Montana 1993 Cold Case Solved – Killer Was Hiding In Plain Sight For 33 Years 

The man who organized the search party for Terri Lynn Mace killed her. He printed the flyers. He divided the county into search grids and handed them out at the volunteer table in the Hardin High School gymnasium on the morning of March 11th, 1993. He drove the gravel roads east of town at 5:00 in the morning for 3 days straight.

 He stood at the graveside when they buried her, head bowed in the third row. He drove her fiance grief counseling. He sat at the Mace family’s kitchen table and accepted coffee from Terri’s mother and told her he was going to do everything he could. That is not a story about a community coming together in the worst moment it had known.

 That is a story about a man who understood with extraordinary precision that the safest place to hide from an investigation is inside the grief of the people being investigated. It would take 33 years, a VH camcorder, a digitizing kit from an electronic store, and a moment caught in the background of someone else’s happiness to finally expose what Scott Dempsey had spent those 33 years making sure no one could see.

But before we get to any of that, we have to go back to Hardin, Montana in the winter of 1993. Because to understand what was taken from this community, you first have to understand who Terri Lynn Mace was. In early March in Hardin, Montana, winter does not leave so much as it loosens its grip. The Bighorn River was still carrying shelf ice when Terri Lynn Mace drove to work on the morning of March 9th, 1993.

And the brown prairie grass on the long flat stretches east of town was just beginning to push back against the mud. Spring in Bighorn County announces itself gradually and without ceremony. A degree of warmth here, a stubborn patch of green there, and the people who live there had long since learned not to trust it until May.

Harden had a population of around 3,400 in 1993, the kind of town where the grain elevator on Center Street was both an employer and a landmark, where the high school football schedule determined the social calendar from August to November, and where a new face in the diner on Second Street would be noticed and gently interrogated within 20 minutes.

Ranching families had been in Big Horn County for three and four generations. You did not move away without explanation. You helped when someone needed help. You showed up. Terry Lynn Mace had grown up here. She was 26 years old, the daughter of Gene and Ruth Mace, who ran a small cow-calf operation 12 miles south of town.

Her older brother Wade had taken over the ranch work after their father’s health began to slow. Terry had gone to Eastern Montana College in Billings for her teaching degree and come straight back to Harden, which some of her college friends found surprising, and which Terry found self-evident. She wanted to teach here.

She wanted to be somewhere she knew. She had been teaching second grade at Harden Elementary for 2 years. And in that time, she had become one of those teachers a school feels differently without. She kept a cassette player on the shelf beside her desk, and during afternoon free reading time, she played audiobooks.

Charlotte’s Web, Little House on the Prairie, Where the Red Fern Grows, and the classroom was always quiet in a way that was not the silence of obedience, but the silence of children who were genuinely somewhere else. Her students called her Miss T. Several of them, now adults in their late 30s and early 40s, still do.

She had started an after-school reading club for the girls in her class who were struggling with confidence. It met on Tuesdays. There were seven members. They had a handshake. She had also, six weeks before her death, gotten engaged. Kevin Holloway was a mechanic at the Bighorn County Road Department, a quiet and steady man who had been in love with Terry Mace since they were in high school together, and had, by general community consensus, been remarkably patient about it.

They had been together for two years. The ring, a simple round solitaire that Terry had told her mother she would have chosen herself, even if she’d been given the catalog, had been on her finger since January. She wore it everywhere. She was not shy about it. At the engagement party, held at the Mace family house the last Saturday of January, Kevin’s best friend since high school drove out from town and stood in the living room and smiled and shook Kevin’s hand.

His name was Scott Dempsey. He worked at the grain elevator. He had been part of Kevin’s life for 15 years, which meant he had been part of the furniture of Terry’s life as well, appearing at cookouts and birthday gatherings and the kinds of casual shared occasions that accumulate around a couple over two years.

Two months before the engagement party, Terry had told her friend Jamie Oaks that Kevin’s friend Scott gave her a bad feeling. She hadn’t been able to explain it beyond that. She said she didn’t want to say anything to Kevin because Scott was his oldest friend and she didn’t want to cause trouble over something she couldn’t put into words.

Jamie told her to trust her gut. Terry said she would. The last ordinary moment anyone would hold of Terri Lynn Mace was the morning of March 9th, 1993. Ruth Mace watched her daughter back out of the driveway at 7:15 in her red Pontiac Sunbird heading toward town waving through the rear view window the way she always did when she left.

A quick flat palm wave like she was wiping a small window clean. Ruth waved back. The driveway was still muddy from a thaw the day before. The river ice was cracking downstream. Terry never came home. At 4:30 p.m. On March 9th, Terry did not arrive to pick up the seven girls from reading club. Their parents waited in the school parking lot.

By 5:00 p.m., Kevin Holloway had been called. By 6:00, Gene Mace was driving the route between the school and their home looking at every ditch and pullout. The Big Horn County Sheriff’s Office received the missing persons report at 7:04 p.m. Deputy Connie Maher was assigned as lead investigator the following morning, March 10th.

She was the first female investigator in the department’s history and she understood immediately and without sentiment what she was likely looking at. Terry’s car was found at 8:47 a.m. on a gravel access road off Route 384 11 miles east of town. The engine was cold. The door was unlocked. There was a grade book and a stack of spelling tests on the back seat.

There was a cassette tape on the passenger seat, Hank Williams, a Christmas gift from Kevin, that had slipped out of the player and never been put back. The community search began that afternoon. Four volunteers organized the effort. One of them was Scott Dempsey. Terry Lynn Mace was found on the morning of March 11th by a rancher checking fence line on the north section of his property, half a mile from where her car had been left.

She was 26 years old. She had been dead since the evening of March 9th. The cause of death was blunt force trauma. At the scene, investigators recovered two items of evidentiary value. A partial boot print in the soft ground near the fence line, size 11 or 12, consistent with a common work boot, and a fiber sample from Terry’s jacket, a single fiber, dark green, consistent with a heavyweight canvas work coat.

In 1993, the technology to extract a DNA profile from a fiber did not exist. Both items were logged and placed in evidence storage under case number BH93-0309. Deputy Connie Maher spent the next 18 months working the case with the kind of methodical persistence that kept her at the office past midnight three or four times a week.

She interviewed everyone in Terry’s life. She built a list of persons of interest. She took voluntary DNA swabs from 11 men in the community who had known Terry or been unable to produce firm alibis for the evening of March 9th. One of those swabs came from Scott Dempsey, who offered it at the volunteer table at the community center two weeks into the investigation.

He said he’d do anything to help find whoever did this. His swab was stored in evidence. In 1993, the DNA technology to match it against the fiber sample did not exist. Maher also interviewed Jamie Oaks, Terry’s closest friend. Jamie told her what Terry had said about Scott Dempsey, that he gave her a bad feeling, that she hadn’t said anything to Kevin because she didn’t want to cause trouble.

Maher logged this in her notes. She interviewed Dempsey again in October 1993. He was composed, cooperative, and devastated in a way that read entirely as genuine. He talked about Kevin, about how hard it had been on him. He cried briefly at one point. He offered to help in any way he could. There was nothing she could use.

By 1995, the investigation had no active leads. There was no forensic match, no witness account, no piece of physical evidence strong enough to build a case from. The case was moved to inactive status in 1997. Connie Maher did not stop thinking about it. But there was nothing left to do. Grief, when it goes on long enough, stops looking like grief from the outside and starts looking like simply the shape of a life.

That was what happened to the people who loved Terry Lynn Mace in the years that followed. Ruth and Gene Mace kept the engagement ring in Ruth’s jewelry box in a small velvet pouch beside her own mother’s bracelet. She didn’t look at it often. She knew it was there. Gene died in 2007 still knowing only two things about who killed his daughter, that it was someone, and that someone was still out there.

Ruth was 81 years old in 2026 and still lived in the house south of town. Still looked out the window at the same driveway where she had watched Terri leave that last morning. Kevin Holloway grieved quietly and for a very long time. He stayed in Hardin through the ’90s, working the same job, attending the same church, going through the motions of a life that had lost its forward direction.

He eventually moved to Billings in 2004 for a different job and a change that he needed and couldn’t entirely explain. He never remarried. He and Scott Dempsey stayed in touch. Phone calls every few months. A visit once a year or so. Two men bound together by the worst thing that had ever happened to either of them.

Or so Kevin believed. Scott Dempsey stayed in Hardin. He was part of the town’s fabric in the unobtrusive way of people who do not seek attention, but are simply always there. He was at the Iron Horse bar on Friday nights. He volunteered with the county fair committee. He coached youth basketball for a few seasons in the early 2000s.

He was not prominent. He was not exceptional. He was the kind of man people described years later by saying they couldn’t think of anything particular to say about him. The after-school reading club that Terri had started ran for 3 years after her death, maintained by a substitute teacher named Paula Breck, who had heard what Terri built and wanted to keep it alive.

It ended quietly in 1996 when Paula moved away and no one stepped in to continue it. The seven girls who had been in that Tuesday club, who had a handshake and who called their teacher Miss T, grew up and moved through their own lives carrying a specific kind of early grief that doesn’t have a name, but that shapes the people who carry it.

The cassette player from Terry’s classroom sat in the school storage room for years before someone donated it to the county thrift store. No one who gave it away knew what it had been. Connie Maher retired from the Big Horn County Sheriff’s Office in 2009. She had spent 16 years with case BH930309 in the back of her mind, returning to it every few years, checking whether new technology or new witness statements might have moved something.

Nothing moved. She told an interviewer in 2011 that the Mace case was the one she’d never made peace with. That she’d never been able to shake the feeling that the answer had been close, and that she just hadn’t been able to see it. The case had been cold for 31 years when Wade Mace, Terry’s older brother, bought a VHS digitizing kit from an electronic store in Billings and started going through a box of old home tapes from his parents’ closet.

If you want us to keep doing this work, finding the cases that haven’t been told, pulling the threads that need pulling, please take a moment to like this video and subscribe, drop a comment below, and tell us where in the world you’re watching from. It matters more than you know. Now, let’s get back to Terry.

Wade Mace had been putting the digitizing project off for years. The tapes were family history, birthday parties, Christmas mornings, a summer camping trip from 1988. And he kept meaning to preserve them before the magnetic coating degraded beyond recovery. He finally sat down to do it in February of 2024. Alone in his living room with a laptop and the converter kit and a glass of something he didn’t finish.

He watched birthdays. He watched Christmas. He watched the camping trip. Then he loaded a tape labeled in his own handwriting from 30 years earlier, T plus Kev engagement, Jan 30, 1993. He watched the living room. His parents, Kevin’s face when Terry walked in. He watched Terry in her blue sweater. The ring catching the light when she lifted her hand to push her hair back.

He was 45 minutes into the tape when the camera, still rolling, panned to the back window of the house and captured a moment Wade had never noticed when he filmed it because he had been watching something else. Through the window, partially in frame, Terry was on the back porch. And Scott Dempsey was standing very close to her.

Close enough that Terry had stepped back against the porch railing. Her body language was unmistakable. She was not leaning in. She was not laughing. Her arms were crossed. Her chin was down. She was looking at the door back into the house. Whatever Dempsey was saying to her, she was not responding to it. And then the camera panned away, back to the living room.

Back to Kevin accepting a handshake from someone near the punch bowl. The whole moment lasted 11 seconds. Wade watched it three times. Then he called the Big Horn County Sheriff’s Office. Investigator Theo Rask had been assigned to the Mace case cold case review in 2023 as part of a Montana Department of Justice initiative to reassess open homicides with evidence eligible for modern forensic processing.

 He had already submitted the fiber sample from Terry’s jacket for low template DNA extraction. A technique that can recover a genetic profile from a quantity of biological material far too small for 1993 technology and was waiting on results. Wade Macy’s call arrived on a Thursday morning in March 2024. Rask watched the 11-second clip from the engagement party footage four times.

 He called Connie Maher retired in Billings. He described what he was looking at. There was a pause on her end of the line that lasted several seconds. Then she said, “I interviewed that man twice. He cried.” The DNA results from the fiber sample came back 6 weeks later. The profile was partial but viable. Rask ran it against Scott Dempsey’s voluntary swab from 1993, still sealed in evidence storage after 31 years.

The match was confirmed on May 2nd, 2024 by the Montana State Crime Laboratory. The green fiber recovered from Terry Lynn Macy’s jacket on March 11th, 1993 matched Scott Dempsey. He had handed the swab over himself at the volunteer table 2 weeks after she died. Rask spent the next 8 months building a case file sufficient for prosecution.

He interviewed 22 individuals, including Jamie Oaks, who was now 57 and living in Billings, and who had never stopped thinking about what Terry had told her in the car that afternoon in January of 1993. She had said it in those words, “Kevin’s friend Scott gives me a bad feeling.

” Jamie told Rask she had gone over that conversation in her mind for 33 years. That she had always wondered if she should have done something more than say trust your gut. That she had not known what more she could have done. Rask also, in the hardest conversation of his investigation, drove to Billings and sat down with Kevin Holloway. Kevin Holloway was 59 years old.

 He had been friends with Scott Dempsey since they were 14. He had called him after Terri died and Dempsey had driven to his house and sat with him until 2:00 in the morning. He had called him from the grief didn’t have the strength to go in alone. He had shared 33 years of ordinary friendship, Sunday afternoon calls, fantasy football, the kind of low-key continuous contact that constitutes the background of a life with the man who killed the woman he had loved since high school.

Kevin said very little when Rask told him. He looked out the window of his apartment for a long time. Then he said he needed a few minutes. Rask waited in the hallway. When Kevin came back, he sat down and answered every question Rask had for the next 2 hours. In a flat, steady voice, and when they were done, he thanked Rask for telling him in person.

 Scott Dempsey was arrested at his home on Cottonwood Drive in Hardin on the morning of January 14th, 2026. 33 years to the month after the engagement party where 11 seconds of footage caught him in the background of someone else’s joy. He was 62 years old. He did not resist. He made one statement to investigators, later released through his attorney.

 He said the evidence was not what it appeared to be and that he had always cooperated fully with law enforcement. He has maintained this position through the filing of charges. The people of Harden processed the news the way a small community processes something that rearranges the architecture of 30 years of shared memory.

 There were people who had stood next to Scott Dempsey at the volunteer table in March of 1993 and thanked him for helping search for Terri. People who had hired him for landscaping work. People who had bought him a drink at the Iron Horse. The word they used over and over in the days after the arrest was not shocked. It was something more like hollowed out.

The feeling of a floor dropping. Several of them remembered, though they hadn’t thought of it in years, that he had always seemed to know where to look when they were searching. That he had suggested the access road off Route 384 on the second morning. That at the time they had found this helpful. Ruth Mace was 81 years old when investigator Rusk drove out to the house south of Harden in January of 2026 to tell her, before the arrest became public, that they had someone.

She was sitting at the kitchen table when he came in. The same kitchen table where Scott Dempsey had once accepted coffee and told her he was going to do everything he could. She took the news quietly. She asked Rusk one question. Did he know why? Rusk told her honestly that he didn’t and might never and that sometimes the answer to that question was not one that brought comfort.

She nodded. She said she supposed she’d known the answer to that question for 33 years. That you don’t get an answer that makes it make sense. You just get an answer. She went to her jewelry box that afternoon for the first time in many years and took out the velvet pouch. Of the seven girls who had been in Terry Lynn Mace’s Tuesday reading club, six have been located and notified of the arrest.

They range in age now from 38 to 43. Three of them, upon hearing the news, mentioned without being prompted that they still remember the audiobooks. Still remember what it felt like to sit in that classroom and be somewhere else for 30 minutes. Scott Dempsey’s trial is pending. He has pleaded not guilty. The Montana Department of Justice has cited the Mace case in ongoing discussions about low template DNA processing timelines.

Specifically, the gap between when evidence is collected and when it becomes eligible for extraction with modern methods. Several analysts have noted that the DNA match in this case could have been made as early as 2015 when low template extraction became more widely available to state crime labs. The fiber sample sat unprocessed until 2023.

What that decade-long gap represents in terms of cases that could be solved with existing evidence is a question that the department has not yet fully answered. There are things this case will not let go of easily. Terry told Jamie that Scott gave her a bad feeling. She was afraid of causing trouble. She didn’t say anything.

 That is not a failure of Terry’s. She owed Kevin’s friendship nothing. And she was navigating a situation with no clear path through it. But what does it ask of all of us to hear that a woman knew something was wrong and couldn’t find a way to be believed without proof? What might have changed if she’d had someone to tell it to who could act on it? And Scott Dempsey stood at her graveside. He sat with her mother.

 He drove her fiance to counseling. Whatever he felt while doing those things, whatever it looked like on his face, whatever it cost him or didn’t cost him, he sustained it for 33 years without anyone seeing through it. What does it mean to know that a performance like that is possible? What does it change about the people we lean on in the worst moments of our lives? Terry Lynn Mace was 26 years old.

She had a classroom of second-graders who called her Miss T. She had a ring on her finger and a life that was just beginning to become the thing she had always planned for it to become. She had a brother who filmed her engagement party on a VHS camcorder and kept the tape in a box for 33 years not knowing what was in it until the night he finally sat down to watch.

Wade Mace told a reporter after the arrest that when he found the tape, he hadn’t known what he had. He said he watched the clip over and over, and every time he watched it, he kept looking at Terry’s face, the way she had her arms crossed, the way she was looking at the door. He said, “She knew.

 She knew before any of us. She just didn’t have a way to make us know it, too.” If you believe truth is worth pursuing no matter how long it takes, subscribe so you don’t miss the next case. And if Terry’s story moved you, share it. Because she deserved better than 33 years of silence. And the least we can do is make sure the world knows her name.

Thank you for watching.