Retired officer reflects on Dolana Clark case

On Sunday, Investigation Discovery aired "Little Girl Gone," an episode of the cable television series "Unusual Suspects" detailing the disappearance and subsequent murder investigation into the death of Dolana Clark, a 9-year-old girl who vanished from Great Falls in 1988.

Comments on the Tribune's website included numerous accounts from those who remembered Dolana in life, and from those who were shocked by court testimony that detailed the circumstances of the spunky little girl's death.

"It scared the hell out of the community because she just disappeared," said retired Great Falls Police Department Detective John Cameron. "When they found her body a year later, her remains were dumped by Belt Park — kind of behind a big pile of logs."

Cameron was a primary investigator into Dolana Clark's murder — an investigation that only began yielding results 14 years after the little girl's disappearance. He remembered her killer, Wilfred "Bill" Morrisey, as a "very odd duck" who hid more than just a penchant for sudden violence.

"This guy kept his mother's dead Chihuahua," Cameron said of Morrisey. "He lived with his mother most of his life — and when his mother died he kept her bathrobe. When his mother's Chihuahua died, Morrisey picked up a piece of his mother's bathrobe, wrapped the Chihuahua in it, put it in an ammo can and kept it under his bed. We opened up the ammo can thinking we were looking for guns and it was an embalmed Chihuahua. He had saved it in a little tomb under his bed."

Dolana Clark was last seen on a summer's day in Great Falls riding her sister's bicycle down 25th Street South. The little girl left an impression wherever she went.

"She would go downtown and into the banks and ask the tellers for money or for suckers," Cameron recalled. "She'd walk into Jack's Pet Store and check out the animals she wanted to buy. She would be wherever she wanted in town at any given time. Her mom and dad — they didn't keep very close tabs on her."

On the day she disappeared, Clark was allegedly upset with her parents for refusing to give her money to buy a Siamese cat she had on layaway. Court documents state Dolana left her parents' house around 5:30 p.m. on the afternoon of Aug. 2. Cameron said investigators theorize Clark road her half-sister's bike to Wilfred "Bill" Morrisey's house to ask for money. Morrisey was friend and neighbor of the Clark family, who had an unusual relationship with Dolana and her older half-sister, Lisa.

According to documents from the Montana State Supreme Court, Dolana and her sister spent a substantial amount of time at Morrisey's house — occasionally spending the night there. At one point Morrisey allegedly spoke of wanting to marry the much younger Lisa, and spoke to Dolana about moving in with him once she got older.

"He was trying to groom the perfect wife," Cameron said of Morrisey. "He really did have this vision that he was going to marry one of those girls and they were going to be his wife."

Cameron said investigators believe Dolana's murder took place shortly after she arrived at Morrisey's house to ask him for money to buy the cat.

"He didn't give it to her," Cameron said of the theorized sequence of event. "What we suspect is that at that point Dolana said, 'Well I'm telling.' Whatever she was going to tell was probably that Morrisey had touched her inappropriately or done something. At that point he probably smacked her and really, really injured her — and then he realized he had to kill her. Then he put a bullet through her head as the final coup-de-grace before he dumped her up in the mountains."

Morrisey was an early suspect during the 1988 investigation into Clark's disappearance; but despite searching his house and cars, detectives found no direct physical evidence linking him to Dolana's disappearance. A few months later, Morrisey left Great Falls and moved to Colorado. Several months that, a hunter found Dolana's skeletal remains in the Little Belt Mountains.

The investigation into Clark's murder languished for more than a decade, until a chance encounter at a Great Falls bus stop renewed interest in the murder.

"I saw Boyce Clark standing on the corner waiting for a bus," Cameron said of a day in 2002. "I just pulled over and said, 'Hey — who killed your daughter?' He just looked at me and said, 'Bill Morrisey did John.' — just like he knew all along but he could never prove it himself."

According to Cameron, he and Detectives John Schaffer and William Bellusci caught up with Morrisey at his home near Weston, Colo., only a short time before Morrisey planned to destroy the final remaining evidence connecting him to Dolana's murder. A key to the investigation was the .22-caliber rifle Morrisey had used to shoot Dolana in the back of the head.

Days before investigators arrived, Morrisey broke up the gun and threw most of the parts away, but had buried the barrel beneath some rocks in the mountains behind his house.

"He kept that gun for all those years," Cameron said, "until he found out that we had reopened the case. He destroyed the gun immediately and was about to burn the house and run when we pulled into Colorado and caught him."

After several years of delays, a Cascade County jury found Morrisey guilty of deliberate homicide in November 2005. He is currently serving a term of life without the possibility of parole at the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge.

Cameron said Morrisey's conviction, 23-years after Dolana Clark's murder, should inspire hope in all families waiting for justice for their murdered loved ones.

"That's one thing about murder cases," he said. "There is no statute of limitations. "One thing I know about everybody whose been touched by a murder in their family — even after the murder gets caught — they never get over it. But if they at least know that the person who did it has been identified, that seems to be a big relief for all of them."