme. However, Harvey had a solid alibi and absolutely nothing pointed towards him being the assailant. By every account, the Pounds had a happy marriage and there were no pressing economic issues that would constitute a motive. Even so, a suspect started to emerge. The Pounds' next-door neighbor,
was certain that she saw Wayne Nance, a neighborhood boy, in the Pounds backyard that day. Then another neighbor reported that she saw someone who fit Nance's general description in the West Riverside vicinity on that afternoon.
Yet another neighbor witnessed a man walking away from the Pound's house on the day of the murder, carrying a black bag as he walked in a southwesterly direction through the field beyond the house toward Tamarack Trailer Park, where Wayne Nance lived. To Sheriff Moe, it was hard to believe that an 18-year-old high school senior could be capable of a crime of this scale. Besides,
Wayne Nance knew the family and was a friend of the son, Kenny, from the time when the Nances and the Pounces were next-door neighbors at Tamarack. When it was revealed that Nance actually knew where Harvey Hiddes Luger knew how to operate it and had actually fired the weapon once on a log with Kenny, Sheriff Moe was still unconvinced. The sheriff was a professional.
And even though he had his biases, he still questioned Nance. Nance's alibi was that he had stayed home from school that day to work on a class project. It was true, he had skipped school, but this was the opposite of a bulletproof alibi. Since he had skipped school, he could have easily made his way over to the Pound House and murdered Donna. As such, a warrant was issued.
Future Detective Weatherman was the man who carried out that warrant. The deputies drove out to Tamarack Trailer Park, a spit of a place under a mountain in a no-man's land just a half mile west of West Riverside. It is more identifiable as being on the eastern outskirts of East Missoula. They were armed with a search warrant.
and it was mid-afternoon as patrolman Larry Weatherman pulled into the McAdam Drive and up to the Nance trailer. The focus of the search would be Wayne Nance's room, and he hoped they wouldn't have any trouble. There wasn't. Weatherman's first order of business was to look for white clothesline rope in Nance's cluttered room. Weatherman was a towering presence in Wayne's small bedroom,
standing at the center of the four walls, his eyes piercing methodically through his eyeglasses at all the trappings of a teenage boy's life. There was something odd here, he realized, though he said nothing. Then he saw it, a black, grip-type gym bag. It appeared to be the same type described by one of the witnesses. Weatherman grabbed it to make a closer inspection.
and before even pulling open its zipper, he could tell there was something inside. Nance's mother showed a heightened nervousness as Weatherman opened the bag. Inside, Weatherman and the other deputies found a variety of .22 caliber bullets and shell casings. They recognized them as the same brand as the ones used in the murder weapon. Then Weatherman found the gold at the end of the rainbow.
He opened a dresser drawer, and his eyes fell on a pair of Wayne's underpants. A large, dark-colored stain was visible, and his experienced eye told him it was blood. Anyone could tell, by what was now a rust-colored stain, that they had been washed since they had been soiled.
Wetherman hoped that the FBI would be able to determine if this was human blood on these shorts, and if so, whose blood type it was. Soon, the police brought Wayne Nance in for questioning and to take a polygraph test. Nance stated he had nothing to do with the murder of Donna Pound, and the polygraph stated he told the truth. An even bigger problem was the physical evidence.
Their hopes had led the investigation to every hardware store in town, but to no avail. The pubic hair they had hoped to match was now a mere hypothetical. It was simply gone, misplaced by the pathologist who shouldn't have done the autopsy in the first place.
When the FBI in Washington finally weighed in, at least they knew that the blood on Nancy's underpants was human, but it couldn't be typed because of the good washing the pants had been given by Nancy's mother. The FBI was unable to find any fingerprints on the single amber rubber glove. By late May,
All there was to the Donna Pound murder case was misty circumstantial theorizing. No charges were filed and on the 19th of June 1974, Wayne Nance joined the Navy to see the barrel. By the winter of 1980, Wayne Nance was maintaining a 3.53 cumulative average out of a possible 4.0 maximum at university.
He managed an A in a first-year studio art course, but earned Fs in a modern fantasy English course and in a course entitled Introduction to Woman. He dropped a course in logic and finished the term on a quote-unquote academic warning.
The following semester, he improved and earned straight Bs in four courses: anthropology, two art classes, and a history class on European civilization. Nance's academic career would be short-lived. After his mother's death, Nance didn't continue in summer school as he had in past summers. When September rolled around again,
Nance was back, enrolling in German, Spanish and physics classes. But it was to be a perfunctory commitment. He pretty much had dropped the idea of college. He got Fs in all three courses and dropped out. And during this summer of 1980, by now Captain Weatherman would investigate a bizarre incident, one involving ropes, that would cause him
to once again vividly recall Donna Pound's case. To make switching to the new Boost Mobile risk-free, we're offering a 30-day money-back guarantee. So why wouldn't you switch from Verizon or T-Mobile? Because you have nothing to lose. Boost Mobile is offering a 30-day money-back guarantee. No, I asked why wouldn't you switch from Verizon or T-Mobile. Oh. Wouldn't. Because you love wasting money as a way to punish yourself because your mother never showed you enough love as a child? Whoa, easy there. Yeah.
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And with that, we come to the end of this part in my expose on Wayne Nunn. Next episode, number 152 in number, will feature part four in the Missoula Mauler 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.