Nearly 22 years later, there's still a slight depression on the Deer Creek hill where Missoula serial killer Wayne Nance laid one of his victims.
"Well, at least it's a pretty view," Derek Bachmann said Monday as he walked away from the forested site where his older sister, Marci, was found dead on Christmas Eve 1984.
Tears then came to Bachmann's eyes, and he walked away, back to the gravel road that winds above the Milltown Dam.
"All right, I think I'm done out here," he said.
Bachmann, his brother Troy, and their stepbrother, Tony Barnes, made the trip to Missoula over the weekend to meet past and present officers of the Missoula County Sheriff's Department who played a role in investigating Nance and, eventually, identifying the woman who for two decades was known as "Debbie Deer Creek."
"I don't want our sister to be just another victim of Wayne Nance," Derek Bachmann said.
To that end, the 36-year-old Bachmann described his sister as a loving, caring young woman who was always there for him.
"Marci was a kind and gentle and loving individual," Bachmann said. " Š She has been the light out at the end of the tunnel."
Bachmann wasn't in Missoula to talk about the family life that drove Marci from her mother's home in Vancouver, Wash. He simply wanted her remembered as the sister who was always there.
"I can't remember a day I haven't thought of her," he said.
The teenage Marci, her brother's "beam of light," ran away from her mother's home sometime in 1983. In the late summer of 1984, Marci stepped out of a long-haul trucker's cab and into the door of the Cabin Bar in East Missoula, where Nance occasionally worked as a doorman.
By late September, she was dead, buried in a shallow grave just off Deer Creek Road above the dam. Her body was found about three months later by a photographer, but authorities couldn't identify her. She was 16.
That identity eluded investigators for nearly 22 years, but earlier this month a series of DNA tests led to the positive identification of Debbie Deer Creek.
"It's one of the most important things law enforcement can do," Larry Weatherman, the county's former undersheriff said late last week. "It brings closure."
Weatherman worked on the Nance case years ago, and he continued to do follow-up work on Marci Bachmann's identity, even after he was retired.
The first big break in the Nance case came about two years after Bachmann, who was calling herself Robin when she arrived in East Missoula, was killed. On Sept. 4, 1986, Nance was killed during a failed attempt to kill his boss at Conlin's Furniture and her husband.
While investigating that incident, investigators learned that Nance had killed before, possibly many times. They even found a picture of the young woman now identified as Marci Bachmann, but couldn't match that photograph to any known missing persons report.
Unfortunately, Bachmann's name had been taken off the missing persons list kept by the National Crime Information Center earlier that year because of a report that she had been seen near Seattle.
Derek Bachmann said he'd spent the last 12 years trying to find out what happened to his sister. He combed Internet sites about missing people and called and sent letters to hundreds of law enforcement agencies. He hired a private investigator, and got nothing but a "lighter wallet" for his trouble.
"Of all those calls, I only got two calls back," he said.
One of those calls came from Raphael Crenshaw, a King County, Wash., sheriff's detective assigned to work on the Green River serial killings. The other came from Greg Hintz, captain of detectives at the Missoula County Sheriff's Department.
Crenshaw had come across Marci's file while investigating the Green River killer, Gary Ridgeway, who admitted murdering 48 women between 1982 and 1998. Crenshaw tracked down Marci's mother, Beverly Charlton, who confirmed that her daughter was still missing and who provided a DNA sample.
Crenshaw eventually gathered other DNA samples from family members, and a lab at the University of North Texas, working with a federal grant to help solve cold cases, matched those samples to evidence that Missoula County authorities had submitted to the same lab. The news came April 6.
While the family is somewhat relieved to finally know what happened, Derek Bachmann said he'd been dismayed to learn how incomplete the NCIC's list of missing persons is. Although each unsolved case is difficult for different reasons, Bachmann said it's sad to realize the sheer number of unidentified bodies in this country, a number close to 40,000.
"It's really sad when you think about it," he said.
On Monday, Bachmann placed a bunch of red roses in the mossy hole that once held his sister. But he said he'll remain involved in efforts to fine-tune the nation's system of keeping track of its missing citizens.
"I plan to be involved," he said. "This is bigger than Marci, bigger than our family."
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com.
