The late fall and winter of 1985 was particularly cold across the northern United States. In November, after spending a few months with his son, David, and his family in Oregon, sixty-seven-year-old retired paper mill worker Dexter Stefonek began the long drive across six frigid states to his Wisconsin home. He only made it halfway.

Five months after departing Oregon, Dexter was found shot to death in eastern Montana. Over thirty-seven years later, his murder is one of the coldest cases from one of the coldest states.

Dexter Stefonek

The past few years had been hard for Dexter as the health of Vivian, his wife of forty-four years, deteriorated. Her death occurring on Christmas Day of 1984 was particularly hard.

The trip to Oregon had done Dexter good, as he relished the time with his grandchildren. They wanted grandpa to stay with them through the winter, as did David and his wife, or at least through the Christmas season so they could be with him on the one-year anniversary of Vivian’s death.

Dexter and Vivian

Dexter, however, wanted to be back home for the holiday. He began the nearly 2,000-mile drive from Oregon to his home in rural Rhinelander, Wisconsin, in the early morning hours of November 18. He told David he planned to pull into rest areas for napping instead of staying in motels.

Early the following day, Dexter was seen fueling his brown Plymouth Horizon at a gas station in Park City, Montana, eight-hundred-fifty miles into his trip. From there, his route home proved literally and figuratively bad.

A Long Route Home

Located off Interstate 94, the Bad Route Rest Area in southeastern Montana is twenty miles west of the town of Glendive, and approximately thirty miles from the North Dakota border.

The Bad Route Rest Area

Near Glendive, Montana

When Fred Siegle, the rest area’s custodian, arrived for work at 8:30 a.m. on November 19, he noticed an unoccupied pick-up parked at the facility.

Fifteen minutes later, highway maintenance supervisor Clyde Mitchell stopped at the rest area and also saw the truck, a white four-wheel drive Chevy with blue trim and a cowcatcher on the front. He noticed numerous clothes and bedding in the back and recalled the vehicle having Arizona license plates.

The Bad Route Rest Area had room for at least a dozen freight trucks and a few dozen cars, but other than employee vehicles, the Chevy was the only car there. The venue was mostly used by motorists as a pit stop; as the temperature was below zero, Fred and Clyde found it strange that the vehicle was parked far from the restrooms.

When Clyde left the Bad Route Rest Area to complete his rounds at 9:15 a.m., the pick-up was no longer there. Fifteen minutes later, as Fred was leaving the rest stop, he observed a brown Plymouth Horizon pull into the parking lot. The driver exited the vehicle, carrying two or three plastic gallon containers which Fred believed were milk jugs.

Fred asked the man if anything was wrong; he replied he had run out of gas. The containers apparently contained the fuel as the man began pouring them into the car’s tank.

                                                     

                      Fred Siegle,                                            Clyde Mitchell,

      Caretaker, Bad Route Rest Area                  Maintenance Supervisor,  

                                                                      Montana Department of Highways  

Half-an-hour later, Dawson County Sheriff Jim George was notified of a car on fire at the Bad Route Rest Area. When he arrived at the scene at 10:20 a.m., the inside of the vehicle was engulfed in flames.

The torched car was a Plymouth Horizon, determined to be the same car seen earlier by Fred Siegle and Clyde Mitchell. The vehicle was registered to Dexter Stefonek, but it was clear that he was not the man who drove the car to the rest stop.

Fred described the driver as thirty-five-to-forty years old, making him at least twenty-five years younger than Dexter, and being at least six feet tall; Dexter was only five-feet-five-inches tall. The driver’s seat of Dexter’s charred car was pushed all the way back indicating a man much taller than he had been driving.

An arson expert determined gasoline had recently been put into the car, not to fill it up, but to blow it up. The bulk of the gasoline had been poured on the car’s back seats.

Dexter’s Charred Car

When his burning car was found near Glendive, Montana, a little over twenty-four hours had passed since Dexter had departed Corbett, Oregon, nearly 1100 miles away and several hours after he was last seen filling his car with gas in Park City, two-hundred-twenty miles southwest of The Bad Area Rest Stop.

Deputies believed Dexter may have attempted to walk for help after running out of gas, only to perish in the harsh conditions, but area searches found no trace of him.

Dexter Disappears

Five months later, on March 8, 1986, local residents Bill and Cindy Shaw made a routine run to dump garbage at an area farmer’s private landfill seventeen miles northwest of the Bad Route Rest Area where Dexter’s car had been found ablaze.

Cindy was an artist and often found materials to use in her artwork at the landfill. On this day, however, she and Bill found something sinister.

 

Cindy Shaw

Cindy found a wallet on the ground. Inside was Dexter Stefonek’s driver’s license along with a substantial amount of money. As Bill and Cindy further searched the landfill, they found several scattered items of clothing and a suitcase which also contained money. After he picked up a boot, Bill saw a man’s foot sticking out from beneath a mattress.

Dental records identified the body as that of Dexter Stefonek. He had been shot twice in the back of his head, execution style, with a large-caliber pistol. He also had bruises on his hands, throat, and the front of his skull, all appearing to have resulted from a “pistol-whipped” beating prior to the shooting.

The suitcase and clothing items found by the Shaw’s at the landfill were identified as Dexter’s. They were in good condition, appearing to have only been recently discarded, and the Shaw’s had not seen any of those items when they had been to the landfill the previous week.

Conversely, after completing the autopsy, Dawson County Coroner Lance Silha believed Dexter’s body had probably been at the dumpsite from the time his car was found burning.

 

Dexter’s Driver’s License

Because the landfill where Dexter’s body was found was remote and known to be used by only a few people, authorities believe the killer was someone familiar with the area.

Dexter’s Body Lay Buried in the Debris

One week later, pencil-written graffiti was found on the wall in the men’s rest room of the Bad Route Rest Area. The note read “HOT JOCK SHOT WAD FROM WISCONSIN 11/85 SATURDAY THE 3rd”.

Police believed the graffiti is a reference to Dexter’s murder. “HOT JOCK” may be a trucker’s CB handle and “WISCONSIN” may refer to Dexter’s home state. The “SATURDAY THE 3rd” is not clear, as November 3, 1985, a Sunday, was two weeks before Dexter was last seen.

It was never determined who wrote the graffiti.

A Cryptic Reference to Dexter’s Murder?

The man seen parking Dexter’s Plymouth at the Bad Route Rest Stop is suspected of murdering him there. Afterwards, authorities believe the killer hid Dexter’s body in the landfill and then returned to the Bad Route Rest Area, doused Dexter’s car with gasoline, and set it on fire in an effort to destroy evidence. He may have been a hitchhiker who was picked up by Dexter.

The suspect is believed to have been between thirty-five and forty-years-old in 1985, making him in his late mid-to-late-seventies today. He was at least six feet tall, clean shaven, and had a light complexion. Authorities do not have enough of a description to produce a composite sketch.

The suspect’s vehicle was a white Chevy 4 x 4 truck, with a long Hawaiian blue horizontal stripe on its side. It had a white camper shell top and a cattle guard on the front bumper. It is believed to be approximately a 1976 model.
Clyde Mitchell saw that the truck had Arizona license plates, with a Phoenix plate holder. Under hypnosis, he recalled the first three numbers of the license plate were 147. Investigators found two-hundred-seventy-nine vehicles in Arizona with those numbers. They narrowed the possibilities to sixty plates but could not link any of them to Dexter’s murder.

Clyde also recalled the vehicle had gold hubcaps, bucket seats, chrome bumpers, and may have had tinted windows. The bedding and clothes in the back of the truck suggested that someone was sleeping in it.

A Drawing of the Suspect’s Vehicle

In addition to visiting his son’s family in Oregon, Dexter had traveled to the Pacific Northwest to see his friend, Arnold Gratias, in Washington. The men made arrangements to deliver several cars they had purchased to Wisconsin.

Following his wife’s death, Dexter had developed a close relationship with Arnold’s recently divorced thirty-four-year-old daughter, Amy Heyn. She and her five children, to whom Dexter had also grown close, lived in Rhinelander. Though she liked Dexter, Amy had recently rejected his marriage proposal because of their over thirty-year age difference.

Arnold Gratias and Amy Heyn were cleared on any involvement in Dexter’s murder.

Proposal Turned Down

Unconfirmed reports recently posted on websleuth sites claim an unidentified man serving a life sentence for murder in a Nevada prison allegedly made statements to his cellmates suggesting his involvement in Dexter’s murder.

Serial killer Wayne Nance, also known as “The Missoula Mauler,” is also a person of interest in Dexter’s murder. The Clinton, Montana, native was posthumously linked to six Montana murders occurring between 1974-86.

On September 3, 1986, Nance shot and stabbed his employer, Doug Wells, inside his Missoula home and proceeded to begin raping his wife, Kris. Doug managed to load a gun and shoot Nance, who died the following day. Doug ultimately recovered from his wounds.

It was only after Nance’s death that physical evidence was discovered linking him to the six murders.

Wayne Nance

On November 19, 1985, the day Dexter Stefonek was last seen, the wind chill factor in Montana reached sixty degrees below zero. Thirty-eight years after meeting a brutal end during the brutally cold Montana winter, his murder is a cold case, literally and figuratively, as investigators say they have received few clues in recent years.

If you have believe you have any information on the murder of Dexter Stefonek, please contact the Dawson County Montana Sheriff’s Department at (406) 377-5291.

Cold Case

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/51244320

SOURCES:

• Billings Gazette
• Eau Claire Leader
• Green Bay Press-Gazette
• Madison State Journal
• Havre (Montana) Daily News
• Kalispell (Montana) Daily Inter Lake New
• The Missoulian
• Unsolved Mysteries
• Wausau Daily Herald