Lake Crescent
Lake Crescent is another one of the many beautiful places that can be found on the Olympic Peninsula. It is located at the northern part of Olympic National Park. We have boated and water skied there many times over the years. We have camped and fished there too but the skiing and boating was the big fun in the 1970's. In spite of my love for fishing I have only fished there a few times. The main reason is I like salt water fishing so much that I nearly gave up all fresh water fishing. The interesting thing is there is very large trout there and frequently there are fish over ten pounds caught. A fellow who I once worked with grew up on the lake and knew how to fish it and 10 or 15 years ago he caught a 20 pound Beardsly trout. The trout is named after a Navy Admiral named Beardsly who's ship put in at the Port Angeles harbor now and then back in the latter part of the 1800's. He would fish the lake whenever he put into Port Angeles harbor! There is another fish that is unique to the lake and it's name is Crescenti, obviously named after the lake. There are other species of trout in there too but these two are the ones that are unique to this lake.
In the 1970's you could find us on the lake when the weather was nice enough for camping and skiing during July and August. The lake is very cold even in the summers hottest days. The lake is very deep and the many springs that feed it keep the temperature between 40 and 50 degrees during the summer months. My depth finder has a temperature reading for the water and I have recorded temperature of 45 at Lake Crescent on one day and the next day go to LaPush and find the water 55 degrees in the ocean. Needless to say we wore wet suits when we skied. The incentive was certainly there to try not to crash and end up in the water! The lake is located 30 miles northeast of Forks on highway 101 between Forks and Port Angeles. It is about 10 miles long and the winding road hugs the south shoreline almost the entire distance of the lake. The north and south sides of the lake are fjord like with old growth timber. We never get tired of the view as we get to see it twice each time we go to Port Angeles. Port Angeles is another 15 miles from the east shore of the lake.
Lake Crescent is also quite deep. It depends on who is telling the story but I have read it is 1000 feet deep or more. I doubt that, but I have personally recorded 650 with the depth finder on my boat. My depth finder is a video type recorder that shows the bottom and is accurate. The place where I recorded 650 feet was about one quarter mile from shore about midway down the lake on the highway side. It is where I had been told it was the deepest. In all fairness, it is said that the bottom is also kind of mushy and that makes accurate soundings impossible to record. The bottom line is the lake is real deep!
I have told you about the lake and its cold and deep water and it leads me into a true story I will relate to you. I won't use any names but the story will be fact. I won't give all the details that I have read but I will try to give an interesting and accurate account of the incident. This story is the mystery part of Lake Crescent that was indicated in the title. There are a lot of other interesting things regarding Lake Crescent and I may write more about them in a later story!
In July of 1940, two Port Angeles men were fishing in their boat on Lake Crescent. They spotted something floating in the water and went to investigate. It was a dead woman who had been wrapped in a blanket that was then tied and weighted with something to take the body to the depths of the lake. Two things caused the body to come to the surface, one was the rope started decaying and the other was the minerals in the cold deep water causing a chemical reaction that caused the body to turn into a putty like substance. It later was discribed as being like Ivory soap! Part of the face and the ends of the fingers were missing but otherwise there was a complete body that turned to soap.
She was taken to Port Angeles where she was put in a building next to the funeral home where the curious and the authorties could view the strange body. No one recognized her and finger prints were out of the question because of the missing finger ends. The fingers apparently decayed and fell off. It was there that the sheriff pried open her mouth and discovered that she was wearing a gold plated dental bridge. The sheriff sent out a flyer with a picture and a hundred dollar reward for information. As luck would have it a South Dakota dentist saw the flyer and now the corpse had a name.
The sheriff learned that she was born in Kentucky in 1901 and at an early age her family moved to South Dakota. She married there and had a daughter. After 12 years they divorced. After a short time she remarried and they headed west because of hard times in the mid west. They settled in eastern Washington and after a few years that marriage failed. After a time in Seattle as a waitress she came to Port Angeles sometime during the early to mid thirties. She got work at the Lake Crescent Tavern, which is the Lake Crescent Lodge today. It was there she met an older man who was a beer truck driver. They had a mutual attraction to each other and his older age didn't seem to bother her. What did bother her though was the fact that he was a ladies man and this made the woman jealous. The relationship was quite rocky and the jealously came out often over the next two or three years. In spite of the fights they got married anyway.
They both liked to party and they did a lot of it but he still ran around without her. The marriage was about a year old and the drinking and fighting continued because he was still running around on her. It was about this time period that she disappeared. There had been a party down town Port Angeles just before Christmas of 1937 and that was the last time anyone saw her alive!
The sheriff had plenty of evidence but to make matters worse it was reported that she had seen in Alaska. This had to be checked out but in the meantime the husband was a likely suspect and the hunt was on for him. He had left the area, probably not too long after the woman disappeared. His story when he was caught was she deserted him. He was arrested in Los Angeles in October of 1941. He was taken back to Port Angeles where a lot of evidence convicted him of murdering his wife and then wrapping her in a blanket and throwing her body into Lake Crescent. The rope he used to wrap the blanket around the body and to tie the weight onto was tracked back to him and he gave information of how she dressed and even telling about a bunion on one of her feet that was still obvious. Another thing that went against him was the fact that he was living in the open with another woman within a month of her disappearance. With the dead woman's reputation as being very jealous it didn't seem logical that he would live openly with another woman.
At his trial he claimed that she left him after the party that night but too much evidence made it easy for the jury to find him guilty. In a short time they convicted him of second degree murder. He had beaten and strangled her and thrown her body into the lake after wrapping her body in a blanket, tying it and weighing it down so it would sink. He was given life imprisonment in Walla State Penitentiary in south eastern Washington! He served nine years and was paroled in January of 1961. He died in California in November of 1974.
The woman's body was laid to rest in a common grave in Port Angeles but was moved to a cemetery in Vancouver, Washington in 1942.
A footnote to this story involves a log truck driver who's family still live in Forks. I don't recall the time period but it probably was in the 1950's. He wrecked his log truck at Lake Crescent and the water was very deep at the crash site. He apparently was thrown from the truck and the body was never recovered. Some time passed, I don't know how long, perhaps several years, his body resurfaced. It was caused by the same chemical reaction that brought the murdered woman to the surface! I have heard this from two sources, one is my brother in law who has been a truck driver in Forks for over thirty years. He isn't above telling a tall tale but I believe this one to be true!
There you have it, a story about the beautiful lake that also holds some sad and gruesome stories.
