‘Twin Peaks’ murder
How unsolved slay of upstate woman led to show
Hazel Drew was a domestic servant from upstate New York who died tragically at 20. She was too young to have made much of a mark in the world, but 110 years later, people are still talking about her.
The beautiful blond was last seen July 7, 1908, walking along a road near the resort town of Sand Lake.
Two men — Frank Smith, a farmhand, and Rudy Gundrum, a charcoal peddler — noticed her walking along the road as they were driving in a horsedrawn wagon toward the town.
“Hello, Frank,” she called out to Smith as they passed. He waved back.
“That’s John Drew’s oldest daughter,” Smith remarked to his traveling companion as they moved on.
The men would recall later that Hazel was carrying an unusual hat made of black straw with three large black plumes.
Four days after that, a group of teenage boys hiking near a place called Teal’s Pond spotted a woman’s body floating face-down. She was so bloated and decomposed that Smith, who was one of the men who pulled her from the water, could only guess that it was the girl he had greeted on the road days earlier.
Even her own father had a hard time identifying his daughter from just looking at the decomposed face, wrote Ron Hughes in “Who Killed Hazel Drew?” a 2017 book on the case. It took an examination of the gold fillings in her teeth before Drew could say for sure that the dead girl was his flesh and blood.
The black hat with the large plumes, a stickpin with the letter “H” and a pair of black gloves turned up along a cow path heading to the pond.
Investigators thought first it might have been a suicide, because Hazel had just quit her job as a governss and may have een running ut of money. That notion vaporated hen the autopy revealed she ad sustained a skull-crushing blow to the back of her head. Also, there was no water in her lungs, which meant that she was on land when she died. Someone threw her in the pond.
Suspicion fell upon Smith, who made no secret that he yearned for a romantic relationship with Hazel. But his alibis around the time of the murder checked out. There was nothing to connect him to her death.
Her family said they knew of no suitors, but a stash of letters and postcards found in one of Hazel’s suitcases hinted that she had many admirers. Theories popped up of a lady Jekyll and Hyde, one side an industrious, church-going innocent, the other a wild woman.
“Hazel was a flirt,” one reporter bluntly put it. She traveled a lot, including excursions to New York, and there was a conquest of a man’s heart at every destination, newspapers suggested. One letter writer, an artist from New York, called her “my lady of the blond hair” and said that he was so smitten with her that he stole her napkin as a souvenir.
Police zeroed in on a few possible suspects. There was a dentist who had proposed and a married train conductor who, gossip had it, she had been seeing. William Taylor, her uncle and a man with few friends and who was estranged from most of his family, seemed a strong candidate. Another was a millionaire resort owner, Henry Kamrath, rumored to have been keeping sex slaves and holding orgies at his vacation camp in the mountains near Teal’s Pond.
New York’s yellow tabloids scorched the investigation, charged that the autopsy had been botched and demanded the body be exhumed. They proposed all kinds of theories — including that Hazel was a prostitute who had been murdered by a client — and said that that the local police were too incompetent or apathetic to pursue them.
There was never an arrest. By July 31, the coroner’s inquest had nothing more to offer than that a “blow on the head from some blunt instrument in some manner unknown” had caused her death.
Newspapers declared the inquest a farce and ridiculed the district attorney. “His office will now draw a veil over the tragedy, and unless by some magic chance the murderer delivers himself up, allow it to remain forever a mystery,” wrote the Evening Star in Washington, D.C.
That’s precisely what happened. Hazel’s case faded from memory, kept alive over the decades in ghost stories and memories of locals.
One of them, Betty Calhoun, told her grandsons, Mark and Scott Frost, about the spirit of a murdered young woman who haunted the mountains around Teal’s Pond.
Mark grew up to become one of the creators of the 1990s hit “Twin Peaks.”
In 2013, long after the show was canceled, Frost revealed that Hazel was the inspiration for the central character, Laura Palmer, right up to the blond updo and hints of a double life.
In 2017, a one-season “Twin Peaks” revival sparked interest in Hazel’s story, starting with Hughes’ book.
Now filmmaker John Holser, who lives in the region, is trying to bring the longabandoned case to life with a documentary called “Who Killed Hazel Drew—the Sand Lake Murder that Inspired Twin Peaks.”
Fans of the show, take note: Holser has a Facebook page— facebook.com/ WhoKilledHazelDrew/—where he posts casting calls for actors and extras to reenact the true-crime story behind the TV classic.