Around midnight on September 3, 1986, Doug Wells found a man in the bushes outside his house in Missoula. It was Wayne Nance, a thirty-year-old delivery driver at Conlin's Furniture, where Wells's wife, Kris, was the store manager. Nance said he had been driving past and thought he had seen a prowler looking in the window, and asked for a flashlight. When Wells turned his back, Nance struck him on the head with a gun. At gunpoint he made Kris Wells tie up her husband, tied her up and took her to the bedroom, then took Doug down to the basement and stabbed him in the chest with an eight-inch knife. Believing him dead, he went back upstairs to Kris.
In the basement was a rifle Doug Wells had been repairing. Badly hurt, he worked free of his bindings, loaded a single shell and went up the stairs. He shot Nance at the top of them, and when Nance got to his own pistol and fired, Wells beat him with the rifle and then shot him with Nance's gun. Both of the Wellses survived. Nance died in the hospital the next day, September 4, 1986. Accounts differ on whether he worked for Doug or for Kris Wells; one says he had a crush on her.
He was born on October 18, 1955, in Clinton, Montana, and lived with his father in East Missoula. When detectives searched his room they found rubber sheets on the bed and maps he had drawn of houses in the area. They also found a bugling elk figure and a Kelgin knife missing from the home of Michael and Teresa Shook, who had been found bound and murdered at their house in Ravalli County on December 12, 1985. Their children were in the house that night, and the killer had tried to burn it down with them inside; they survived.
Over the years since, investigators have attributed six killings to him. The first was Donna Pounds, killed at her home in Missoula on April 11, 1974. Nance, then eighteen, was a friend of her teenage children and was seen in her backyard that day, and evidence linking him to the killing was found in his home, but he was never charged. About a decade later the bodies of three women were found in different places around Missoula. Unidentified, they were named for where they lay: Debbie Deer Creek, later identified through DNA as Marci Bachman; Betty Beavertail, later identified as Devonna Nelson; and Christy Crystal Creek, who has never been identified. With the Shooks they make six. He was also once suggested as a suspect in the 1974 abduction and murder of five-year-old Siobhan McGuinness in Missoula, but DNA ruled him out, and genetic genealogy later identified another man.
Because he died before he was ever arrested, none of the killings attributed to him was tested in a courtroom. What links him to them is the physical evidence found in his home, the pattern of the attacks and the account of the one couple he failed to kill.