Terror in a Top Hat Undoes Town

There are few clues, except the most unsettling one: a tall man in a long, dark coat and a black hat who walked through this small Western town in the Bitterroot Valley one morning this week, and then brazenly walked out again. When he left, three women in the local beauty salon were dead, their throats slashed.

So far, a witness who saw the hatted man near the scene of the killings is the only lead Sheriff Perry Johnson has. There was no apparent robbery, no argument that anyone knows of.

It is a case that has terrified this community and mystified police, who are tracking down sightings of the man all up and down the valley--before he disappeared, it seems, off the face of the earth.

“We’re trying everything and anything,” Johnson said Thursday. “There were people out and about that saw this man afterwards. He went into an alley, out on the road, down another road, and eventually across country,” where he seemed to slip into the wind. A dog lost his scent down on One Horse Creek Road.

A customer stumbled on the bodies of the Hair Gallery’s owner, Dorothy Harris, 62; the manicurist, Brenda Patch, 44; and 71-year-old Cynthia Ann Paulus, a customer. The woman said she had seen a man in a dark coat and hat outside the salon before she entered.

In a town like most small Western towns, where everybody knows almost everybody else, there is a feeling not only of fear--will he come back?--but invasion. Sudden, violent death is a part of the landscape in this land of ranchers and hunters, but not random death, not three ladies gossiping over nails and hair on the main street of town on a bright Tuesday morning.

“It’s like this terrorism thing, in a way. It’s on your mind all the time. Everything is unraveling,” said Joanne Watling, who lives on a rutted residential street behind the Hair Gallery in a small house with pumpkins on the front porch.

“In 12 years of living here, I’ve never locked my door. Now, I’ve had to look around for my key. The fact that it seems like it was almost a random type thing--that’s what’s so scary,” Watling said.

Police say they are not ruling out any possibility. They are carefully debriefing relatives to explore the possibility of someone having a grudge, scrutinizing similar crimes from the past, looking at robbery as a motive.

The problem, said Johnson, is that nothing appeared to be stolen from the small beauty shop--no cash, no equipment--except for two things: a pair of smocks, the kind that get draped around a customer’s shoulders to collect falling hair.

“The family when they looked around said there were a couple of them missing: one gold and one black,” the sheriff said. His comment on that clue was a raised eyebrow.

Neighbors said Harris had owned the building on U.S. 93--the main highway that bisects the Bitterroot Valley out of Missoula--for years. She had tried to make a go of it as a second-hand shop, one neighbor said, but that was before all the wealthy transplants from California and Washington started building big houses out in the valley.

Harris turned it into a beauty salon a few years ago, and contracted with Patch to do nails. She put a red, white and blue barber’s pole outside, and a lighted yellow highway sign: “HAIR CUTS. $10 AND UP.” Since Sept. 11, she’d had a poster of the American flag in the window.

Patch moved out toward Stevensville to get away from the bustle of Missoula, 16 miles north of Florence, said her friend, Joanette Thies. In the house she shared with her husband of 24 years, you could sit outside and watch the summer thunderstorms rage over the top of the Bitterroots. “Oh, God, it was our own theater,” Thies said.

Patch had two grown children and a 2-year-old grandson who adored her, who called her “Maga.”

Thies remembers just last week, when Patch was working late, waiting for a customer after dark. “I said, ‘Aren’t you afraid to be in here alone?’ She said, ‘No, nobody’s going to hurt me.’ Brenda wasn’t afraid. She just didn’t have that mentality that someone would do something like this. But she was a fighter. She didn’t give any [trouble], but she didn’t take any either. I figure Brenda put up a good fight.”

Paulus’ family also describes her with a similar kind of energy. She was 71, but she golfed regularly, raised quarter horses, gardened. She never left home without a fishing pole in her trunk, and when she’d spot a good hole alongside the road, she’d look over longingly.

She never missed a University of Montana game--in fact, she may have rescheduled her regular Friday nail appointment to Tuesday so she could look nice for Tuesday night’s basketball game, said her daughter, Cindy Shannon, one of four children and four stepchildren Paulus left behind.

Thursday afternoon, the family gathered and tried to understand what had happened.

“The detective said yesterday this guy definitely isn’t from here,” said son Bub Hobitt.

Jerry Paulus, her husband, agreed. “A typical Montana thing, a shooting would be common for somebody from Montana. . . . In Montana, many of the fights are by hand. There’s an argument between two guys, and they kill each other. But ladies demand respect, and the locals respect ladies.”

That’s why when the tall man in the topcoat and the hat walked by Tuesday, Ken--he didn’t want to use his last name, with the suspect still at large--knew it wasn’t somebody from Florence.

Ken, a retired Marine in a cowboy hat, was sitting in the bar at the Wild River, where he meets friends every morning for breakfast. It was 10:30 a.m.--just about the time of the murders.

The man walking by in the parking lot, he said, was wearing a black or dark-colored cowboy duster--a mid-calf-length coat with slits in the front and the back so you can ride a horse in it. He was wearing a dark hat, he said.

“The thing that set me off a little bit, what caught my attention, was he didn’t have a Stetson like the boys around here wear,” said Ken. “It was kind of a cross between a fedora and an Australian outback hat--the kind of thing that didn’t fit around here.

“So I lean back to look at him, and he’s walking through the parking lot in a purposeful manner, heading north. . . . He didn’t stop. He just headed up the highway. The thing is, this guy didn’t fit the mold here.”

Others around town saw the man walk up a few back streets and hike out across the fields. Later, miles to the south, near Darby, someone says they saw the man in the hat hitchhiking on the highway.

The thing is, was it him? Or another man in a hat? And what did the coat and hat look like? Sheriff Johnson said the witness at the beauty salon described a man in a suit coat and a hat--”you know, those kind of short top hats they used to wear in the movies when they were dancing with canes?”--that didn’t sound like the hat Ken saw.

Johnson sent an artist out to talk to the witnesses Thursday, to put together a composite sketch. Deputies were out on the highway, following a bloodhound down the railroad tracks across the highway on One Horse Creek Road. But the dog looked bored.