Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now.
Whoa, easy there. Yeah.
applies to online activations, requires port in and auto pay. Customers activating in stores may be charged non-refundable activation fees. Ryan Reynolds here from Intmobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down.
down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.
$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes each detail. Need new glasses or want a fresh new style? Warby Parker has you covered. Glasses start at just $95, including anti-reflective, scratch-resistant prescription lenses that block 100% of UV rays.
Every frame's designed in-house with a huge selection of styles for every face shape. And with Warby Parker's free home try-on program, you can order five pairs to try at home for free. Shipping is free both ways, too. Go to warbyparker.com slash covered to try five pairs of frames at home for free. warbyparker.com slash covered.
Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did and how. Episode 153. I am your Norwegian host, Samas Rosland Weyborg Thun. Children being attacked is the most heinous crime of all.
and the Missoula mauler did not shy away from such activities, as we witnessed in the latest episode of this expose. Tonight, we continue down the downward spiral of Wayne Nance's life and crimes, ever closer to coming full circle with where we began his demise. Enjoy. Enjoy.
As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are...
Marilyn, Meow, Mickey, Operation BP, Russell, Sabina, Samira, Scott, Skortnia, Shauna, Tony, Trent, and Val. You are the backbone of the Serial Killer Podcast. 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, a swelteringly hot crawlspace. It is located at Conlins, high between the warehouse and sales floor.
You are crouched next to Wayne Nance. He is sweating, but not just from the temperature. He is also masturbating, furiously. Through slits in the ceiling, you both have a direct view of the ladies' bathroom at Conlins. The view is from above, so that you can see directly down into the stalls. Nance loves to spend time up here, undisturbed.
knowing that no one can see or hear him as he brings himself to orgasm again and again, watching his female co-workers undress and go to the toilet. The ladies below have no idea they are being watched, and if someone suggested it to them, they would be horrified.
To them, Nance is the sweet-mannered awkward boy who treats them just so very nicely.
He brings flowers on birthdays. He compliments their hair after they have been to the salon. He compliments their dresses, especially when they have bought new ones. Their boyfriends and husbands seldom give them the same courtesies, and even though none of the women would ever dream of being romantically involved with Nance, they all view him as harmless.
However, all good things must come to an end, as Nance saw it. He understood that sooner or later he might be caught in the act, and wanted to counter such an event before it happened. And so he reported the hidden crawlspace with the view of the ladies' bathroom to his superior. She immediately suspected Nance, especially since he seemed far too righteous about the whole thing,
But having no proof, she told her floor manager, Rick, to look into the matter. Rick also suspected Nance. Nance was in his eyes a weirdo, and more than likely to be a peeping Tom. When confronted by Rick, Nance pointed instead at his co-workers. Rick knew that he was lying. The men Nance had pointed to were stand-up regular guys who obviously had no interest in leering at women going to the toilet.
However, Nance had reported the crawlspace and they had no actual proof it was Nance who had used it. So the matter was dropped, but Nance's standing at Conlin's was severely reduced. Many people there now viewed Nance with more than simply pity for an awkward young man. They viewed him with disgust. It would get worse.
After he had given up his secret hideaway masturbation hole, Nance got himself a new fetish to practice at work, a camera. The women at Conlin's usually didn't mind having their picture taken, but they did mind the way Nance went about it. They would mind their own business, working the sales floor, when suddenly Nance's voice would say,
Hey, Wendy! And when the young and attractive woman turned, she would be surprised by a click and the flash of a camera. At first, the women half-heartedly told Nance to knock it off, brushing it off as just another aspect of his generally awkward behavior. But he didn't knock it off.
He simply got more and more eager, and finally his supervisor told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to stop taking photographs at the workplace. He did, but by then he had amassed stacks and stacks of snapshots of the women of Conlins.
They were generally of poor quality, and the expressions on the women's faces reflected a definite lack of enthusiasm for the maniacal paparazzi who was taking their picture over and over again. They were ill-posed, parked as the women might be on occasions sunk into a floral patterned deep-lined sofa. The flash lighting was harsh. Nance kept the countless pictures of his female co-workers in a box at home,
but he had done something special with his even bigger collection of his favorite subject. His favorite subject had been his supervisor, Chris. They were edited, cropped, and archived in a small white album. The first page featured the head-and-shoulders picture of a smiling Chris, bordered by a white oval mat.
At the bottom, Nance had placed Chris's signature, which he had scissored from the bottom line of a conlens insurance form. Page after page of photographs showed her sitting officiously at a desk, sinking into the plush of a showroom sofa, lounged legs up on another, entering a doorway, standing on the loading dock, perched demurely on the arm of a stuffed chair, hands in lap, legs crossed.
The album pictures had been carefully cropped to eliminate extraneous subject matter. Nance had meticulously cut off the corners on most of all of them, leaving rounded edges. He had jammed up to four pictures on a page. When he didn't like the smallness of the image, he had blown-ups made. Nance was deeply, desperately infatuated with his supervisor Chris.
She became his full-time obsession slash hobby. Nance scribbled on the backs of some pictures revealed in grainless, stark clarity the powerful nature of his obsession. Chris Zimmerman Wells, I love you, signed Nance. Chris Zimmerman Wells, I'm crazy about KZ. Chris, I want you to live with me and my lazy boy, signed Nance.
Nans also carried Chris's picture in his wallet. He had snipped her handwritten work order messages into word bits, taking the word love from loveseat and boy from lazyboy and pasted together a new message. It read, I love you, big boy, which he kept in his locked toolbox, and it did not stop there.
In a far corner of the warehouse, Nance had kept another stack, which was a more chaotic but equally telling testament to his desire for Chris. In what once had been a deli store meat and cheese sampler box, Nance kept the other odds and ends, further proof of his recent monomania.
No bigger than a large dictionary, the box contained more than thirty-five additional pictures of Chris, some of them framed. There she was, eating a banana, or standing near a mattress. It contained dime-store sweetheart stickers, dozens of Conlin's red tags that had been trimmed down to leave only her signed initials. KZ. Nance's business card. Chris's business card.
a large collar advertisement of a woman in a yellow Liz Claiborne dress holding a handbag with her head ripped off in jagged abandon. An ad for Victory Chapel, a wedding emporium, a routine office communication from Chris to Rick Mays saying, "Come find me." As was the case with most of the attractive women at Conlin's, Chris was in a happy relationship.
This did not hinder Nance's obsession with her. When her husband Doug would enter the front door of the showroom and head towards the back to find Chris, Nance, if he happened to be out front, could be seen clenching his fists. Everyone else at Conlin's liked Doug. They had learned not to expect much chatter from him. He was quiet, they knew that. But he fit in every other way.
Doug shared the same view of Nance that the other husbands had. The fake gold necklaces and stick pins and junkie doodads that Nance had given his wife were no different from those he had given Carey's wife, Cindy, or George's wife, Joyce. Doug did not know at the time, but he would find out later, that Nance's interest in his wife was quite different.
For one thing, he would learn that someone entered his house, searched out Chris's teal-green silk wedding dress. It was hung deep in a closet inside a zippered plastic garment bag, and the intruder had streaked blood around the collar line, along the sleeve and down the skirt. Chris and Doug would not discover this macabre handiwork until years later.
But it would be clear that whoever had done this must have had a key to the front door. And thus we come right back to where we began. The house in the suburbs, the strange truck parked outside the Wells' household, and Nance managing to threaten and force himself inside.
The ordeal Chris and Doug had to endure before they finally managed to kill Wayne Nance. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax, and think about...
Work. You really, really want it all to work out while you're away. Monday.com gives you and the team that peace of mind. When all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync, things just flow. Wherever you are, tap the banner to go to Monday.com.
Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much?
I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash switch whenever you're ready. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As a family man with three kids, I know firsthand 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. The following night, the TV news would carry the story of the Missoula couple who survived an ordeal with an intruder who did not survive.
The report would be seen on television screens across the state. Among the barest details of the story was the connection between the couple, their attacker, and Conlin's furniture. But that was the single most important detail to Bob Shook, who sat in his living room 50 miles away in Hamilton, electrified by this information. Christ, that's where the kids got the furniture, he thought, his mind leaping.
It already grated on Bob Shook that the investigation into his son's and daughter-in-law's murders seemed to take so long. Over the past nine months, he had learned to live with the frustration. He would occasionally ask Sheriff Dye's men how the case was going. He really wanted to know why it was taking so long. Every time, the answer came back the same.
He was not the only one who wondered why. Always he was told that these things take time. Bob's son, Steve, who was on the Hamilton force, finally told his father that the sheriff's department was at the end of the line, that they did not know anything. Bob knew he now had a red-hot lead, and he was not going to hesitate anymore.
First thing in the morning, he would call the Missoula County Sheriff's Department. Captain Weatherman was out when he called, but he was told he would be back soon. Bob stayed by the phone. When it rang, he was burning to tell Weatherman what he knew. When Weatherman picked up, Bob started to instruct him to check Nancy's house. Captain Weatherman cut him off and said, and I quote,
We have been out there this morning. We're going back this afternoon. End quote. Bob pressed on and told the captain to be on the lookout for a statue of a bugling elk and a knife, a custom-made, bone-handled, Kelgin hunting knife. He knew that this particular knife was missing from his son and daughter-in-law's house. The captain answered, and I quote, I think I saw that knife this morning. End quote.
As the media got wind of the facts now coming to light, newspapers provided more bombshells. The barrage of connections between Wayne Nance and a series of sex-motivated murders emanated first from Sheriff Dye, who disclosed the link to the Shook homicides, the knife and the elk.
Captain Weatherman noted that there were several other murders over the years that would be wrested from their dusty file holders and eyeballed for Wayne Nance's signatures. Among them, principally, were the separate killings of three young women whose bodies had been found east of town.
The community's preconceptions about somebody who might have been a friend, a co-worker, a joker, a drinking buddy, a son, or just the delivery man offloading a new stuffed chair for the den was quickly swallowed by the bloody tidal wave of facts about Nance's horrific act.
Captain Weatherman had been in Wayne's room in the spring of 1974 when he found the black bag containing the .22 caliber shells and casings and the bloodied but washed underpants. This time, when he led detectives on the search of the house at 715 Minnesota Avenue, concentrating on Wayne's room, what triggered their most intense interest was his bed.
The sheet was of green rubber. The bedposts were looped with rope ties. On the posts at the headboard, one side clearly was tied to permit escape from the ligatures, an indication to the detectives that Wayne had practiced on himself. Wayne's father told Captain Weatherman that his son had a skin condition that called for him to sleep on a rubber sheet.
The detective inferred otherwise and suspected that Wayne Nance may have even used his bed as a sacrificial altar, removing his stabbed bloody victim in the handy leak-proof wrapper. Then he had brought it out to the truck for disposal.
Among the items removed for evidence was a strip of coin booth photographs that showed Wayne in three poses with a dark-haired woman exhibiting not much more than the trace of a smile. Her bangs were cut at the eyebrows. She wore oversized gradient tint glasses and a ragland sleeved sweatshirt. In one pose, she and Wayne were kissing.
Weatherman wondered if the 140-pound corpse he had pulled from the frozen earth at the Bonner Dam could be the woman in the photo, the corpse he for so long had personified as Debbie Deer Creek. George Nance identified the woman in the photo only as Robin.
Captain Weatherman solved at least part of the puzzle by positively identifying Robin as Debbie Deer Creek. Most victims of a serial killer don't survive more than two minutes once they come under the killer's control. But the Welsers, who had spent more than an hour and a half with Nance, managed to kill their potential killer in return.
Doug and Chris survived as living victims, witnesses to the fulminating rage that drove Nance right down to the moment of the kill. They had no way of knowing what was going through Nance's mind, but they can talk about what he did and what he said, as well as how they reacted.
all of which bears directly on the FBI's research into the role victims play when they fall into the deadly clutches of a psychopath like Wayne Nance.
At the FBI's invitation, Doug and Chris have become regulars at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where special agents of its behavioral science unit profile killers by deduction. What they learn from the crime scene and the victims tells them something about the killer.
The Welsers made a trip four times a year, addressing seminars on the subject of their specialty. Wayne Nance, serial killer. Their courage and grit draw applause from the FBI agents who hear their story, at times spellbound, always fascinated to learn whatever they can about the most dangerous criminal there is, the serial killer.
No one knows exactly how many people Wayne Nunns killed. Local law enforcement authorities credit him with at least four murders. Donna Pounds, the girl called Robin, and Mike and Teresa Shook. He is the only suspect in the unsolved murders of Devona Nelson and Chrissy Crystal Creek.
It just so happens that in May of this year, 2021, Chrissy Crystal Creek has finally been positively identified as Janet Leigh Lucas. In 2006, the true identity of the girl only known as Robin was uncovered.
Her name was Marcella Cherie Buckman, and she had been only 16 years old when Nance murdered her. After it was all over, the community breathed a sigh of relief. For the heroes that finally had put an end to Nance's rampage, the Welsers, it was a different story. It had taken 22 stitches to close up the gashes on Doug's head,
Nans had used a handmade club that the warehouse guys at Conlin's had watched him make. He had used Bonneville Power Administration lead wire, looping it up and back and up back again until it was the size he wanted. Then he wrapped it with black electrician's tape and fashioned a bolster to distinguish the handle from the club end.
The slug that brushed the sciatic nerve in Doug's right leg had given him a case of foot drop. He had almost no control over it for months. It hung limp at the ankle, and he was forced to wear a leg brace. Eventually, his doctors extended his Achilles tendon and reconstructed the ankle, and the nerve came back.
The stab wound to Doug's chest was a more serious matter. The knife had missed Doug's heart by a fraction of an inch, but it had severed his diaphragm and cut open the stomach lining. Fluids escaping from his stomach migrated to his chest, irritating the pericardium, which wept in defense of the heart.
As the pericardial sac filled, it put pressure on his heart. It was drained once, but in a week's time had hardened to the consistency of an orange peel. A quarter of an inch thick in places, it was crushing his heart and reducing blood flow to one-third normal. Because he could have suffered a heart attack at any moment,
Doctors performed emergency open chest surgery and removed the protective membrane. Even after Doug recovered from the physical trauma of the events of that September night, both Doug and Chris discovered their lives had been irrevocably changed. For months after the attack, Doug complained of an odd floating sensation and suffered from vertigo and bouts of disorientation.
and he also had recurrent nightmares about Nance. But even though Doug and Chris struggled with after-effects of Nance's assault, they took a respite in the fact that they were alive, and Wayne Nance was dead.
I don't know.
Until your ultimate demise. What if we just say forever? Okay. $25 a month forever. Get unlimited talk, text, and data for just $25 a month with Boost Mobile forever. After 30 gigabytes, customers may experience slower speeds. Customers will pay $25 a month as long as they remain active on the Boost Unlimited plan. Need new glasses or want a fresh new style? Warby Parker has you covered. Glasses start at just $95, including anti-reflective, scratch-resistant prescription lenses that block 100% of UV rays. Ever.
Every frame's designed in-house, with a huge selection of styles for every face shape. And with Warby Parker's free home try-on program, you can order five pairs to try at home for free. Shipping is free both ways, too. Go to warbyparker.com slash covered to try five pairs of frames at home for free. warbyparker.com slash covered.
At Ashley, you'll find colorful furniture that brings your home to life. Ashley makes it easier than ever to express your personal style with an array of looks in fun trending hues to choose from, from earth tones to vibrant colors to calming blues and greens. Ashley has pieces for every room in the house in the season's most sought after shades. A more colorful life starts at Ashley. Shop in store online today. Ashley, for the love of home.
And with that, we come to the end of my expose on Wayne Nance, the Missoula mauler. Next episode, number 154 in number, will feature a brand new serial killer expose. So, as they say on the land of radio, stay tuned. Finally, I wish to thank you, dear listener, for listening to
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.