Anatomy of a Serial Killer

From the missing-person report, Josserand read the name: Marcella Bachmann. Last contact: 5/1984, Vancouver, Washington. “All I could think was, ‘I wonder how this poor girl got from here to there?’ ” she says. Still, certainty depended on more family samples, ideally from the biological father. So the call went out to Derek Bachmann through Detective Crenshaw in King County. Crenshaw didn’t say anything about the bone from Missoula. “I gave him the spiel I give everyone, so as not to get hopes up,” he says. “ ‘The lab wants more DNA samples to make sure that if there’s a hit, they can narrow it down.’ ”

“I called up my dad,” Bachmann says, “and flat-out told him, ‘You have to do this. I have to know.’ ”

On March 22, 2006, the Center for Human Identification received two FedEx envelopes, one containing a cheek swab from Bachmann, the other from his father. The father’s nuclear DNA matched all of Debbie Deer Creek’s nuclear-DNA markers. To underscore the identification, Derek’s mtDNA, like that of his mother, proved identical.

Following protocol, the Center for Human Identification relayed the news to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which in turn called Missoula and Captain Hintz, who had submitted Debbie Deer Creek’s femur after Larry Weatherman’s retirement.

“I’ll never forget his call,” Bachmann says. “I was in a poker tournament and had to step outside.” As Hintz spoke, Bachmann suddenly realized that he didn’t want “closure” after all. “I instantly grasped the idea that he was finally calling back about the Web-site photo. I told him I’d been thinking about it, that the picture couldn’t have been my sister,” he recalls. “Well, he disabused me of that.”

The Final Identification

Almost exactly two years later, on this snowy March day in Missoula, Weatherman waits for Derek Bachmann to step out of the county truck they have borrowed for their second visit to the place where Weatherman unearthed Marci’s frozen remains on Christmas Eve 1984.

Bachmann shivers inside his leather jacket. The snow quickly saturates his sneakers as he follows the retired lawman a quarter of a mile through the woods to a bluff above the Clark Fork River. A grove of spindly conifers still surrounds the mossy depression that once held Marci’s body. “It was a lot harder the first time,” Bachmann says of the visit. “Yeah,” Weatherman acknowledges. “That was a hard one for you.”

From beyond the bluff comes the rumbling sound of construction—or rather, deconstruction—echoing up from the Milltown Dam below. A strip of orange and yellow surveyor flags marks a path past Marci’s gravesite to what will be a viewing platform directly above a river-restoration project. In addition to tearing out the old dam, the county plans to build a small park. Construction is due to begin in the spring. Bachmann has come back, in part, to ensure that nothing desecrates Marci’s spot. Perhaps he can even persuade the county to raise a small memorial, he proposes. Weatherman nods in agreement.

“I suppose you’re ready to put all this behind you,” Bachmann offers as the men head back to the truck. “I don’t suppose it ever will be,” Weatherman says, “until we get Christy identified.” At press time, DNA from Christy’s femur had been entered into the Center for Human Identification’s database of cold-case remains, as well as the national DNA database. She’s ready to be found.

Jessica Snyder Sachs is the author of Good Germs, Bad Germs, now out in paperback.