An elderly Montana inmate told investigators at the jail where he is spending a 100-year sentence for killing his wife that he had slaughtered another woman 15 years earlier.
Courtney Brooke Atlas, 79-year-old, claimed that he found God while incarcerated and wanted to “clear” the gruesome details of Pamela Ann Dorrington’s murder that he had long denied.
Dorrington was renting an apartment at Atlas’s property in 1968 when she mysteriously vanished. Four months following her disappearance, her remains were located on Holton Lake, at the Gates of Mountain Marina.
Atlas said that he was 26 years old when he called Dorrington about a water leak. When she let him into her apartment, he strangled her to death and later dismembered her body.
“This was cold, this was calculated, and we’re not giving all the details of this gruesome homicide,” Clark County Sheriff Leo Dutton said.
“It is difficult hearing what was done. He fantasized about her acted upon it.”
