In the winter of 1984, sixteen-year-old Marcella Cheri "Marci" Bachman, a Caucasian female, vanished after running away from her home in Vancouver, Washington. Her departure stemmed from a troubled family life, a reality that her fifteen-year-old brother, Derek, understood all too well. He had escaped from a boys' home to speak with her before she left, a conversation that would haunt him for years as he wished he had tried to stop her.
Marcella's journey led her to Missoula, Montana, where she fell into the company of a man named Wayne Nance. For a time, she lived with him, using the name "Robin."
On Christmas Eve of 1984, a hiker in a wooded area near the Middleton Dam in Missoula County made a grim discovery. The partially exposed remains of a young woman were found in a shallow grave. She had been shot three times in the head. For years, her identity remained a mystery, and she became known to investigators as "Debbie Deercreek," a name derived from a nearby drainage basin. Her case grew cold, one of several unsolved homicides in the area that would eventually be linked to a single, sinister figure.
The man Marcella had been living with, Wayne Nance, was a suspected serial killer known as the "Missoula Mauler." Photographs of Marcella were found in Nance's possession, and hair similar to hers was discovered in his home. Nance claimed she had left the area around the time she was believed to have been killed. Before he could be brought to justice for the string of murders he was suspected of, Nance was killed in 1986 during a home invasion where he was attempting to murder another couple. With his death, the full extent of his crimes remained unconfirmed through a legal conviction, and the identity of "Debbie Deercreek" remained unknown.
For over two decades, Derek Bachmann never stopped looking for his sister. His search was a long and arduous one, filled with dead ends and painful possibilities. He even considered that she might have fallen victim to the Green River Killer. In the early 2000s, his search led him to the Doe Network, an online resource for missing and unidentified persons. In 2006, nearly twenty-two years after her body was found, a DNA match finally confirmed that the unidentified young woman was Marcella Cheri Bachman. The identification brought a painful end to her family's long search, finally allowing them to bring Marci's remains home and lay her to rest.
