Town note
Geraldine was originally created as a stop on the Milwaukee Railroad.
about 0:05:14The story
Dr Brian Rein was born on Valentine's Day 1965 in Rocky Ford, Colorado, and grew up there and in Sugar City before his family moved to Scott City, Kansas, in 1975. He attended Colby Community College from 1983 and then Kansas State University, and worked at the Sork Veterinary Clinic in Scott City before moving to Geraldine, Montana, in 1994. There he and his sister Charlene owned and ran Prairie's Edge Veterinary Services, with an auxiliary office in Denton, and he rented an isolated trailer on land owned by Richard and Marlene Prostman. Marlene helped set up the clinic and became its office manager.
Anne Wishman, born in 1974, came from a farm family on the outskirts of Geraldine. Both had attended college in Bozeman, and his family leased a farm in the area. In December 1995 the couple moved into an apartment in Great Falls.
In May 1996 Anne and Brian spent an evening talking and agreed to talk again. Earlier that month Brian had cancelled a last-minute trip to Yellowstone and Jodi had gone alone, taking a job in Gardiner on the way home.
He telephoned Anne's friend Trish Judeman, her friend Heather Buck in Washington and her sister Marie in Illinois, pouring out his grief and warning that Brian was using her. Marie learned that he had let himself into Anne's house and read her diary, and that he had driven past Brian's trailer at two in the morning and seen Anne's car there. Anne asked him for space on 5 June, and he then invited her away for the weekend on 6 and 7 June and was refused each time. On 8 June he turned up at the Wishman farm as she was getting ready for a dance, brought a bottle and drank in the yard when she would not go for a drive. She spent that night at Brian's trailer.
At 3.22 a.m. he telephoned Brian's house asking for her, then her Great Falls apartment, then drove to the trailer and knocked; Brian told him she was not there. At six that morning he telephoned again pretending to be her brother Carl, and when Anne came to the phone he called her a tramp, a slut and a whore. She hung up, he called back, apologised and admitted reading her diary.
On 18 June a large rock was thrown through the clinic window. On 24 June Anne told him to stop bothering her family and friends, and the hang-up calls continued. On 9 July Anne saw headlights turn into Brian's driveway at 2.30 a.m. and leave again.
At 9.30 p.m. a hang-up call reached Anne's apartment, made from Randy's telephone, and at 9.45 p.m. Brian's telephone rang and the caller hung up when he answered. At 10.15 p.m. Anne's friend Kelly Hines rang Brian so that Anne could hear his answering machine; Brian answered, spoke to Anne until about 10.40 p.m., then said abruptly that he had to go and hung up. A neighbour, Bill Spevisek, heard what sounded like two pistol shots at dusk, which in mid-July came around ten o'clock, and saw an unidentified man riding a dark green ATV towards Brian's trailer.
On 13 July Anne telephoned repeatedly from nine in the evening until one in the morning but the line was busy. On 14 July at about ten in the morning Richard Prostman went to the trailer, found Brian's car there, went in and found him dead on the kitchen floor, lying on his back with his legs crossed at the ankles and his own .357 Magnum near his left hand. He drove home and had his wife call 911; Marlene went in, saw the injuries and said he had not shot himself but had been in a fight. Brian had two gunshot wounds to his right arm and one contact wound to the right side of his chest, which was fatal, plus abrasions to his forehead and the bridge of his nose, a swollen right eye and a contusion behind his right ear, and his outer shirt was torn.
The crime scene was then destroyed. Nothing was taken from the trailer. The death was initially treated as a suicide, which Brian's grandmother rejected, and it was the first homicide in the area for nineteen years.
On 24 July investigators searching the ground found the leather gun case for the .357 in tall grass about 85 feet from the trailer, and a patch of trampled grass in the shelter belt from which the back door could be watched unseen. He was interviewed again on 4 April 1998, admitted setting his alarm clock to wake after the bars closed so he could check on Anne and Brian, and admitted using different vehicles, including the ATV, for drive-bys.
The prosecution portrayed a jealous stalker and relied on circumstantial evidence; the defence, Jennifer Striano, argued that the crime scene had been destroyed, that the surviving trace evidence did not match her client, and that the time of death might have been Saturday rather than Friday. Anne, now Ann Stone, testified. A hair belonging to her was found on Brian's hand and DNA from an unidentified person was found in his underwear. Larry Hagenbuck, a friend from Kansas, had told a counsellor the day after the body was found that Brian had been shot with his own gun, and the defence suggested that he or Anne might be responsible.