The Smooth Talker

Roy Allan Melanson was a drifter from Texas with a long record of rape convictions and an easy way with strangers. On the night of July 10, 1974, he was drinking at Fagiani’s Cocktail Lounge in downtown Napa, California, where fifty-one-year-old Anita Fagiani Andrews ran the bar her family owned. She was found stabbed to death after closing time, and the case went nowhere for decades.

Six weeks later, near Gunnison, Colorado, twenty-five-year-old photographer Michele Wallace gave a lift to two hitchhikers. One got out at a bar. Melanson stayed in the car, and Michele was never seen again. Her remains were not recovered until 1992, when volunteers from NecroSearch International searching a high mountain slope spotted a gold tooth in a partly buried skull. A jury convicted Melanson of her murder in 1993 and he was sentenced to life without parole.

DNA closed the rest. A cigarette butt saved from the Napa bar was matched to him in 2007, a bloodied towel from the same scene matched as well, and a Napa County jury convicted him of first-degree murder in 2011. In 2010 Louisiana deputies charged him with the 1988 killing of twenty-four-year-old Charlotte Sauerwin after a crime lab match. A fourth suspected victim, his Texas landlady Pauline Klumpp, was never found. Melanson died in a Colorado prison on May 22, 2020, at eighty-three.