Instead of being alleged to have COMMITTED A Crime On Substack, Let’s INVESTIGATE A Crime…In Bozeman? – by Travis Mateer

Yesterday, on the phone, a Bozeman Detective confirmed that the alleged suspect in the murder of Shelli Waltemath was the person I thought it was, a former homeless client I knew from years ago by the name of Steven Dailey.

Beyond reportedly knowing that Dailey was from Missoula, not much else is being said about how Steven Dailey may have known Shelli Waltemath, or what the motivation might have been.

Without any substantive information beyond the basic facts being reported by authorities, I went to Facebook to see what kind of chatter was happening and found relevant comments that helped me piece together a timeline of Steven Dailey’s history with the victim and when I believe he arrived in Missoula.

Steven Dailey’s arrival in 2007 overlaps with my time at the Poverello Center, the homeless shelter I started working at in 2008 as an Americorps VISTA. I remember Steven from those early years as a quiet man who was short and heavyset with dirty blond hair and a beard he kept trimmed, meaning he wasn’t immediately recognizable as someone using homeless services, just an average, nondescript dude who kept to himself.

Or did he?

From my limited interactions with Steven Dailey when he was using services I knew he wasn’t dumb, but something was definitely “off” about him. Many clients back then had some degree of substance abuse issues, but I don’t recall that ever being an issue for Mr. Dailey, nor were there any obvious signs of a debilitating mental disorder that I can remember.

So what was up with him?

While most of the clients from back then have faded from memory, Steven Dailey was someone I kept seeing around Missoula, mostly downtown, and almost always at Break Espresso, hence the image at the top of the post. He was always by himself and, besides noticing his presence, I don’t recall much else.

Thinking that perhaps Steven Dailey was renting a room above Charlie B’s, I called the bar this morning and actually got Charlie on the phone, but after getting about 30 seconds into explaining why I was calling, Charlie hung up on me, right after I said Steven’s name.

Ok, Charlie, maybe you’ll be more communicative to Bozeman Detectives when they call, assuming, of course, they’re interested in asking a question I’m now asking myself on this cold Sunday morning.

Here’s the question: is Shelli Waltemath the FIRST woman Steven Dailey has murdered?

It would have been nice to ask Charlie my question in person, which I would have done if it wasn’t for the 1,500 foot radius of Travis exclusion currently being reviewed by the Montana Supreme Court, making in-person inquiries about a murderer living quietly in Missoula a chargeable felony for me right now.

If Missoula ever got serious about reviewing patterns of death in this part of the state, a person like Steven Dailey might be worth examining closer, but there’s a good chance that won’t happen. Not in a town that barley blinked when a nameless corpse was found on a popular hiking trail right by the campus where thousands of college kids get their alleged “education”.

The Missoula Police Department is investigating after a hiker discovered a deceased male near the three-mile marker of the Kim Williams Trail on Wednesday afternoon.

Officers responded to the area just before 3:30 p.m. on November 12 after receiving the report from the hiker who found what appeared to be a body.

MPD’s Detective Division and the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office Coroner are conducting the investigation.

The body of the deceased male has been transported to the Montana State Crime Lab for further investigation and identification.

Police said the individual’s identity will be released after a positive identification has been made and next of kin have been notified.

Was the identity ever released? No. Does anyone care? Apparently not. For anyone who does care, I figured out the body was most likely the body of Mike Condo, a name that I released in this blog post four months ago, in June, just 9 days before the day of my alleged crime, which I’ll be getting a trial for on December 11th.

For more context on Mike Condo and the woman I’d be interrogating if the investigation of corpses was MY job, here’s an article I found with the common narrative elements so prevalent in stories like these, which is meth and my former employer, the Poverello Center:

On December 5, 2024, a Missoula Police Department Officer was dispatched to the area of the Stone Creek Lodge. The reporting party was a hotel employee who requested that law enforcement respond and remove two individuals. The two individuals were later identified as 44-year-old Shana Lincoln and 59-year-old Michael Condo.

The officer arrived and located the two near a vehicle. The officer informed Condo why he was there and requested ID. Condo told the officer that it was in the vehicle. While the Condo was retrieving his wallet, the officer heard something drop to the ground and saw a syringe loaded with a crystalline substance. The officer instructed Condo to turn around and detained him in handcuffs.

According to court documents, Condo told the officer that the syringe contained methamphetamine, which he purchased from someone near the Poverello Center. Condo also gave the officer verbal consent to search the van. Condo told the officer that everything in the van was his, except for Lincoln’s purse and backpack.

While bringing attention to this kind of stuff doesn’t win me any friends with tourism boosters and other invested interests selling our mountain paradise to outsiders, there was that appearance of my name in a New York rag talking serial killers that I can point to when it comes to actual cases I was actually involved in, like Kevin Lino’s.

While designating a killer like Kevin Lino as a serial killer, or not, is now a matter of modern semantics, the meta-issue of narrative control continues to be a massive point of frustration for me as I see things in my own community and keep making the mistake of SAYING SOMETHING about those things with the dumb expectation that if enough people simply know what’s happening, they might be inclined to do something more than bitch and moan on social media about it.

Instead of just letting things happen, let’s remember it was a CITIZEN who took down our baby-faced serial killer, Wayne Nance, half a century ago, and it was a BROTHER who broke the Unabomber case, not a female FBI Agent who never existed, so if there’s any shred of concern left for objective truth, it’s going to be up to those outside conventional structures of authority who are going to have to find and preserve it.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. when it’s safer for me to do so, I’m hoping to get back to posting my research on Substack soon.