Shootings in Anaconda, Montana

I heard about this mass shooting, from August 8th, recently even as I do not subscribe to newspapers. For some reason, information reaches me. I do check in on the Billings Gazette of my hometown, but am not a subscriber. I cannot access anything but the teaser article in the beginning.

Once upon a time, I was able to click on the teaser, and the story would appear for a brief instant before being covered by a banner. I would quickly hit control A (select all) and control C (copy) and capture the story, which I would reprint on Microsoft Word. I said to myself at the time, “Don’t let on about this! Don’t tell them you can do it.” But then one day the cover-up banner appeared so quickly that I could no longer perform this exercise. My only way of accessing content was to subscribe, and I am often intrigued by stories, but cannot force myself to push that button.

In this story, four people were shot and killed at the Owl Bar, 819 E 3rd St., Anaconda, Montana. It happened at 10:30 in the morning on August 8th. “Sounds fake!” I immediately thought.

Here they are, left to right Daniel Edwin Bailee, 59; David Allen Leach, 70, Nancy Lauretta Kelley, 64, and Tony Wayne Palm, 74. I looked them all up on Ancestry.com, and they all turn up as Anaconda residents. But there are issues:

One, for all but Palm, there are no photos, and for Palm the photos do not match what we see here, that is, he has full lips. See to the left here.

It’s easy to see the photos do not match, Palm above on the far right, with this boy. Even as youthful photos cannot be used to compare against adults, I think it safe to say that patrons of the Owl Bar at 10:30 in the morning have not had liposuction surgery. (Lip removal?)

There is, however, another photo of Palm on Ancestry, seen to the right here. The lips are thinner, so we might have some confusion at Ancestry. There is no facial match at all between the two, the man far right above and the boy to the right. Furthermore, I think we can all see that the two boys here are no match.

Also, within Ancestry, there is confusion about residence, with Daniel E. Baillee, far left above, living in Anaconda from 2003-2020 (nothing beyond 2020 on any of these people), and in Deer Lodge, Montana from 2009-2019. David Allen Leach is said to have lived in Kalispell, Montana from 1996-2009, Las Vegas from 2012-2013, Lakewood, Colorado 2000-2008 and in 1996 in Boise, Idaho. Tony Wayne Palm spent his whole life in Texas.

That’s all very confusing. I am not very good at this stuff. I tried using Instant Checkmate, Intelius, Radaris and MyLife, but I did not get results and sensed that I was going to be in for a long wait before they demanded a credit card number. I use Ancestry because my wife has it, but I don’t necessarily trust it.

What about the shooter? His name is Michael Paul Brown, and right away I noticed he was on the lam, and that 38 various cops were looking for him. That’s one of those spook numbers, which is what made me curious at the outset.

That is a photo taken (I am guessing) by a security camera outside the Owl. It is a color photo and has good detail even as it gets a bit blurry in my rendition. Nothing wrong there. He is certainly fit, and wearing underpants. Supposedly he lived next door to the Owl Bar, so that might explain why he did not bother to dress before he did the massacre. I always like to be presentable when I murder people. 

This is as far as I got. I could do no more, and what I did confused me. There was nothing in all the confusion from Ancestry that said “hoax,” just bad data. I first wondered how the news people managed, and quickly, to get full frontal facial shots of the victims. However, I then thought  these are our times. These could be from Facebook. We all have them, except me, who is banned for life. 

I assumed, from what I gathered in my brief research, that this massacre might be a real one. By the way, I wondered too if we were dealing with day drinkers, since they were at a bar at 10:30 AM on a Friday, but not necessarily. It could easily be a gathering place for old friend’s for coffee each morning. 

Anaconda, by the way, is as I recall a dreary, small, impoverished town about 25 miles from Butte. There was once a smelter there that took ore from Butte’s Berkeley Pit. They built a smokestack, and at 585 feet it is the tallest (surviving) masonry structure in the world. It is now a park, and not one I would visit. Is there a gift shop at the bottom of the stack?

That’s as far as I got, and even as it all looked suspicious to me, I had to let it go. However, I decided to contact Miles Mathis, and within a couple of hours received the following reply:

First clue: captured on August 8, 8/8.  For the rest of aces and eights:

The suspect was captured on August 8 on a property adjacent to Montana Highway 1 west of Anaconda. Authorities had announced a $10,000 reward for information on his whereabouts.^[1]

Three ones there to go with our eights.

Second clue: Owl Bar, the owl being a big signal of Intel, since the owl is the bird of Lilith, consort of Satan.  

Third clue: suspect was born on Halloween.  He is army and national guard.  

That’s good enough for me. I’ll let it go for my part, and hope readers here can add more. 

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By the way, when writing these days in WordPress, I am forced to use what they call their “Gutenberg” format, which is extremely difficult. It is easy to lose things, and some commands I often use are not available. WordPress tells us it is state of the art, but I think back to when Microsoft Excel replaced Lotus, which I thought was far superior. WordPress Classic format is easy to use, and nothing ever disappears on me, except now the Classic format.