The Nameless
Christy Crystal Creek was around 20 when she left home somewhere in the southeast U.S. and started hitchhiking. She stepped out of a semi-truck in the parking lot of a bar and went inside. Soon, she met Wayne Nance, who later shot her twice — point blank, execution style — and left her body in the woods.
Maybe.
No one knows what happened to Christy, or if they do, they’re not saying. In September 1985, a bear hunter found skeletal remains scattered across a hillside near East Missoula. When investigators arrived, all they found were the bones, two bullets lodged in the skull and small tufts of hair. There were no personal items like clothing or a purse, only the bare bones of Christy, and no one knew who she was.
Very little is known about the body of Jane Doe 3UFMT, nicknamed “Christy Crystal Creek” after the road near where her body was found. Nothing is known about how she ended up dead on a hillside outside Missoula, or why she arrived there in the first place. Even her age is an educated guess; she could have been anywhere between 19 and 21.
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The only absolute things about her are the two .32-caliber bullets that ended her life.
Sydney Bacon, 43, chose to study Christy’s remains for her forensic anthropology master’s thesis in 2004 at the University of Montana. Her choice to study Christy was motivated, in part, by the criminal aspect of the case. But what intrigued her most was the mystery surrounding Christy’s life and death.
Bacon hoped studying the bones would nail down some facts about the woman’s identity. And she hoped, even though she says she shouldn’t have, that she might be the one to finally identify the body.
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She concluded Christy was indeed female, between 4-foot-11 and 5-foot-2. The width of her hips indicated she may have once been pregnant, even given birth.
She died between 1983 and 1985.
She had light brown, wavy hair most likely treated with a perm.
She underwent extensive and rare dental surgeries up until approximately a year before her death. She probably smoked cigarettes, staining one side of her mouth.
Christy’s body proved she had been well taken care of for most of her life. And now, she was forgotten. She’s been stuck in a box, in an evidence locker, for 30 years.
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Since Christy’s death, it has been assumed — thanks to books like John Coston’s “To Kill and Kill Again: The Terrifying True Story of Montana’s Baby-Faced Serial Sex Murderer” — that she was a victim of Wayne Nance. Nance, who allegedly murdered four people in the Missoula area before dying in the botched attempted murder of Kris and Doug Wells, cannot be definitively linked to Christy’s murder. The only major connection between Christy and Nance’s other victims is the area where their bodies were found. Nance dumped two murder victims linked to him outside East Missoula, near Turah.
“We can try to assume [Christy was Nance’s victim],” said Judge Robert Deschamps, 75, of Missoula, Montana. “But we can’t know for sure.”
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Christy was found in the wintertime, but her body might have been exposed to the elements for two years.
The Nameless