S04E34 - The Murder that Inspired Twin Peaks

Jerry Drake returns to discuss his new book:
Hazel was a Good Girl: The Murder that Inspired Twin Peaks

Jerry has been with quite a few times to discuss Grimoires, Jack Parsons, The Hollow Earth, Internet Mysteries and Ghost Lights and we're excited to see what he makes of this real life unsolved murder with ties to one of the most influential shows to ever air on TV.

This episode does discuss murder, sexual assault, and other sensitive topics. It's not really explicit but it might not be suitable for children, hence the tag.






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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Monster House presents.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Terrible Tragedy Next Sunday Murder was just the first step.
Who killed Laura bon Now the curtain's open again. From
the start, you can follow the trail of clues, of crimes,
of cheating hearts.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
Can't let me in on whatever the hell is going on.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Here, Sheriff. We've had a lot to talk about.

Speaker 4 (00:29):
For the first peak or the second exposure in You.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Spot the Killer, everyone will be talking about it.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.

Speaker 5 (00:46):
A giant, hairy creature in Part A Part Matt in Larkness,
a twenty four a mile long bottomless lake in the
Highlands of Scotland, if the creature known as the Luckness Monster.

(01:20):
Monster Talk.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Blake Smith.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
And I'm Karen Stolsner.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
It's been a while since we've had on author and
researcher Jerry Drake, but he's back, so check the show
notes for links to previous visits where we talked about
ghost lides and grimoires and all sorts of fun stuff.
But today we're going to be talking about murder. Specifically,
we're going to be talking about Jerry's new book, Hazel
was a good girl solving the murder that inspired Twin Peaks. So,

(01:50):
if you're a true crime fan, or a Twin Peaks fan,
or a Monster Talk fan who occasionally dips their toes
into either, you're going to enjoy this interview and you'll
doubtless enjoy Jerry's book with David Lynch is passing earlier
this year. It's a little bittersweet to be talking about
Twin Peaks, but it's definitely a bit of American culture
that changed the way we watch television and what we

(02:10):
come to expect from a series. Americas were glued to
their sets wondering who had killed Laura Palmer and finding
out the answer only made things weirder. So grab your
log Hydra Diary, and get a cup of damn fine
coffee and let's get to some morangetutor.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
So, Jerry, we've invited you want to talk about your
forthcoming book. It's going to come out in about a
month now, I believe, June tenth. June tenth. Yeah, So
Hazel was a good girl solving the murder that inspired
Twin Peaks. So, yeah, you've been talking about this with
us for quite some times. It's really exciting that you've
gotten to this stage. And yeah, we want to hear

(02:53):
about how you became interested or rather drawn into, as
you've said, the case of Hazel drew.

Speaker 6 (03:00):
You know, I it's interesting Hazel. Hazel was the girl
that inspired Mark Frost to write the original screenplay for
Twin Peaks. Everybody knows David Lynch, but what fans of
that show didn't realize is that Mark Frost is the
guy that actually wrote most of the canonical episodes, the

(03:20):
ones that he and Lynch wrote worked on, and he
also wrote the sideline war material. There are a couple
of books that came out in conjunction with Twin Peaks
to Return, which I think today might be the eighth
anniversary of that show premiering. So Mark Frost is really
the guy who who was behind the story of Twin Peaks,

(03:42):
with Lynch being the tour that put it on screen
and then kind of modified it. You know, his process
is to film what he films and it happens. You know,
he invented the character of Killer Bob because of a
shot that went wrong, and all this stuff like it's
there's you could write a whole book about Twin Peaks,
and there's probably a bunch out there.

Speaker 4 (04:00):
But at the heart of it.

Speaker 6 (04:01):
In upstate New York, there's a town called Troy that's
immediately it's on the east side of the Hudson across
from Albany, which is the capital, and it sits at
the bottom of the Taconic Mountains. There's a big hill
in the middle of Troy, which they unimaginably called the
Hill and on top of his polytechnic University, and Rensler

(04:22):
is the oldest polytechnic in the world. It was founded
by one of the descendants of Killian van Rensseler, who
was the last great patroon of Old New York. When
you study New York history, he's the last land baron
in the area. He was on the Dutchyst India Company
board and was a pearl merchant and had a million

(04:43):
acres of land. And there's a little piece of land
called Slider's Corners near a place called Sand Lake where
this girl was found face down in a little mill
pond about seven days after she was killed in July
of nineteen oh eight. Her name was Hazel Drew and

(05:03):
her murder for some reason became international news for that month.
It was twenty three days. It was in all the
major papers, even in the German and Australian press later
that August, all around the world. And it followed up
on probably one of the most famous solved murders in
American history, which was the death of Billy Brown, who

(05:26):
was killed by Chester Gillette. In fact, Chester was executed
by Edison's electric chair right about the time Hazel's body
was being found, and so a lot of people thought
this was going to be the next big pretty white
girl murder. And they sent a guy up from New
York names named Clements. Will Clements, who styled himself as

(05:50):
the Srilock Holmes of America. He was very modest, and
he claimed all these outrageous things, and there's a little
there's a couple chapters about Clemens the book where he
kind of makes himself out to be this great criminologist
and he solves the murder.

Speaker 4 (06:05):
He didn't.

Speaker 6 (06:05):
He got sued actually for libel and lost his suspects
suited him for libel, and he invented really the character
of Laura Palmer with that story. A wrong woman living
a double life who got killed by a lover. It
turns out none of that stuff was true, and that's
what really got me interested in the story is that,
you know, I'm I mean, at the end of the day,

(06:27):
you know, my professional area of study is nineteenth century
history and labor history. I mean, that's what I did
all my work in college on you know, long before
when I was ever in the government. You know, that's
what I was primarily interested in. So I was like, well,
you know, I'm fascinated by Troy, a factory town. You know,
this is giving me something to really read about. And
you know, I was in bed COVID hadn't happen yet.

(06:50):
I had the flu in a friend of mine who
was moving to Troy. There publishers. In fact, you know,
full disclosure that the people that are publishing this book.
I decided to let them have it since they were
involved in the in the adventure. They were moving from
New Hampshire to Troy to kind of set up their business,
you know, business blowing up blah blah blah. And my
friend texted me and said something about this dream that

(07:13):
she had about finding this book in a cafe or
a library. We tell the story in there, and it
was called the absence of memory, and I, while suffering from.

Speaker 4 (07:24):
A fever, dreamed about the same book.

Speaker 6 (07:26):
And I opened it up, and in the front of
the book, you know, on a stack of Bibles of
atheist I'll swear on a stack of Bibles. But I
saw this person's name, Hazel, I drew in the dream,
and I wrote it down and I texted it to
my friend and it turned out she's a real person,
and she was murdered and the girl who inspired Twin Peaks.
Now I will quickly put on my skeptics hat and say,

(07:49):
you know, I watched Twin Peaks in high school, and
I watched the return, and it's entirely possible.

Speaker 4 (07:53):
I knew all that right, And I was triggered.

Speaker 6 (07:56):
My subconscious was triggered by my friend moving to this
town that I already had an interest in. You know,
I would love to teach at Rensseler whenever I retire
rentally or as they pronounce it. So I probably already
knew all this stuff. But that's how I got interested
in the story. It's great story, So I told the
story as it happened.

Speaker 3 (08:12):
That's a good story.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
That kind of experience, though, even even if you have
an explanation for it. It's still it still feels liminal.
You still feel the weirdest.

Speaker 6 (08:21):
The whole thing is, the whole thing is liminal. And
I put my tongue right right deep in my cheek
and rode with it because it's a great story. You know,
sometimes you see Bigfoot and sometimes Bigfoot sees you, right.

Speaker 4 (08:33):
So I started digging into it.

Speaker 6 (08:42):
And then COVID at my friend and I were down
in San Antonio for AWP.

Speaker 4 (08:47):
I was thinking about doing something on some stuff.

Speaker 6 (08:51):
We talked about, you know, doing a casebook of you know,
all the cases I'd worked on and something fun like that,
and we really started talking about Hazel and she's like, to.

Speaker 4 (08:59):
You want to dig into this?

Speaker 6 (09:00):
And then we were in San Antonio when COVID lockdown started.
In fact, I got the last flat out of town
I could get back to DC before the lockdown happened.
And I was like, I'm working on it and I
was interested in And then I got COVID and I
was home for two three weeks and they never let
me come back to work. We had shut down, so

(09:20):
I was in my house teleworking all day. I was
locked in this smaller house a small, you know, little
bitty row house in York, Pennsylvania, with all my occult
books waiting on Blake Smith that ask me to send
him a book so i'd have something to do, right,
you know, and you know that kind of thing. And
I was like, well, I'm just going to dig into this.

(09:40):
I've got ancestry, I've got newspapers, dot com. I'm going
to dig into it. And the more and more I
dug into it, the more clues I found that other
people who had looked into it hadn't found. And then
whenever I got stir crazy, you know, I realized my
friend and I were the last people who had had
sort of public contact with each other.

Speaker 4 (09:57):
So we arranged a visit.

Speaker 6 (09:59):
I booked time at the libraries, you know, went in
and kind of under you know, Cloak and Dagger was
able to get some time research time in the libraries.
They were just as bored as I was, so they
gave me full run of the New York State Library
and you know, the Troy Public Library, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 4 (10:15):
And by the end of.

Speaker 6 (10:15):
It, you know, I not only had a person who
I think is the suspect, and some new clues. You know,
even if my guy didn't do it. The fact that
he was so heavily looked over and such an obvious suspect,
you know, means that there was there was more going
on than than what people at the time seem to

(10:35):
let on. So, you know, I think a person in
her home did it, a person who was obviously a
very likely suspect, like the police, This would be the
first person police would investigate today. And the fact this
guy was ignored satistically, statistically makes no sense unless you
explore the political connections and things like that that I
lay out in the book.

Speaker 1 (10:55):
First of all, it's in talking about Mark Fraut. You
reminded me that like Mark Frost, super influential on Twin Peaks,
Mark Snow did the music for the X Files.

Speaker 4 (11:09):
Yeah, I was like, what's up with.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
These cold marks? I don't know, man, a little weird, right, Yeah.

Speaker 6 (11:14):
You know, And I mean, I mean, you remember that time,
like Twin Peaks and the X Files. Oh my god,
that was the best time to be.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
All I have such you know, as you talk about
in the book, you went to a bowling alley to
watch this, and I had to go to my best
friend Mike's house because my parents were, it was all
shut down for me. And so his mom has passed away,
but she was such a glorious influence on me and
I just I loved the fact she'd let us watch
these shows, and she loves talking about Twin Peaks, and

(11:45):
she wasn't as into the X Files, but she loved
the fact that we got to hang out and talk
about it together. It was great, but not quite a
serious question, but at what point during this research did
you realize you had become a hazel nut?

Speaker 6 (11:59):
I mean tonight, this was the first time I've heard
that joke. And you know, I'll do this that it's
it's it's it's going in something. I mean, yeah, it's
going on a website when we get it fired.

Speaker 4 (12:12):
All right.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
Here's my serious question though, So part of this this case,
you know, and you would have to do this narratively
anyway to tell a story, but I think you make
the point that it matters a little bit more in
this case. The setting, Yeah, the where it happened, the
when it happened, These factors matter in your investigation. Can
you talk a little bit about when the story took

(12:33):
place and where and what was going on there at
the time.

Speaker 6 (12:36):
So it's it's nineteen oh eight, it's upstate New York.
New York is in a you know, we think of
New York as this you know kind of you know,
the number one population in that area today or of
Italian descent. At that time, it was primarily Irish Methodists
that control the politics of the area, and New York
was transitioning from the old Lincoln Republican part to the

(13:01):
new Theodore Roosevelt Republican Party, the Progressive Party, and the
political machine was shifting in that area from a kind
of corrupt machine politician politics to Theodore Roosevelt's more clean
cut progressive politics and what would eventually become the Democratic

(13:22):
Party under Franklin Roosevelt a few years later. There was
also a shift in local hegemony. The Irish aristocrats that
ruled the area and controlled all the political offices in
upstate were being starting to be pushed out by an
incoming Italian population that we're moving up from New York.
So it's a hegemonic shift. The middle classes, we knew

(13:43):
it didn't exist then, but Hazel would be considered a
part of the professional middle class at that time. She
was a governess and a live in housekeeper in the
wealthiest homes in Troy, New York, and all of her
bosses were politically connected to this Irish Methodist Republican political machine.

(14:07):
And her aunt had worked in some of the wealthiest
houses and at the hotel where all these guys kind
of hung out sort of gangster style, and probably got
her her jobs. So she was not a scullery maid
or somebody doing, you know, scrubbing out shoes. She was
a young, you know, good looking lady, twenty years old
when she died. She'd been working in these houses since

(14:29):
she was fourteen. She was literate, very literate. In fact,
she read a lot, She wore glasses, she took care
of her teeth, she had had some advanced dental surgery.
Her parents lived in a big house on Fourth Street,
even though they were working class people. So these were
you know, these were not four people. They were not
disadvantaged people, but they were, you know, members of the

(14:51):
local establishment. Her aunt marries into this political elite after
Hazelis is killed and leaves the legacy behind. So they're
what we would consider today sort of like the equivalent
of a of an oiled field services worker in Houston.
You know, somebody who's got a high school education but
makes a you know, a low six figure salary by

(15:13):
having a specialized job.

Speaker 4 (15:14):
You know, that's my family, right.

Speaker 6 (15:15):
You know, none went to school, but they all made
a damn good living laying pipe and working in the
oil fields. That's what Hazel was. So when she got killed,
I mean, this was killing one of the local elite.
There were a lot of murders that year, but they
weren't pretty white Irish Methodist girls, so the city got
nervous about it. Also, She's found killed about eight miles

(15:39):
from her house out at Teal Pond, on the land
of a guy named Farmer Conrad Teal. They called him Coonteal.
He was a local descendant of the of the Dutch
aristocrats that lived there. I believe the farm is still
in the family down to this present day. And it
was right across the street from where her uncle, William Taylor,

(16:00):
her mother's brother, was living. So Hazel spent her last
sort of dollar two three dollars after she was fired
or left or quit her employer's house a guy named
Professor Carey, who was a teacher at Renseleer, an engineering
professor there. She leaves his home and is found dead

(16:22):
a week later in this pond across the street from
her from her uncle's house. Some witnesses had seen her
at the local train station. She said she was going
down to New York or down the river, which meant
New York.

Speaker 4 (16:36):
In those days.

Speaker 6 (16:37):
She may have gone to Albany. I think she stayed
on a riverboat. I found some evidence that she may
have spent the night on a riverboat, which would have
been a way that a woman could travel in those
days without having to have a chaperone to book her
into a hotel. She's found dead. There's no public transportation
to get you right up to that pond. Anybody that
did the murder would have had to have been seen,

(16:58):
or they would have had have known the area and
been able to sneak in an automobile. There were a
lot of people traveling that area that night. So a
huge chunk of the book is an attempt to set
the stage and to meticulously recreate all that witness testimony.
And a few people have looked into this case. I'm
the only one that's ever done that like that just
took that took over a year to do, to go

(17:19):
through all those hundreds of newspaper articles and go, oh,
this person said they were here at this time and
the moon set at this time, you know, and this
person said they saw that person.

Speaker 4 (17:29):
So we reconstruct that timeline.

Speaker 6 (17:31):
My wife helped me do that, you know, sitting around
the kitchen table, you know, to find out exactly how
the movements up and down that road happened that night.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
It's cool, though, that's good detective work. Yeah, I mean, oh,
it's really good work. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (17:51):
I mean, that's how you saw the case like this,
and it just took a lot of work. But I
think it eliminated some of the other suspects from them
because it's somebody that had to be in an audio mobile.
Tire tracks were witnessed. Cars of Henry Ford's model T
doesn't come onto the market until November of that year.
This is July, so cars were still rich people's stuff

(18:11):
in New York at those days. So it really gives
us an understanding of who the suspects would be.

Speaker 3 (18:17):
Well, I just want to go back to an earlier
part of the book, paranormal lack experiences that you had
that you wrote about in this book, and you've already
spoken about the dreams, but your cemetary experience. I think
that that was really fun the way you document that
as part of your hands on research.

Speaker 6 (18:32):
So you know that was not any original draft of
the book. I didn't put it in there because I
didn't want to seem crazy. And I took photos. Hazel
took photos after it happened, and I thought about it
and I thought about it, and I wrote the original
draft of the book. I think that story doesn't get
in until about draft five or six. The original book

(18:54):
was one hundred and sixty thousand words long. So all
that came out, and in a cold winter day here
in New in DC, right before.

Speaker 1 (19:05):
Would you say, a crosty days mark.

Speaker 6 (19:08):
Trusty day with a lot of the with a lot
of this stuff going, she called me up and said,
you gotta, you gotta put the cemetery story back in there.
You gotta do it. People want to read it. It happened,
It's interesting, so put it in there. So I put
it in and it did happen to heaven. Just liked
that it was cold. It was impossibly cold, and I

(19:29):
had on some north faced boots that I had not
taken out of the closet in years, and they fell apart,
so my feet were wet. And we went up to
that weird old tree and she was freaking out and
there's no there's about a foot snow on the ground,
there's no snow under the tree. She was acting tweakerl word.
Puts her hand on this tree and starts freaking out.
And I put my hand on that damn tree, and

(19:49):
again this could be you know, I I know I
don't have a cardiac problem because I've gone to the
cardiologist since then, and my vegetarian diets served me well.
But I got sick. I got violently said. I went
down that hill. I thought I was having a heart attack.
I thought I would not be able to drive my
car back. I got one of those weird BMW's that
you have to have magic powers to drive. So I'm like,

(20:12):
my friend's not gonna be able to drive us out here.
We're gonna die out here in a snowstorm. And I
threw up and it fell on the ground and we
were out looking for Hazel's grave. We couldn't find it.
It was too cold. It was stupid for us to
even try to go out there in the snow because
it's bone white and the snow is bone white, and
I fell over. I fell on the ground, and when
I stood up and looked down, I was on top

(20:33):
of her tombstone. And it happened exactly like that. You
can even see in the pictures, my stumbling feet coming
down the hill, and instead of going straight to my
car where I was headed, I took a right lost
my balance, went down on the ground, beat full of
snow and muck, and looked up and I see on

(20:55):
top of this grave, it says Hazel. And I'm like,
oh man, you found it.

Speaker 1 (20:59):
I'm glad you said that. We've had you know, we
get iTunes reviews and some of them were some of them,
some of them are awesome. There's lots of great five
star reviews, which is wonderful. Occasionally we'll get like a
one star reviewer. It's like the host reject all paranormal.
You know, how could you live your life like this?
And it's like, no, it's not really like that. Honestly,

(21:19):
the lived experience of being a human is even if
you rationalize, if you can come up with an explanation
of everything, you still have the emotional surprise, the heartfelt experiences.
I mean, we're just because we try to put an
explanation of things, doesn't mean we don't have these magical moments, right,
And I think it's really it's really powerful when you

(21:44):
have these these kind of moments, because you know, even
if you could say it's statistics, or it's it's a coincidence,
or any any number of rational explanations, doesn't matter. You
lived this weird moment where suddenly it felt like the
universe was lining up. We're gonna be talking a little
bit about that in the upcoming thing we're doing on
the Psychedelics. It's like, it's just, yeah, it's something.

Speaker 4 (22:08):
Yeah, I had some of that long time ago. That's
going in another book. But I lived by this out
of control musoming. I live by this motto that is
uh w W j D what would Joe do?

Speaker 6 (22:22):
And by Joe Joe Nickel, you know he's pastor, but
you know a guy I had a long relationship with
and just love dearly.

Speaker 4 (22:31):
Uh.

Speaker 6 (22:32):
In my opinion, the master skeptic. You know, he didn't
think people were diluted. He took experiences at face value,
and more than anything else, he went into the field
and did research, and you that changes every experience you have.
It really does you know I I am a witness
in this story, not the investigator. So I'm not going

(22:53):
to tell you what I think happened because I don't
know what happened. I would need a Joe Nichol to
come in and say, well, Jerry, you know, you were,
you know, going through a midlife crisis in a time
of heightened and you've done all this research and you've
seen a million photographs of this cemetery. So of course
Carl Jung kicked in and you know, blah blah blah. Okay,

(23:14):
I buy it. You know, I'm not a believer. I
buy it. But I wrote the story not trying to
explain that, which is again, that's probably what happened, but
from the experience that I had, and that's what makes
it interesting. That's I mean, you know, I'm an anthropologist
by training. It gets the lived experience versus the explanation,

(23:35):
and I'm solving the murder. I break a lot of
true crime rules in this book. If you're bored by
true crime, you'll like this one. I put myself in
the story, which is apparently a no no in true crime,
and it's written as a casebook and an adventure and
I liked it that way. So you're getting the story
from my perspective, not from a god godlike investigator that's

(23:58):
off the state.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
At the time time of the crime, people had a
story they wanted to tell about what kind of person
Hazel was. Yeah, journalism and journalism, yeah, and.

Speaker 4 (24:09):
I mean that.

Speaker 1 (24:10):
But we faithfully we live in an enlightened age now
where that never.

Speaker 4 (24:14):
That never happens.

Speaker 6 (24:15):
Actually, I think that's why this book has a lot
of relevance, because we're in that same media environment. Yeah,
there's a case going on right now, this care this
poor woman, there's a podcast about it, who may have
run over and killed her her boyfriend who's a cop,
and she's been that's hot.

Speaker 1 (24:30):
That's a hot topic right now.

Speaker 6 (24:32):
Yeah, and it's like, you can't you don't know what's real.
You exactly, I'm confused. You don't know what's real and uh.
And that's the same environment we're dealing with in Hazel's day.

Speaker 1 (24:42):
But you've got the advantage of you've got the passage
of time, right, and time cools off the hot media
and you can actually go back and sort of figure
out what's really going on. You can look at more
evidence based approaches. So what kind of person did people
say Hazel was and what kind of person did you
uncover in your research?

Speaker 6 (24:58):
So so they say she was a duplicitous woman, a manipulator,
a quote unquote horror, that quote gets knocked around, a
person who was on the make, you know, trying to
get in with men to get money in favors. I'm
not a prostitute, because prostitution was more or less accepted

(25:20):
in Troy at that time. Main Faith, America's most famous
nineteenth century prostitute was in Troy about three blocks away
from the police station. So, you know, legitimate I'm going
to give you money for sex work was acceptable in Troy.
So Hazel wasn't doing that. But they accused her of being,
you know, what they would call a good time girl,
somebody who traded favors maybe sex for.

Speaker 4 (25:46):
Money and.

Speaker 6 (25:48):
You know, dinner's out, that kind of stuff, And that
was a common person. There was a woman in town
named Handla Bell who was doing that, you know, and
she gets tangled up in this story by giving Hazel
the name of somebody she could go hang out with
in New York who seemed not to be interested in her.
Hazel was not that she's when we start to unpack

(26:11):
who she really was. She had a bunch of letters
in her trunk that Will Clements, the guy who worked
for the Pulitzer paper, the Yellow journalists said were from
men and boyfriends, to the point that two of those
letters were probably concocted. You know, it's generally agreed that
he made one of them up. He probably made up
the other because they only appear in his media. And

(26:32):
this is a story that was covered all over the country,
and other reporters didn't cover Will the story the same
way Will Clements did. They They don't mention facts in
their coverage that he mentions. And Clemens had a reputation
for making stuff up. He made up a whole case
in New York a couple of years before this that
ended up. I can't remember if he got sued or

(26:53):
got beat up or something bad happened to him because
he was making up nonsense. So that was sort of
his stock in trade. And he paid her in this
one article as a woman who was he calls her
coy and a coquette, and you know, he was to
keep it relevant for the kids. He was kind of
one of these, you know, in cel. You know, woman hating.
He man types the shirt of America and he paints her,

(27:17):
you know, in the stripes of all his weird fantasies
of what a of what a fallen woman is. And
I mean that was a thing. Then that's something people
talked about. It was in the moral conversation. It was
driving the push for prohibition. You know, this is at
a time when people are starting to do prohibition pushes
and all that kind of stuff. But Hazel wasn't that.

(27:38):
She was actually a young woman who read a lot.
In her last job, she ends up working in a
professor's house, and when people came to see her, they
said she was usually sitting on a couch reading. The
letters in her trunk were actually not from uh lurid men.
They were from doctors. Her adult letters in her trunk.

(27:59):
She was she had something wrong with her health. She
was seeking medical advice. So all these trips that you know,
I'm actually the first person to publish this clue. It's
not in any other stuff. So this is good stuff.
All these trips she was taking supposedly to get in
with men, she was actually going to get seek medical advice.
And most of the letters in her trunk were either

(28:19):
from friends or they were juvenilia. They were letters, childhood
letters that she had received and hung on to from
people she knew, because I don't forget she was twenty,
you know, so a lot of the French that she
had made she had made when she was a kid,
and a couple of them were still kids. Was seventeen,
eighteen years old, you know.

Speaker 1 (28:35):
So does that make her she's doing extensive correspondence about
medical issues, Yeah, to make her some kind of typeochondria actively, I.

Speaker 4 (28:45):
Mean it's possible.

Speaker 6 (28:47):
I mean, she spent way more money on her teeth
than a person of her station would spend.

Speaker 4 (28:52):
She'd already have.

Speaker 1 (28:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6 (28:55):
She had a pair of handground glasses. Now you know, these.

Speaker 4 (29:00):
Set me back two hundred fifty bucks from you know,
for the losers.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
He's holding his glasses.

Speaker 6 (29:05):
Oh well, I'm sorry, Yeah, I'm holding up my glasses
from Warby Parker sponsorship. Two hundred and fifty bucks. But
a set of handmade glasses, like in the old days,
you went in and you tried on glasses, like reading glasses,
until you got something that kind of worked. But she
had a set of glasses made and and you know,

(29:26):
gold rimmed Cotney pencenose glasses, handmade. I think I ran
the numbers for it was like a like twelve hundred
dollars in modern money, Like this is not something a
housekeeper spent their money on. So she was unusually obsessed
with her health. She had been really sick with the
grip earlier in the year before she died. The grip

(29:47):
is a particularly pernicious flu. Spanish flu hadn't happened yet.
The flu was bad that year. And also this is
when typhoid. Mary was, you know, one hundred and fifty
miles away in New York, so people were terrified of typhoid,
and the early stages of typhoid and flu are very
very similar. So Hazel quarantines herself around Christmas of nineteen

(30:10):
oh seven, and Clemens of course, thought she was pregnant
and had an abortion. And that's the story that he tells,
and that goes that falls into the lore right down
to the present day. You listen to a podcast about
this thing, and that's the story they're going to tell.

Speaker 1 (30:23):
Well, it's a very easy story to help you know. Yeah,
that makes great sense. There's your motive, you know all
that stuff.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
Oh, it's sensationalist. That's exactly people want to hear.

Speaker 1 (30:33):
And I'm sure the autopsy bore that out right.

Speaker 6 (30:35):
The autopsy was done by three doctors. I mean, this
is kind of serious. The autopsy was done by three doctors.
And I actually pulled some medical books to see you
can tell if somebody had been pregnant or had an
abortion in nineteen oh eight, and oh yeah, the doctor
said no, she had not had an abortion. There was
also no no evidence of sexual contact, so she wasn't
raped when she was killed. In fact, she had no

(30:55):
marks on her other than the contusion at the back
of her head. And I'm holding my hand up at
a kind of about a ninety degree agle. She she
had a contusion on the back of her head that
didn't break the skin. So my theory is is that
she wasn't murdered. Most people assumed she was clobbered over
the head with a stick or hit with a club
or a rock. But she was five feet tall, so

(31:17):
you know, to hit her like that, she'd have to
be leaning over and it would have busted her head open.
I think she was wearing a whalebone corset. I think
someone she got into an argument and her killer shoved her.
And it's super rocky out by teal pond. You know
you're going to fall down out there in good boots
on a warm on any on a given day, she

(31:38):
was out there in the middle of the night. I
think somebody shoved her. With that corset on, she wouldn't
have been able to bend her body forward to guard
her head, and I think she just went straight back.
And one of the clues I found that's unique to
my book is that they found her glasses. A couple
of reporters were out walking around and they found her
her glasses laying by a rock. So you know Pensne's glasses.

(32:00):
If you don't know what they look like, you know,
think of you know, the old cartoon. I'm trying to
at the Monopoly Man. This is in the in the
in another universe, he wears glasses. I don't know what
their glasses without rems and they just sort of sit
on your nose. And in the old days, people really
liked them because they they didn't look louse. This was

(32:21):
before contacts. They didn't really look like you were wearing glasses.
So if you're really concerned about your looks, you could
wear these glasses and have a lower profile. And Hazel
wore those things for the last two years of her
life all day long, so you know, she was clearly
wearing her glasses when she got clobbered. And what I
think happened is that there was an argument, she got shoved,

(32:42):
she couldn't adjust her footing. She was wearing city boots,
so that would have been a flat fronted book boot
with a little two inch heel, and her feet went
out from under her. She hit this rock, uh, and
it caused a contusion that stops her heart, and the
autopsy discovered that. But the hit was so gentle that
it didn't even break the skin. And this is super

(33:02):
common amongst people that ski. This was not an assassination.
This was probably a quarrel.

Speaker 3 (33:12):
I think you do such a marvelous job of honoring
her her name and her name as well just as
a woman. It's very important to me that he did this.
And I think it's interesting when you talk about her
being a good time girl, and it just makes me
think of the Flappers a couple of centuries on. You know,
so not a whore, not someone like that, not a

(33:36):
sex worker, but someone who just likes having a good time.

Speaker 6 (33:40):
I appreciate you saying that, because that was a part
of this story that really concerned me. It is hard
to write this kind of history as a white man,
ye without setting a lot of context.

Speaker 4 (33:53):
The Long Book.

Speaker 6 (33:56):
Told this story in detail and set a lot of context.
And now people just have to just kind of understand
that the Gilded Age, you know, before women's liberation, before
women could vote, had a whole different way of approaching attitudes.
And I took a lot of this from like my
grandmother's story, my my grandma grandma.

Speaker 4 (34:15):
I never called her grandmother grandma.

Speaker 6 (34:17):
My my mimi. My mom's mom ran away from home
when she was, you know, fourteen, fifteen years old, and
she joined the Works Progress Administration PA WPA, and she
was ballet dancer, and she ended up out in San
Francisco and she danced with this girl named Edith something

(34:38):
I can't remember he name is. She was from New
York City, and they realized they could make more money
just going out with dudes at night and just doing stuff,
and she ended up being an.

Speaker 4 (34:49):
Adult dancer, you know a few years later.

Speaker 6 (34:51):
You know, that was that was something people in my
own family did and you know, I come from the
same socioeconomic background as Hazel. You and I in the
first college grad you know, and that kind of stuff.
So you know, my my grandmother did that. And she
was a nice lady and went to church, you know,
and the whole thing. But she was a good time
girl back in the back in the late twenties and
early thirties, because that's how you could.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
Get everybody's got to eat.

Speaker 6 (35:13):
Everybody's got to eat, you know. And I think Hazel
had a real strong interest in going to New York City.
She loved to travel. She had gone down there Memorial Day,
you know, the anniversary of that trips coming up next weekend,
what they called Dedication Day back then, I believe, and
she left to party. And she spent all of her
money on partying. Because when you were a housekeeper, you

(35:34):
got three hots and a cot, you got you got food,
you got clothing. You know, you got us and you
made it a pretty damn good salary because you were
in charge of the people's kids. So you know, it
was a great job for somebody who liked to hang out,
and that's what she was doing. It was innocent fun,
it was girl stuff. It was not, you know, and
you know, she had some tight relationships with some of

(35:56):
her girlfriends. She seemed not to be interested in having
a out of male relationships, especially according to her brother.
So she was just having a good time and it
seems like she must have got in with somebody who
who who got a little carried away?

Speaker 1 (36:10):
Well no, I know that some of our listeners would
be like, wait, this is not a true crime podcast, right,
So we're monster talk. We talk about weird stuff and monsters.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
And.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
So there was a spiritualist element to this case. So
what was the involvement of psychics astrologers?

Speaker 6 (36:30):
So I'm glad you're bringing that up. That's that's my
favorite chapter in the book. And I would have yanked
this book from publication if they made me pull it.
There was a lot of that man, and that's why
I wanted to come on to your your show and
wanted to other than I just love you guys, and like.

Speaker 1 (36:45):
To quote Terry Guard, the feeling is mutual.

Speaker 4 (36:48):
Yes, So but no, there was weird stuff that happened.

Speaker 6 (36:53):
There's a point where the DA says, I keep getting
all these tips and finally the press are like.

Speaker 4 (37:00):
Come on, the guy's name is Jarvis Peel, Drivis p O'Brien.

Speaker 6 (37:03):
You know, you can just big mustache cigar, you know,
just the classic robber baron.

Speaker 4 (37:09):
He really was a railroad lawyer. He was a robber
baron lawyer.

Speaker 6 (37:12):
Finally revealed what all the letters were, and it was
people having dreams about Hazel Drew and solving the case
and their dreams. I don't know if Mark Frost knew that,
but that's right out of how Dale Cooper gets his
information in the in the TV show. So I thought
that was bizarre. Yeah, And then okay, the mother talks

(37:35):
to the several papers, the New York Times, the Gray Lady,
and the New York Times. You know, maybe it's the
failing New York Times today quote unquote, but it was
a big effing deal in nineteen oh eight.

Speaker 4 (37:49):
It was the paper.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
This was before word ale, So this is impressive.

Speaker 6 (37:52):
Way before it was a gaming platform. It actually carried
news and information. It was the national paper of record.
And they cover this story and they say, and Hazel's
mom says, I believe she was taken out by a
well to do man of Troy, and he had power
over my daughter. He hypnotized her, and he murdered her. Well,

(38:16):
that's a great quote, except I turns out the guy
I think killed Hazel was into hypnotism.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
That's funny, that's really.

Speaker 5 (38:27):
Because when I.

Speaker 6 (38:28):
Found that clue, I was like, dude, you have got
to be kidding me. And sure enough, he does have
a high a tie to the most famous hypnosis of
the of the era was a guy named Xena Xenophon
Lamont somebody, and he was a personal friend of Mussolini
and was a wild dude, and my suspect had had

(38:53):
a tangible a tie to him.

Speaker 3 (38:55):
I want to ask about that. I mean, do you
think that this was a mother's grief or do you think,
because you've alluded to towards the end, that they knew
who this person was.

Speaker 4 (39:05):
I think Hazel's family knew who the killer was.

Speaker 6 (39:10):
I certainly think Hazel's aunt many knew who the killer was,
because she acts like she knew who the killer was.
She I tails it. She This is a lady who
made it to forty years old without ever being married
in nineteen oh eight.

Speaker 4 (39:23):
That carries spinster again.

Speaker 6 (39:28):
My partying grandmother's sister was a spinster aunt who had
a special friend she lived with for a long time.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
You know, they didn't have a Subaru but a lie.

Speaker 6 (39:40):
But they wouldn't have I think they had a Chrysler.
But she had that special friend and was a typist
and you know, wore jeans when people didn't wear jeans
and stuff like that. You know what I'm talking about.
I do.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yeah, yeah, I think anybody who's serious will find plenty
of loved ones who had that profile. Yes, yeah, yeah, and.

Speaker 6 (39:59):
Aunt many at at the age of forty, about six
months after Hazel dies Is killed. Mary's a member of
the Republican establishment, a guy who eventually made a good
amount of money in the water trade in Troy. We
don't think of, you know, New York for having that good,
good water, but they actually do. Troy's right close to
Saratoga Springs.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
Oh no, I actually I love New York City water,
which comes from the mountains. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's why the.

Speaker 4 (40:24):
Pizza is good. That's why I'm fat. You know.

Speaker 3 (40:28):
Well, do you think her getting married, do you think
that that was a reward or do you think that
it was her kind of I think it was an.

Speaker 6 (40:34):
Award, a reward in a way to protect herself because
everybody shut up O'Brien's It kills O'Brien's political career. His
failure to solve this case ends his political career, and
he had a stellar political career. His brother had ties
all the way to the Roosevelt's White House, so O'Brien

(40:55):
could have gone a long way as a part of
the establishment. But what he got instead of politics was
an f ton of railroad money.

Speaker 4 (41:02):
And he and.

Speaker 6 (41:03):
The killer and one of the other suspects all had
ties to the railroad that still runs through Tryan, Albany today,
and they were just about to launch a massive, what
we would call multi billion dollar project right at the
time Hazel is killed. And that project happened and they
all got nice, big houses and lived happily ever after.

(41:24):
Uh So, politics be damned, you know, the railroad came
through for him, you know.

Speaker 4 (41:30):
And I think that's a lot of what what happened.

Speaker 6 (41:32):
I mean, we we think of the railroad now as
this lame, slobbering, lame thing that is dying, But at
that time it ruled the country. I mean, it was
it was the the premier industry in the United States
before before World were World War One.

Speaker 4 (41:45):
So they got they got their stacks.

Speaker 6 (41:48):
And uh and went on and lived and lived happily
ever after, and many clammed up and uh and had
a nice life too. She eventually had servants of her own.
She never had to work a day in her life
after Hazel died.

Speaker 1 (42:01):
But I guess one question I think readers are going
to want before they buy the book is how confident
are you've solved the mystery? Like do you do you
have it? Do you think you are? You pretty confident here?

Speaker 4 (42:13):
Well, you know, I don't think I'm gonna get sued.

Speaker 3 (42:22):
Myself.

Speaker 4 (42:23):
Yeah, I do.

Speaker 6 (42:24):
Wonder about that, like like you know when you write
true chrime, and a lot of people who solve contemporary
murders straight up get sued like the But this this
case is over one hundred years old. I am when
I'm three beers in, I am one hundred percent confident.
I saw at nine o'clock in the morning, I'm about

(42:45):
seventy five to eighty percent confident. And when you read
the book, I lay this out. The reason why I'm
so confident is because the clues lead to a tiny
suspect pool, and there is only one suspect who meets
all the criteria. He had a car, he knew the area,

(43:05):
he could navigate his car up and down that area.
He was in Hazel's house. I mean, you guys are
talking about now, but I not say it captivating, interesting,
well read, smart hypnotist.

Speaker 4 (43:21):
And they were.

Speaker 6 (43:22):
Going to bury Hazel across the street from his house,
and the day of the murder, or the day of
her funeral, they moved the grave. So that's one of
the reasons why I think the family knew who did it,
because you don't You're not going to marry the bury
the murder victim where this guy.

Speaker 4 (43:39):
Nobody's going to do that.

Speaker 6 (43:41):
Her, even I, who am not superstitious, ain't doing that.
So they moved her body to another cemetery where Hazel
had no family. Her whole family's buried there now. But
they were gonna they were going to bury her right
across the street in the family platform where I think
the murderer lived. And they changed that on the day
of the on the day of the funeral. Wow, So

(44:02):
I think they knew who did it. I think a
lot of people in Troy knew who did it. And
I have talked to some people in Troy who think
I'm right about this. They're not going to go on
the record, but they're like, yeah, you know, it makes sense.
And the problem is we had just come off the

(44:23):
Billy Brown murder, right, so a rich guy with power
over the young girl kills her. The fact that my
suspect was not investigated is really problematic because they weren't
that dumb. I mean, the FBI was just getting started.
Scotland Yard had been around, I talk a little about this,
you know, the CIRTE was up and running under VIDOC

(44:45):
and all that stuff. They knew enough about crime, and
they knew enough about crime from what had just happened
one hundred miles away in their state. Two of at
least asked this guy some questions that the inquest.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
He lies.

Speaker 4 (45:07):
At the inquest, he tells a story different from what
he had been telling the press, so he's already perjuring
himself and nobody followed up. Today.

Speaker 6 (45:18):
This would be the guy they would take into custody
first and shake down without his wife, for kids or
anybody else present. Like the suspect that I think dead.
It is the guy the cops would immediately arrest today.
And I think even if he didn't do it, man,
it's so suspect, that he was not taken into custody,
that he wasn't questioned when people, the most off the

(45:39):
wall people were questioned about this murder, just the most
random dudes. And at the end O'Brien, after investigating the
whole thing, at the Corner's inquest, tries to mark it
down as a suicide and he can't find any of
the there's three coroners who worked on it, and there's
the corner stroke more strope who's doing the question, and

(46:00):
none of them will say this was a suicide. They're
all like, this is a murder. And he brings in
a doctor to swear it was a suicide. And the
doctor is his buddy from the railroad that the suspect
and the work for. He's a railroad surgeon. He does

(46:20):
the word suicide doesn't even appear in the book that
he wrote about railroad surgery.

Speaker 4 (46:24):
So if that's not a.

Speaker 6 (46:25):
Cover up, Yahn, then it's the world's worst police investigation.

Speaker 3 (46:29):
I think it's an excellent theory. I think that the
person that you point to is just so suspect and
I picked it up on that very early on. Maybe
we can talk about that later, But there was just
one thing that you mentioned that that had me tweaked
so right to the end. I was very satisfied when
you named this person. And I think it's just so
incredibly sad that she died at such a young age

(46:51):
and this person went on to live a very long life.
It's just very unfair.

Speaker 6 (46:56):
I appreciate that if he didn't do it, and I
fingered a guy.

Speaker 3 (47:00):
Who did, the hell was it?

Speaker 4 (47:02):
Then then you.

Speaker 6 (47:04):
Know the guy should have at least done more right,
like at least he had a responsibility from his position
to have at least ponied up some of the reward.
I mean, a grocery store cloak clerk put up a
reward and this guy didn't.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
So, you know, I want to ask you, why is
interest in this case enduring? And are there any living
family members too?

Speaker 6 (47:25):
There are living family members. There are still Drews in
the area. They have an ancestry page. I reached out
to a couple of them, and you know, I think
they're done. You know, they're not interested in this, and
that's fair. You know, I got to see one of
the family members showed me some pictures I'm not allowed
to use, so I got to see more images of
Hazel than the anybody else will ever get to see.

(47:47):
And I'm very I got to see what many really
looked like, you know, what Hazel looked like, you know, for.

Speaker 3 (47:53):
Real, see that one picture or the two versions of
that one picture.

Speaker 6 (47:58):
So there is still family around there, not the Druis anymore.
But you know, I hope they'll read this book and
enjoy it. But this is a part of their history.
I think they're kind of they're kind of finished with now.
If any of Hazel's relatives are listening to this and
I didn't talk to you, and you want to talk,
let's do it. Because at the end of the book
I talk about this. There's a little section at the

(48:18):
end called this Isn't Over. There were over a thousand
people who visited the crime scene, and there were over
one hundred people who saw her body in the funeral home,
and a lot of them took photographs somewhere in Troy.
There are pictures. There are pictures of the crime scene,
there are pictures of Hazel, and they're in addicts there.

(48:39):
I went to a garage sale in Avril Park and
bought some stuff that had clearly come out of the
attic and had nothing to do with Hazel.

Speaker 4 (48:46):
So you know, if people.

Speaker 6 (48:48):
Related to Hazel, or people related to any of the
folks in this book are still around want to talk
or have artifacts, I hope they'll bring them because I'll
do another version.

Speaker 4 (48:57):
I'll do a part two. I'd love to.

Speaker 1 (48:59):
There's this high and we've talked about briefly about Twin Peaks.
Did you get a vibe on why Frost was interested
in this case or why was he aware of it?
And like, how did I mean? I see several elements.

Speaker 6 (49:15):
So the local lord, there's even there's a pick in
the version of the book. You haven't seen it yet,
but while I was writing this book, they actually put
up a monument to Hazel right across from teals Pond,
and it tells the Mark Frost story. People think Hazel
haunts the place where she died. People have seen her
ghosts there for years, and Mark Frost's grandmother told the
story of Hazel Drew within the context of a ghost story,

(49:37):
So she is a ghost. Plus, if you go to Troy,
go to Manry's Diner, go to the woods around Teal's Pond,
it's the real Twin Peaks.

Speaker 1 (49:46):
I mean to have damn find coffee that's.

Speaker 6 (49:48):
Really restaurant in Troy has damn fine coffee and they
roasted and blended themselves.

Speaker 1 (49:57):
It's fantastic.

Speaker 4 (50:00):
It's great.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
This was This was such a great read. And when
is it coming out again?

Speaker 6 (50:09):
It is June tenth, and I don't know this. This
may be out by the time it comes. It's Amazon,
Barnes and Noble. It's going to be in stores. Please,
if you like paper books, God, go to Barnes and
Noble and buy it. That would make me so happy Amazon,
of course. But with this kind of thing, I'd like
to keep doing this.

Speaker 4 (50:27):
Guys.

Speaker 6 (50:28):
You know, I've got another case I'm working on that's
never been publicized that's even weirder than this one. I
won't say the name, but it's uh voodoo murder in Philadelphia.
The book is going to be called Blake get Ready
Hexan City.

Speaker 4 (50:45):
So so good.

Speaker 6 (50:49):
I'd like to keep doing this, but you know, I
can only do this if if people buy this stuff,
so i'd sure.

Speaker 3 (50:55):
Yeah, I totally understand. Well, wonderful job. Jerry, really loved
the book, and I'm excited to see what you do next.

Speaker 1 (51:03):
Rite Jerry again, thank you for coming back. And it's
always going to see you. And that book again is
out June tenth, and check it out Guards.

Speaker 4 (51:12):
And Noble, all the places.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
Monster You've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show
about monsters. I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner. You
just heard an interview with author and investigator Jerry Drake
discussing his new book, Hazel was a Good Girl, solving
the murder that inspired Twin Peaks. It was fun to
see how Jerry applied his work skills and amateur investigator

(51:34):
skills to tackle this mystery. And we hope that you
grab a copy when it comes out on June tenth.
Links in the show notes to pre order. Monster Talk
theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.

Speaker 7 (51:46):
You know this is Excuse me a damn fine cup
of coffee.

Speaker 1 (52:39):
This has been a Monster House presentation.