Nine Days in April:

The Twin Tragedies That Shadowed Butte in 1965

A CITY ALREADY HARDENED TO LOSS

By 1965, Butte, Montana, was a city accustomed to sudden death. Underground mining had claimed lives by the hundreds since the previous century, and the Anaconda Copper Mining Company’s shafts still ran beneath the streets where families lived, worked, and buried their dead in the Catholic and fraternal cemeteries that ring the Butte Hill. But the violence that struck the city in the second week of April 1965 was of a different order entirely. Within the same forty-eight-hour window, three residents vanished from their ordinary lives: a mother and daughter from the city’s North Side, and a seventeen-year-old girl who had gone out for an evening with friends. None of the three would be found alive. The cases became, and largely remain, unsolved, and together they form one of the more haunting chapters in the city’s twentieth-century history.

THE DISAPPEARANCES

On April 9, 1965, fifty-one-year-old Marjorie McQuiston and her twenty-six-year-old daughter Nancy went missing from their home at 945 17th Street, on Butte’s North Side. On the same day, seventeen-year-old Joann Toni Kankelborg, born October 22, 1947, to Andrew “Andy” Kankelborg and Louise Helen Pestotnik Kankelborg, also disappeared. The timing was not merely a coincidence noted by later chroniclers; it created immediate confusion for investigators, who found themselves managing two apparently unrelated disappearances at once, with limited personnel and no clear indication whether the cases were connected.

Kankelborg was the second of five children in a Butte family well known in the community. Her disappearance, coming on the heels of an ordinary evening out, alarmed a city that had, within living memory, rarely confronted the disappearance of a teenage girl under violent circumstances. The McQuistons’ absence took slightly longer to register as ominous, since adult women simply not returning home did not, in the initial hours, carry the same urgency in the eyes of 1960s-era law enforcement. That would change quickly.

DISCOVERY ON BIG BUTTE AND UNDER THE BRIDGE

The bodies of Marjorie and Nancy McQuiston were found five days after their disappearance, near the top of a hill northwest of Butte known locally as Big Butte, less than a mile from their home. Newspaper accounts from the period, along with later retrospectives compiled from those accounts, describe both women as having been shot and severely beaten. It should be noted that regional sources differ slightly on the precise date of discovery: two accounts place it on April 14, 1965, while a photograph caption from a later retrospective in the Montana Standard dates the discovery to April 13. Given that most narrative accounts, including a detailed 2018 survey of Montana cold cases published by the Billings Gazette, converge on April 14, that date is treated here as the more likely one, though the discrepancy is worth flagging for any researcher working from primary clippings.

Nancy McQuiston’s automobile was located roughly a quarter-mile from the bodies, in a gully at the edge of Big Butte, its trunk stained with blood. Investigators concluded from this evidence that the women had been killed elsewhere and transported to the site where they were found. The autopsy, as reported in a contemporary Montana Standard article later digitized by the genealogical archive Newspapers.com, indicated that Marjorie McQuiston died from a bullet wound to the right temple and had also been shot in the shoulder, while Nancy McQuiston was shot in the back of the head and in the hand; the coroner believed Nancy might not have died immediately from her wounds. Both women, according to the same account, showed signs of having been beaten with fists in addition to being shot. The suspected weapon was Nancy McQuiston’s own .22-caliber automatic pistol, which was recovered from the family home.

Joann Kankelborg’s body was found on April 15, 1965, one day after the McQuistons were discovered, under a bridge southeast of Butte. The proximity of the two discoveries, occurring within twenty-four hours of one another and involving victims who had vanished on the same date, intensified public anxiety and complicated the investigative picture even further.

THE ARREST OF JERRY VAN NULAND

Investigators moved relatively quickly in the Kankelborg case. Jerry Van Nuland, described in later accounts as a local Butte athlete, was charged with her murder. According to the Billings Gazette’s 2018 survey of Montana cold cases, Van Nuland ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. This detail is drawn from a single detailed secondary source and has not been independently corroborated here against a contemporary 1965 court record, so it should be treated as probable rather than certain pending confirmation from Silver Bow County court archives or a digitized trial transcript.

What is better corroborated, because it recurs across multiple independent regional accounts, is that investigators actively searched for a connection between Van Nuland and the deaths of Marjorie and Nancy McQuiston, and that no such connection was ever established. The Kankelborg case, in other words, appears to have been solved, or at least adjudicated, while the McQuiston case, occurring in the same narrow window of time in the same small city, was not. That asymmetry has puzzled investigators and local historians for six decades.

A CASE THAT WOULD NOT CLOSE

The McQuiston murders remain, as of recent reporting from Butte-Silver Bow law enforcement, formally unsolved. Sheriff Ed Lester, discussing the case with local television station KXLF in the summer of 2025, noted that many of the people who were present at the time of the crime have since died, complicating any prospect of resolution, though he expressed hope that advances in DNA analysis and investigative technology might eventually yield new leads. A companion piece from KBZK, covering cold cases across Gallatin, Park, and Butte-Silver Bow counties in the same period, situated the McQuiston case alongside other long-unresolved Montana homicides, including the 1994 killing of Julianne Stallman, underscoring that Butte’s mid-century violence was not an isolated aberration but part of a longer pattern of crimes that outlasted the technology available to solve them.

The physical record of the case persists in institutional form as well. The Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives maintains a vertical file cataloged under the heading “Crime: Murders — Kankelborg, 1965,” a modest but telling indication that local archivists have treated the events of that April as part of the historical record worth preserving, distinct from ordinary crime reporting. Joann Kankelborg herself is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Butte, her memorial maintained through the genealogical database Find a Grave, which records her birth and death dates and identifies her parents and siblings, information that has allowed later researchers to reconstruct something of the family context surrounding her death.

WHY THE MCQUISTON CASE ENDURES

Several factors help explain why the McQuiston murders, in particular, have retained their grip on local memory. First is the manner of the crime itself: a mother and daughter, seemingly targeted together, killed with a weapon taken from their own home and dumped a short distance from where they lived, in a landscape, the flank of Big Butte, that residents pass daily and that overlooks the city itself. Second is the sheer improbability of two violent, fatal disappearances occurring in the same city on the same day without any established link between them. Investigators in 1965 searched for that link and did not find it; investigators sixty years later have not found it either. Third, and perhaps most significant for the case’s persistence in public memory, is the absence of resolution. The Kankelborg case, whatever the precise legal outcome, produced an arrest and a named suspect. The McQuiston case did not, and an unsolved double homicide involving two generations of the same family carries a different weight in a community’s collective memory than one where the machinery of justice, however imperfectly, ran its course.

It is worth resisting the temptation, present in some popular retrospectives, to romanticize this period as a lost age of innocence shattered by singular horror. Butte in 1965 was, like many American cities, no stranger to violence, and the coexistence of three unrelated or partially related tragedies in a single week says as much about the limits of small-city law enforcement resources in the mid-twentieth century as it does about any particular darkness unique to Butte. What the case does illustrate, clearly and without need for embellishment, is how quickly an investigative apparatus built for an earlier and simpler set of expectations could be overwhelmed by concurrent crises, and how easily one case can be resolved while an adjacent one, unfolding in the same days and the same streets, can remain open for generations.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

The account above draws on newspaper archives, broadcast news retrospectives, and archival finding aids rather than a single narrative source, and several factual points, particularly the exact date of the McQuistons’ discovery and the specifics of the Kankelborg legal proceedings, rest on incomplete or partially conflicting secondary reporting. Researchers seeking to resolve these points further would do well to consult the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives’ Kankelborg vertical file directly, along with Silver Bow County District Court records from 1965, neither of which was fully accessible for this article.

WORKS CITED

Billings Gazette staff. “7 Unsolved Multiple Homicides in Montana, and Two That Were Solved through DNA Evidence.” Billings Gazette, 25 Sept. 2018, billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/crime-and-courts/7-unsolved-multiple-homicides-in-montana-and-two-that-were-solved-through-dna-evidence/collection_2b86636c-ce9e-5acd-9967-3cdf14e64bf9.html. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives. “Crime: Murders — Kankelborg, 1965.” Vertical Files, Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, buttearchives.pastperfectonline.com/bysearchterm?keyword=Murders. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

“Butte Murder 1965.” The Montana Standard, 16 Apr. 1965, Newspapers.com, www.newspapers.com/article/the-montana-standard-butte-murder-1965/30043603/. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

Emeigh, John. “Butte Has Open Murder, Missing Persons Cases Going Back 60 Years.” KXLF News, 22 July 2025, www.kxlf.com/news/crime-and-courts/butte-has-open-murder-missing-persons-cases-going-back-60-years. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

“Joann Toni Kankelborg (1947–1965).” Find a Grave, Find a Grave Memorial ID 110925499, www.findagrave.com/memorial/110925499/joann-toni-kankelborg. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.

McDonald, Jane, Cassidy Powers, and John Emeigh. “Haunted by the Past: Highlighting Cold Cases in Gallatin, Park and Butte-Silver Bow Counties.” KBZK News, 22 July 2025, www.kbzk.com/news/crime-courts/haunted-by-the-past-highlighting-cold-cases-in-gallatin-park-and-butte-silver-bow-counties. Accessed 19 Aug. 2026.