Town note
The town was originally in Oregon before the boundary was moved.
about 0:07:43The story
Denio is a census-designated place of about 47 people in Humboldt County, in north-western Nevada, pressed against the Oregon border at almost 4,100 feet. The murders in this episode did not happen in Denio itself. They happened out in the Black Rock Desert at Pinto Hot Springs, with Denio the last town on the road in.
His parents fought the petition and he stayed a Gress. He was a handsome, athletic, well-liked schoolboy, graduated in 1953, and worked for Boeing as a computer programmer before, some time between 1953 and 1963, he went to pieces. By 1963 he was farming potatoes in Oregon and telling everybody that 300 women wanted to marry him.
In 1966 he was institutionalised after a standoff in which his father came at him with a knife and he answered with a shotgun. He was diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic and hospitalised more than once between 1966 and 1968. When a game warden told him it was not duck season, he announced that he was an army general on a special mission, with federal authority to open the hunting season for himself, then put a 12-gauge in the warden's face and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired.
In 1970 a premature dynamite blast twelve miles north of the Quinn River crossing, near Orovada, took most of his right hand and part of his left. He lost two fingers and walked twelve miles down a switchback road to a ranch kitchen, where the cook fainted at the sight of him. The miners started calling him Three Fingers. A second nickname, Straight Gut, came from the night he ate twelve sandwiches and a whole jar of peanut butter at Jess Miller's place.
He drifted further out. He settled at Pinto Hot Springs, where there was no 14-day limit on public land in those days. He dug a two-room, eight-by-ten-foot home into the ground beside the spring, piped hot water into it and irrigated two gardens with fruit trees. He kept chickens in an old car and fed them oatmeal and popcorn while he went hungry. He ate roadkill and meat from the dump, and walked fifty or seventy miles to Denio for his 185-dollar monthly disability cheque. Locals feared him. In April 1977 a Bureau of Land Management employee, Hal Green, told him he was trespassing. Gress produced a shotgun and said he would rather shoot than talk about it. The BLM decided not to evict him, on the grounds that he would only go somewhere else.
Richard Weese was 40, a Colorado prospector and former computer programmer who had been chasing a family treasure map since he was a boy. His father had acquired a map of the Blue Bucket treasure, the gold a wagon train was said to have lost in the Black Rock Desert in 1845. Richard had made two trips already. On August 31st, 1977, he married Judy Warren, a 31-year-old former real-estate worker, on her birthday.
On June 6th, 1978, Richard and Judy left Colorado on another hunt, driving through Montana, Idaho and Washington, with Judy telephoning home every four days. On June 15th they took a room at the Denio hotel for five dollars a night. On June 16th Judy called her brother and said they hoped to be home in two days for a wedding, then they drove out to look for the claim.
They never came back. When they had not returned within five days, the hotel clerk called the sheriff. Meanwhile Pete Cacenaut, a 75-year-old French-born trapper and prospector who lived in a cabin in the hills, came by to soak his rheumatism in the spring. He found two bodies lying less than a hundred yards from Gress's dugout, and Gress came up out of the ground and shot him with a 30-30.
On a Saturday morning two men rockhounding at Pinto Mountain Hot Springs found three corpses and drove to Winnemucca to report them. Deputies, a coroner and the media went out. It was the coldest spot in the nation that day and the machine would not do more than ten miles an hour, so four-wheel-drive patrol cars boxed him in after three warning shots. He raised his hands and said, "I don't know a thing about it."
The Weeses had been shot with a 22 brush gun that a friend had given him to shoot coyotes; Pete with the 30-30. The poodle was shot as well. The bodies had lain in the sun for at least eight days, and Pete's autopsy showed he had died several days before the couple. The treasure map was never found. A single 22 casing near Judy's body matched Gress's rifle because the firing pin had been replaced with a screw, leaving a distinctive mark.
He was sent to Lakes Crossing Mental Hospital. In August 1979 he was declared competent. Psychiatrists fought over whether the schizophrenia was in remission. Lane called him a man who killed to cover up killings; the defence called him a paranoid schizophrenic who had fled society in an intelligent attempt to isolate himself.
The episode then follows a second story out of the same desert. The opening was six feet deep and two feet high, on a steep seventy-five-foot run of broken volcanic rock. They dug it with shovels, five-gallon buckets and a sifting screen. In 1984 they unearthed a burden basket and a conical basket, and inside were the remains of two children, a boy of about four and a girl of about ten, buried roughly 2,000 years ago. Pam scrubbed the baskets clean with pine cleaner and the s kept the bodies.
When that failed he arranged to have Olds killed. Two men took Olds to Gardner Ridge, dug a shallow grave in front of him, put him in it, took photographs and then helped him out, because they were police officers staging the murder.
Richard and Judy Weese are buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Longmont, Colorado. Pete Cacenaut is buried in Winnemucca.