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[MUSIC PLAYING] NANCY GRACE: December 24, 1984, a body discovered in a shallow grave, Missoula, Montana.
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STEVE BUNCH: The skeletal remains that they found had one unique piece to them and that is that she--
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the unknown female-- had two .32 caliber bullets that were fired into the back of her head.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Police launch a full investigation, but they cannot identify the victim.
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SUSAN LANE: When remains are found, then basically, you're going to look for who
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was reported missing and they couldn't find anyone that matched. NANCY GRACE: When another dead body turns up,
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police fear a serial killer on the loose. ROBERT DESCHAMPS III: Another unsolved female homicide
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east of Missoula. DAVID CONWAY: It was quite shocking for the community. It was quite shocking for everyone
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involved to realize that there was a serial killer among us. When they searched his home, they
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begin to find items of interest and evidence that linked him to many of the missing and unidentified
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remains. NANCY GRACE: This is the story of how two victims are left unidentified
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and without justice for decades. It's also, the story of how newly invented DNA technology gives victims' families the closure
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they so long deserved. I'm Nancy Grace and this is "Bloodline Detectives." [MUSIC PLAYING]
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Christmas Eve, 1984. A woman's body discovered near Deer Creek, Missoula, Montana.
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ANGELA MARSHALL: A photographer was walking along at Deer Creek Road in East Missoula, when the photographer
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came across a body. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Police rush to the scene. ROBERT DESCHAMPS III: The ground was frozen solid.
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They brought in some heaters and tried to thaw the soil around, enough that they could extract
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this body from the ground. Eventually, they were able to get it out. It turned out to be a woman--
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a young woman. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Investigators carefully examine the body.
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ROBERT DESCHAMPS III: Her hair was still there. Her hair was unique in that it had been dyed a couple of times
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and so, there were several layers of coloring in this hair. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Detectives search the crime
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scene for more evidence. DAVID CONWAY: They searched the area all around-- grid search, searched it with metal detectors,
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sifted through the dirt in the immediate burial and the shallow grave area and nothing was found.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Detectives are unable to identify the victim so they give her the case name, Debbie Deer Creek.
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DAVID CONWAY: She was officially listed as a Jane Doe, but because she was on Deer Creek and, at the time,
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we there were several Jane Doe's so they were given nicknames and she was nicknamed Debbie Deer Creek.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The body, taken away for autopsy. Investigators have lots of questions and very few answers.
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DAVID CONWAY: It's impossible to give an exact time frame of how long it would take to decompose
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and how long it would have taken to have gotten her into that state, but presumably, a couple of years.
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STEVE BUNCH: The skeletal remains that they found had one unique piece to them and that is that she--
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the unknown female-- had two .32 caliber bullets that were fired into the back of her head.
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And so, that's an obvious to a trained investigator-- or even, maybe, an untrained investigator-- that's not
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a person who committed suicide. That's clearly somebody who was murdered. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Police beg the public for information,
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but Debbie Deer Creek goes unidentified. Then, nine months later, another body discovered.
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On September 9, 1985, there was a bear hunter out in Missoula County and he shot a bear
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and was tracking the bear and he came across human remains. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Investigators race
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to the remote area and they determine the victim has been dead for some time. ANGELA MARSHALL: They named her Christy Crystal Creek, based
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off of where she was found. She was found along Crystal Creek Road and Crystal Creek
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runs into the Clark Fork River, which then runs next to a small town, called Truro, which is
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about southeast of Missoula . ROBERT DESCHAMPS III: Crystal Creek is a drainage that runs down out of the mountains 2 miles east
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of Deer Creek, where Debbie Deer Creek was found and this one, the body had obviously
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been there for a while because all that was left was the skeleton. SUSAN LANE: The bones were scattered about.
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They were concentrated in, kind of, a covert area, which might have been covered by some brush for a shallow grave,
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but just, not necessarily in a hole that's been dug, but just covered up. Often, you will find some of the bones
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might have been spread away from the original site, taken by predators. So most of her bones--
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a few were not recovered, but most were found in that area. So the initial investigation was going to the site
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and retrieving all the human remains and also, then, using the metal detector because she had been shot in the head.
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So it was looking in that scene for any personal effects, any of the bullet casings, anything
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and they found nothing. DAVID CONWAY: In the '80s, the tools that were used to identify remains
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were tremendously limited in comparison to what we have today. It was pre-DNA. There was blood typing that could be done to determine
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if the blood type matched one another, but that's not very conclusive and, in this case,
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they were skeletal remains so we couldn't even do that. There were databases at the time to be able to enter missing
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persons and compare that to found remains, but they were difficult to use and they
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didn't provide a whole lot of avenues for investigation or resources. There was obviously dental or odontology comparisons
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that could be done, but you had to have something to compare it to. When remains are found, then basically, you're going to look
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for, who was reported missing? And so they started, who was reported missing locally, who
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was reported missing in the state, and then, going regionally and nationally and they couldn't find anyone that matched.
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You can tell from bones, the height of someone so that, kind of, narrowed it down.
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In this particular case, in Christy Crystal Creek, she was between 4' 11" and 5' 1".
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And you can also determine age so she was between the ages of, like, 23 and 29. NANCY GRACE: Local police now have two unsolved murders
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on their hands and the sinking feeling, a serial killer on the loose. That's next, on "Bloodline Detectives."
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[MUSIC PLAYING] 1985. The Missoula County Sheriff's Office working two brutal homicide cases,
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both victims shot in the head. Very troubling for investigators? Both victims remain unidentified.
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SUSAN LANE: Both sets of remains had been shot in the head and they were skeletonized.
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They were found without any personal effects or clothing. One-- the one in September-- was found near Crystal Creek
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and so she was named Christy Crystal Creek. The other was found near Deer Creek Road
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and so she was Debbie Deer Creek, while she was unidentified. During the time, they did a facial reconstruction using
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some of the early methodology and so, they put out pictures and flyers-- again, here's unidentified remains--
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and try to get public awareness. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): But the public appeals do
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not generate any solid leads. Both cases go completely cold over two decades, until April 2006.
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Derek Bachmann had been looking for his sister, who had ran away, for many years.
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ANGELA MARSHALL: He had spent much of his life searching for his sister. When Marci Bachmann was about 16 years old,
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she ran away from her home in Vancouver, Washington, mostly due to family troubles.
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DAVID CONWAY: He feared that she may have been a victim of the Green River Killer
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so during the course of that investigation, he contacted those investigators. SUSAN LANE: They had been trying to identify additional victims
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of the Green River Killer and so, they asked Derek to submit his DNA and that would be compared
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to any of the DNA from the unidentified remains cases that they have. He submitted his DNA and while it didn't match any
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of the Green River Killer suspected victims, Derek Bachmann's DNA was a familial match to one
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of the cases that the Missoula County Sheriff's Office had put into CODIS and that was for Debbie Deer Creek.
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So it turned out, Debbie Deer Creek was identified as Derek Bachmann's sister, Marcella
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Bachmann, known as Marci. NANCY GRACE: By going to police, Derek Bachmann tragically,
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finds his sister, Marci. His information and his DNA reveals she is Debbie Deer Creek, but how did she end up in Montana?
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Then, police show Derek a photo of an unidentified woman named, Robin, last seen with a local serial killer, Wayne Nance.
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SUSAN LANE: They showed the photos to Derek, who said, that's my sister. DAVID CONWAY: When Marci Bachmann was 16, in 1984,
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she ran away from her home in Washington and hitchhiked her way here, to Missoula, Montana.
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We presume that she came in contact with Wayne Nance at the Cabin Bar in East Missoula, where
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he was a doorman or a bouncer. They developed a relationship and she was known as his girlfriend for a short period of time
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and stayed with him there. He told everyone that her name was Robin and that she was from Texas.
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SUSAN LANE: People had met her or met them at the Cabin Bar and he told people that she had gone back home
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or gone off traveling so no one really-- there was no one in Missoula that listed her as a missing person.
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She wasn't from Missoula, she didn't have family in Missoula, and really had only been there for a few weeks,
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and was living, kind of, a traveling lifestyle so the fact that she moved on didn't
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seem suspicious to anyone. Marcella, or Marci, had a relationship or the last person
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she had been seen with was Wayne Nance, who ended up essentially, being a serial killer.
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Wayne went to the home of Doug and Kris Wells. Kris Wells was the manager of Conlin's Furniture
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Store and Wayne had developed a crush-- more like an infatuation-- with Kris. He had been known to send her flowers, give her cards.
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The night of September 3, 1986, he went to the home of Doug and Kris Wells. ROBERT DESCHAMPS III: And at pistol point,
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he has Kristen tie Doug in the basement, with his hands behind his back and Doug is left seated.
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He then marches Kris back up the stairs, down the hall to the master bedroom. After he had tied up Kris, he went back to the basement
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to check on Doug, where he had beat him with a club. ROBERT DESCHAMPS III: And according to the Wells's, like,
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he's going into some kind of a trance. He's speaking to himself about how he's got to be careful.
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He can't make any mistakes. And he's back and forth, back and forth between Kristen
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and Doug, two or three times. He goes down there and he looks at Doug and he takes his knife
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and he goes over to him and he stabs him in the heart. [SMACK] And Doug says, he pulled a knife out and he looked at it
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and he saw that there was some blood on him and he rather, nonchalantly wipes the blood on the knife
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off on Doug's pant leg. Now, here's Doug tied to this post. He's been stabbed in the chest.
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He knows that this guy is back and forth and he's headed back up the stairs to his wife
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and he doesn't know what's going on up there. Eventually, through this entire ordeal,
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when Wayne wasn't around Doug, Doug was able to get out of his ties. And Doug was a gunsmith and so, in the basement
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is where he kept all of his equipment for work. ROBERT DESCHAMPS III: And he looks around the room
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and over in the corner, he sees an old rifle propped up in the corner. He staggers over and he gets the rifle
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and he looks around for a bullet and all he could find is one bullet. [LOADING GUN]
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SUSAN LANE: He didn't think he could make it up the stairs so he made a bunch of noise to draw Nance's attention so Nance
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came back to the top of the stairs to see what was going on and Doug shot him and hit him in the side.
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[GUNSHOT] ROBERT DESCHAMPS III: But Wayne doesn't go down. He's still standing there so Doug, somehow, summons up
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superhuman strength, grabs the gun by the barrel, and goes up the stairs and he starts wailing
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on Wayne with the stock-- the butt-- of the rifle and Wayne starts doing a crab walk back down the hallway
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towards the master bedroom. Wayne pulls out of the bag that he had, his pistol and he shoots and he shoots Doug in the leg.
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So now, Doug has had been stabbed in the chest and shot in the leg, but he doesn't give up.
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He keeps wailing away at Wayne. And finally, they get back into the master bedroom
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where Kristen is tied on the bed spread eagle. Kristen has somehow managed to get one of her hands free
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and she's trying to hit Wayne and Doug's yelling, out of the way! Out of the way!
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And he's hitting him. Another shot goes off and then, the room goes blank. [GUNSHOT]
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Wayne Nance has been shot in the head with his own gun. Doug collapsed. It turns out later, that the stab to his chest
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did not actually enter the heart, but Doug's bleeding profusely and he's seriously injured.
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Kristen calls 911, the sheriff responds, and Wayne is dead. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Incredibly, Doug Wells
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survives the horrific ordeal. Now, investigators need to learn more about Wayne Nance.
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ANGELA MARSHALL: Wayne was born in October of 1955. He grew up in the Missoula, East Missoula areas.
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He went to elementary school at Bonner Elementary School, which is just a few miles from the town of East Missoula,
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and he was known to be, during elementary school, quite a rulely kid, kind of, a troublemaker of sorts.
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And in my research, Detective Marta Timmons, with the Missoula County Sheriff's Office,
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had interviewed neighbors of Wayne Nance and his family from when he was growing up in the neighborhood as a child.
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And he would often, kidnap cats, put them in mailboxes, and then blow them up. He went onto high school in Missoula and he was quite,
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the loner, kind of, a recluse, had very few friends, and was often, seen drawing pictures in a notebook.
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He was quite an avid drawer and some of the pictures in the notebook that he would draw would almost
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represent the occult. So, kind of, a liking for witchcraft or sorcery, drawings included pentagrams, bloodied
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knives, demons with horns and blood and skulls. SUSAN LANE: I don't know if he suffered trauma as a child.
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There was a lot of strange things going on, besides his carving pentagrams into his arm.
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It's hard to say what's rumor or what's true. ANGELA MARSHALL: Oddly enough, he was a really good student.
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His teachers would say he was a good student in class, he earned well over a 3.0 GPA, and he
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ended up graduating from Semmel High School in 1974. SUSAN LANE: His mother, she had a troubled life.
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She died in a single car accident on Deer Creek Road so in that same area is where his mother had died.
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He apparently told a couple of people that was his favorite place to hang out. There was an old car and one of those
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that he liked to just sit and watch. He loved going out in that area at the time.
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It was just, pretty much, a rural road, but that was one of his favorite areas to hang out
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and he used to go there and he would take women on dates there. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Detectives learned Wayne Nance
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was a suspect in the 1974 murder of 39-year-old Donna Pounds, but police couldn't gather enough evidence
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to charge him at the time. What authorities had found was a woman who had been gagged, bound in a chair,
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and found in the basement of her home. Donna Pounds had been shot five times in the back of the head
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and what was really odd and slightly disturbing about this crime scene is they were able to find the murder
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weapon, which was a .22 caliber Luger and the reason why they could identify that so well is because the murder
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weapon was on the scene. It was actually found in between Donna's legs, with the shaft shoved up her vagina.
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Wayne was friends with Donna's son, Ken, and he had also been spotted by witnesses in the neighborhood.
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Other witnesses, who didn't necessarily identify Wayne on the scene, had mentioned seeing somebody
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with a black backpack or somebody carrying a black bag of sorts. And authorities did question Wayne about his whereabouts
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during the time of Donna's murder and Wayne said that he wasn't in school that day,
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but he was also walking around the wilderness or the woods by his home, looking for Indian artifacts for a class.
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But what was interesting about that is the class that he was searching these artifacts for had actually
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ended the previous fall. So authorities did gather a search warrant. They searched his bedroom.
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They did find a black backpack. They also found a pair of women's bloodied underwear.
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They decided to have Wayne take a polygraph test, of which he passed. Now, in trying to build a case around Wayne in order
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to make arrest for him in Donna Pounds murder, they weren't able to do so because all of the evidence
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that they had was circumstantial. And so, essentially, they weren't able to charge
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Wayne with Donna's murder. NANCY GRACE: Missoula County sheriffs decide to search Wayne Nance's home.
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What they find will link him to more murders. Could the search yield clues about Christy Crystal Creek--
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the other unidentified Jane Doe? That's next, on "Bloodline Detectives." [MUSIC PLAYING]
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2006, Missoula County sheriff's investigating the murders of two unidentified women in the 1980s.
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Investigators successfully ID one of the victims as Marci Bachmann, using familial DNA.
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Investigators confident Marci Bachmann was the victim of a suspected serial killer, Wayne Nance.
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Wayne Nance was a serial killer during that time frame here in Missoula. He was responsible for a number of deaths.
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He, himself, was killed during a home invasion. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): During a search of Wayne Nance's home
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after his death in 1986, police find evidence of an unsolved double murder that went down December 12, 1985.
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SUSAN LANE: Teresa and Michael Shook were killed in their home and they were tied up, killed, and then,
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the house was set on fire with the children still inside. Luckily, the house was shut up and locked up in such a way
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that the fire went out, but people were able to come to the house and break in and rescue the children, who survived,
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but the Shook's had been killed. ANGELA MARSHALL: Authorities were able to connect Wayne,
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eventually, to the Shook murders, following Wayne's death because also in Wayne's bedroom
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were some belongings of the Shook's that family had identified as missing from the house following
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the fire and their murders. And two of those prominent articles were a cast iron statue of an elk bugling
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and another one was a Kelgin knife that Mike had actually been given to, by a family member.
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SUSAN LANE: And one of the police officers says, I think I saw that in Wayne Nance's room
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and so they went back and they recovered some items and the father was able to identify
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and provide a receipt of the actual purchase of the knife. And so, they used that to basically,
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connect Wayne Nance to that double homicide, as well. ROBERT DESCHAMPS III: He probably, would be a fairly
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stereotypical serial killer. Most of all of these people have been methodical and careful
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with their crimes. They're difficult to catch. They have many similarities, in that all of them
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tend to be very careful. They have peculiar habits. For example, Wayne Nance slept on rubber sheets.
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He kept his room darkened with black plastic so light didn't come in. He was meticulous and had clothes laid out
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in a certain order and folded in a certain way, which seems to be stereotypical of a lot of these people.
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He certainly had an interest in the occult, in stuff that made him different from your average person.
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That doesn't mean that everybody that has an interest in the occult is a serial killer or even
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a killer, but there are similarities that certainly exist between him and, what I understand,
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exist with other serial killers. The real question is, what creates these people?
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What is it that goes on with them that leads them to this kind of behavior? I do know that Wayne was obviously,
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a sociopath because he took a lie detector and he passed it with flying colors. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Police are still
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anxious to ID the remains of the unidentified victim they have called, Christy Crystal Creek.
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DAVID CONWAY: We had a reserve deputy, Marta Timmons. She was heavily invested in getting Christy Crystal
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Creek back to her family. She researched and worked with the anthropology department,
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researched every available avenue at the time. She spent countless numbers of hours on that investigation,
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trying to get resolved to it. SUSAN LANE: Her bones were sent to the University of North
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Texas Center for Human Identification and they were able to extract the DNA that went into CODIS.
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The forensic odontologist looked at her dental work and said that she had an actual screw
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post in her jaw, which was not common, he said, at that time in the US or Europe.
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ANGELA MARSHALL: The teeth that remained had fillings, which could only have been
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done from overseas, in places like China or Korea or even, Thailand. SUSAN LANE: So based on the forensic anthropology
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and the odontology, the best guess at that time was that she was an Asian female, which was what she was
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listed as in all of the unidentified remains databases, as an Asian female. NANCY GRACE: Next on "Bloodline Detectives," a cold case unit
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is set up, but will it lead investigators to even more crimes serial killer Wayne Nance has left behind?
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[MUSIC PLAYING] 2018. Missoula County sheriff's investigating unidentified remains of a young woman.
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Her case name? Christy Crystal Creek. They suspect she was murdered by serial killer, Wayne Nance,
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and they send her case to their newly established cold case unit. ANGELA MARSHALL: Missoula County Sheriff's Office
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was able to develop a cold case squad and it's a team of three former federal agents
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who are currently retired. And so, they volunteer their time, as well as their professional resources, in investigating cold cases,
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particularly for the Missoula County Sheriff's Office and Christy Crystal Creek's case has
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been one that's been hanging over the department ever since her remains were found, back in 1985.
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It was important to us because we were so busy with current cases-- with cases that we're actively working--
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we really don't have time to go back and look at cases that have grown cold so this was a great opportunity to establish
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an unit who had the time and ability and skills to go back and look at those cold cases
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and use new technology to solve them. The cold case unit presented the idea of using forensic genealogy to determine the identity
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of Christy Crystal Creek. Her DNA, by that point, had already been tested and entered
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into CODIS, with no results. STEVE BUNCH: I initially got involved with the Christy
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Crystal Creek case when Sue Lane, up at Missoula County, called and asked if the FBI would
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help her out with another case. You'll find that when you work forensic genetic genealogy
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cases, there is a lot of work to be done. The building of the family trees in these cases
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can take weeks or months and the more manpower that you have, the better. And so, I think, Sue just needed some additional assistance
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and so she reached out and I was happy to jump in and help. SUSAN LANE: In order to do forensic genetic genealogy,
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you have to have a new DNA sample. You can't use the CODIS profile because it's,
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kind of, apples and oranges. So we had to check to see if anyone had any of her DNA sample from when they did the CODIS--
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the extract-- that we could use to further amplify and they didn't so then, we had to send
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her bones to a laboratory to try to do the extraction. STEVE BUNCH: Bode is a fantastic lab at doing extractions
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from bones and Bode was able to extract a large amount of DNA from these bones, but the quality was so bad
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that the array wouldn't run. And so, when you have that type of a situation, sequencing is the way to go and what we had determined
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was if you have bones-- skeletal remains that have been in the elements, contaminated,
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bacteria, over time, Othram was the best place to go in order to get a viable snip through sequencing,
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in this case. NANCY GRACE: A SNP profile, abbreviated SNP, stands for single nucleotide polymorphisms.
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Put simply, it's a generic variation among people that "Bloodline Detectives" can use
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to hone in on a victim's ancestry, helping to pinpoint their identity. SUSAN LANE: In January of 2021, we
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submitted the Christy Crystal Creek to Othram to do the whole genome sequencing.
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DAVID CONWAY: The profile that we received from Othram Labs was entered into two open sourced genealogy platforms.
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One gave a distant match, one gave a much closer match-- in fact, a first cousin.
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STEVE BUNCH: We got the matches back and we started building trees and the idea with all
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of these-- the goal in the beginning-- is always to connect matches. And once you start connecting matches, what I like to see--
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as the person doing the genealogy-- is we know that every human being has a mom and every human
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being has a dad and so, you want to find DNA that's going to come in through mom's line
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and find DNA that comes in through dad's line. And once you do that, once you find the DNA coming
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in from both sides of the equation, that's when you know you're in a very, very good spot.
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Sue and I were working together. It was actually late at night. I was working from home-- which is where a lot
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of the genealogy work gets done, is after hours at night on my laptop-- and Sue and I were working together one night
00:31:30
and we just-- she's a bulldog. She does not stop. I mean, she just wants to work all night long--
00:31:37
and it was late one night and we just, were on the phone, plowing back and forth, and we were
00:31:43
able to find the DNA coming in from both sides of the victim's family. And it was at that point, we knew
00:31:48
we had narrowed it down to a very, very small pool of potential candidates. NANCY GRACE: Finally after 35 years,
00:31:57
investigators closed in on identifying a victim they named, Christy Crystal Creek.
00:32:04
That's next, on "Bloodline Detectives." [MUSIC PLAYING] May 2021. Missoula County sheriff's cold case unit
00:32:20
identifies the likely family tree of an unidentified victim, Christy Crystal Creek,
00:32:26
through genetic genealogy. Her body was discovered back in 1985. She was shot and buried in a shallow grave.
00:32:38
SUSAN LANE: We had this family tree circle and then when we got the family Tree DNA hit--
00:32:45
which was a good hit-- we were able to build out their family tree. And when we overlay those two trees,
00:32:51
we saw that there was a maternal line here that crossed a paternal line here and it was that husband and wife,
00:32:59
we looked at all of their children because that's where the DNA would match. And so we were able to find a number of siblings and amongst
00:33:06
those was Janet Lucas and there was no record of her past 1983. So she became, kind of, our focus.
00:33:16
Let's look at her and be able to include or exclude her as Christy Crystal Creek.
00:33:22
STEVE BUNCH: Janet was the one that we just couldn't find any info on. She just wasn't anywhere in any of the databases
00:33:29
and so, it's tough to prove a negative. It's tough to prove that she doesn't exist right now, today,
00:33:34
in current times, but one of the resources that genealogists and investigators in this field find very,
00:33:40
very helpful is a website called newspapers.com and newspapers.com is fantastic for going
00:33:46
back in time and looking through old newspaper clippings-- I mean, really old newspaper clippings that have articles
00:33:53
posted about different things. And through newspapers, we were able to find a posting in one
00:34:00
of the papers that was notifying the public, saying, hey, we don't know where the mother of Janet's son
00:34:07
is currently located. It was a posting that was saying that custody of her son was going to go to these two other folks in her family.
00:34:16
And it was at that point, we realized that you wouldn't post something like that shortly after she went missing,
00:34:22
unless you didn't know where she was and, for me, that was the aha moment when, hey, this is the person who
00:34:28
we're really looking to find. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The cold case team finds a first cousin who is a match
00:34:35
and asks him for information about Janet Lucas and her whereabouts. He quickly confirms their suspicions.
00:34:45
He had a relative, Janet Lucas, who had gone missing in the mid-'80s. He also told us that Janet had a brother
00:34:52
and provided contact information for the brother. So we reached out to the brother to contact him,
00:34:58
to see if he had additional information about Janet-- was she, in fact, missing?
00:35:02
When was the last time he had seen her? And it turned out that he actually was with all of the siblings.
00:35:08
They were at a sibling reunion and so all of Janet's brothers and sisters were there and they were able to provide us
00:35:14
with information indicating the last time they had seen her was in March of 1983.
00:35:21
They were able to get DNA samples from her son and close relatives for a direct comparison match.
00:35:28
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Investigators get that DNA result from the lab and confirm Christy Crystal
00:35:34
Creek is, indeed, Janet Lucas. SUSAN LANE: She had finally been identified and it was emotional for all of her siblings, for everyone,
00:35:43
for her son, in particular. He had been looking for her for decades, since he became a parent, himself.
00:35:49
And he actually said that he had come across the Christy Crystal Creek profile on NamUs, but she was listed as an Asian female
00:35:57
so he discounted it. They went through a lot of the grief because they didn't know she was dead
00:36:04
so basically, we did a death notification. For us, it was identifying remains in a positive way.
00:36:10
For them, it was a death notification so it was hard because I think they had all held out some hope.
00:36:16
A number of them flew to Missoula after that notification and asked to go see where her body had been found so the detectives,
00:36:24
the captain of detectives, the chaplain took the family out to show where her body had been found.
00:36:31
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Detectives speak to Janet's family members and trace the circumstances
00:36:36
of her disappearance. The family had last seen her in March of 1983. Prior to that, she had been living with her brother--
00:36:46
her twin brother, Jimmy-- and his family, along with her son, as a single mother.
00:36:52
SUSAN LANE: She had not come home for a few days so he went to go find her and he found her at a bar drinking
00:36:58
with some friends and he had a confrontation, saying she needed to come home and be with her son.
00:37:03
And he left, thinking-- they had an argument, but he left thinking that she would be coming home--
00:37:09
she basically, assured him of that-- and then, she never came home and he never heard from her again after that and that was in March of 1983.
00:37:17
DAVID CONWAY: We knew that she had a boyfriend who lived in Northern Idaho. Years later, after she became missing,
00:37:23
he told extended family of hers that they had been hitchhiking together to Montana.
00:37:29
They got into an argument along the way and she got a ride and he didn't. Coincidentally, Wayne Nance and Janet Lucas
00:37:38
had the same month and day for date of birth. We know that Wayne Nance was a doorman at the Cabin
00:37:44
Bar in East Missoula. It was a common place for hitchhikers to wander into. SUSAN LANE: So if she's 21 at the time, she goes to the bar,
00:37:53
she gets carded, hears the bouncer-- hey, that's my same birth date. They might have established rapport right then.
00:38:02
We interviewed everyone from that time frame and no one could recognize Janet, had ever seen
00:38:08
Nance with Janet so there's no proof of that. As I say, it's hypothesizing a theory of the crime,
00:38:14
but the fact that she was found less than 2 miles away, same time frame, same manner of death, same manner of arrival
00:38:20
into Missoula that it leads us, more likely than not, the last friend she was seen with has passed away.
00:38:27
There was no evidence indicating that he had been there, that he had ever confessed to it,
00:38:32
that they were seen together. It just seems, more likely than not, she did hitchhike
00:38:37
and that's where she encountered Wayne Nance. DAVID CONWAY: There was never any specific item of evidence,
00:38:45
nor has there been yet, a specific item of evidence that linked Wayne Nance to Christy Crystal Creek.
00:38:51
However, because of the location of the body dump, because of the time frame that it occurred,
00:38:56
it's presumed that Christy Crystal Creek was an additional victim of Wayne Nance.
00:39:01
The nature of the death of these victims was extremely violent. We'll never know the full details or circumstances that
00:39:08
led up to the moments before their death, but we are glad to be able to finally get Janet's remains
00:39:15
back to her family to give them some closure and so that she can rest in peace. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Investigators,
00:39:24
thankful to finally lay this case to rest. SUSAN LANE: Forensic genetic genealogy, in this case,
00:39:34
brought that closure, brought that identification and she never would have been identified.
00:39:38
We had nothing. We had no perpetrator DNA. We had her DNA already in the existing system.
00:39:44
There was no personal effects. There was no casings. There were no missing persons.
00:39:50
There was nothing. We had followed every lead and Marta Timmons had dedicated probably, the last two
00:39:57
decades of her career to trying to identify Christy Crystal Creek DAVID CONWAY: Tragically, Marta Timmons
00:40:06
never got to see the result and the fruits of her labor. She passed away, just before we were able to positively
00:40:13
identify Janet Lucas. NANCY GRACE: There are so many times an investigation is never really finished
00:40:21
for "Bloodline Detectives." In the cases of Marci Bachmann and Janet Lucas, the Missoula County sheriff's cold case unit
00:40:29
did an incredible job identifying the two victims. Still, these dedicated professionals
00:40:36
want to know everything. Did the victims fight back? Did Wayne Nance claim other victims, who
00:40:44
identities still remain lost? They will continue to ask those questions and by doing so,
00:40:50
try to come to terms with the cases they take on. I'm Nancy Grace Thanks for joining us,
00:40:58
on "Bloodline Detectives." [MUSIC PLAYING]