[page 11] The following is an excerpt from David Bushman and Mark T. Givens’ book Murder at Teal's Pond: Hazel Drew and the Mystery that Inspired Twin Peaks, published in 2022 by Thomas & Mercer. It opens with a foreword by Mark Frost, co-creator of Twin Peaks, and is followed by the authors’ introduction.
What’s the first “ghost story” you remember? One that left marks, if not scars. That gripped you with the singular chill of mortality introducing itself.
Mine came by way of my maternal grandmother—one for whom the words colorful and strange don’t begin to do justice—a more than apt stand-in for the archetype of the crone, one of mythology’s eternal guides to the underworld. The former head of the WPA’s music division and a charter member of the OSS in London during WWII, Betty Lawson Calhoun was brilliant, complicated, and an inveterate fabulist.
Her family were city folks, her father an accomplished engineer and professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, a then-thriving industrial hub just upriver from Albany. When the Spanish flu pandemic devastated the country in 1918, Thomas Lawson decided to move his wife and two young daughters to the country. On a rustic, rugged, heavily wooded plateau twenty miles to the southeast, near the shores of an idyllic, arrowheaded alpine lake, he bought a decaying eighteenth-century farmhouse. He transformed it into a substantial ten-room home, bought up most of the raw acreage around the shoreline, built roads and a windmill, selling lots or cabins to friends and colleagues, soon creating a lively, upper-middle-class summer retreat community.
Life for the fortunate families on the shores of that lake changed forever and for good. For the mountain folk surroundding them, who’d been living in isolation on that plateau for seven generations, little changed. They worked for the new-[page 12]comers but kept their distance, eking out a hardscrabble living from the land, logging, making charcoal and, during Prohibition, moonshine. Two different worlds.
Legends abounded. These mountain families, nine of them in particular, were said to be descendants of Hessian mercenaries, deserters from the British Army during the American Revolution, drawn to this area for its resemblance to their ancestral Black Forest. The one the Brothers Grimm made famous as the source of all that’s sinister. A more local talent, Washington Irving, captured the same eerie mood of these Upstate woods, hills, and ponds, where the indifferent savagery of nature infected those who dared intrude and try to tame it. Whenever thunder rattled the panes, Betty always referenced the local lore; it was the sound of Rip van Winkle’s eerie Dutchmen, bowling ninepins in their mountain lair.
When we were youngsters, the locals were presented to us as peasants out of Russian literature: colorful, dim, loyal, with an edge of uncivilized danger. A more prosaic explanation, learned later, is that two centuries of deprivation, ignorance, intermarriage, alcoholism, madness, and incest yielded little but pain and tragedy. We heard constant whispers of terrible things that happened “up the mountain” and met many of these folks throughout childhood. A few chilled me to the bone; let’s just say, when I later saw the movie, the locals in Deliverance seemed familiar to me.
So, to Betty’s ghost story: two local laborers, hill folk, staggering back up the mountain after a payday pub crawl in town—a weekly ritual—encounter something uncanny.
***
Full moon. Clear, still night, early fall, with a whisper of winter in the air. As the men approach a small cow pond on the right, a desperate, loud, lowing moan fills them with fear. And then, hovering above the water in the moonlight, a glowing apparition that in their pickled minds assumes the shape of a struggling human form. The two drunks sprint home in terror, instantly sober, pledging to reform their ways. [page 13]
Our eyes were like saucers. We drove by that cow pond every day on our way up and down the mountain. Haunted? Damn.
And then, with a cackle, Betty revealed that the next day a nearby farmer discovered one of his Guernseys had wandered off and gotten stuck in the shallows.
So I ask, innocently, why did they think it was a ghost in the first place?
Oh. Ten years earlier the body of a young woman, a murder victim, had been found floating in that pond. Betty offers this as a throwaway, a punch line, the end.
I didn’t take it that way. A real person died in that water. She never mentioned a name and, when pressed, remembered no details. As time passed, without knowing a single fact about this young woman—or if this story was entirely invented—the image of that poor, forgotten soul lodged in a corner of my mind.
Two years later in California, that feeling hit much closer to my life. While away at boarding school in Canada, a girl I knew well—Susan Freschi, fourteen, daughter of my father’s boss and sister to one of my best friends—was assaulted and killed by a deranged young man. As time passed, and I learned more about the pervasive threat of sexual violence that women face on an everyday basis, these two dreadful events coalesced in my mind.
Twenty-five years later these conflated memories found fictional life as Laura Palmer. Or rather, Laura Palmer became a way to explore and explain what might have happened to that lost girl in the pond.
After Twin Peaks went off the air, I bought a place on that lake myself and began spending summers there for the first time in decades. It turned out a fellow I’d known since childhood, John Walsh, a local jack-of-all-trades and one of the hill folk—his grandfather had worked for my great-grand-father and Betty—had been equally obsessed with this story and for years had been digging to learn more. [page 14]
She was real. She had a name. Twenty-year-old Hazel Drew—beautiful, blonde, and connected to a number of powerful men—died in that pond one hot July night in 1908. She was a local girl who’d moved to the city, encountered a new way of life, and got caught up in the fast lane. Her story became a regional and then a national scandal. Even Betty’s tall tale of the two drunks, ten years later, mistaking a lost calf for Hazel’s ghost, turned out to be true.
David Bushman, a Variety editor when we first met in the nineties, emailed me a few years ago. He’d caught wind of this story—I’d made a passing reference to it in an interview—and he and his writing partner, Mark Givens, wanted to dig in and investigate. I offered my blessings and a few leads to follow, including my old childhood friend from up the mountain.
What they’ve produced here is a meticulous reconstruction of a sensational, forgotten crime, the investigation that followed, and its aftermath on the Capital region—over a century later—all rendered as gripping and immediate as an episode of Law and Order: SVU. It is also a relentless search for answers and justice, not only for Hazel Drew but for all the women who continue to fall victim to this monstrous plague of violence. It is, we now know, a crime as old as time.
I think of her whenever I pass Teal’s Pond. The ripples this murder created in that still water have continued to radiate around the world for a hundred years. For all of our Hazels and Susans and Lauras, this book is a monument of remembrance to their lost and stolen lives.
Mark Frost, cocreator of Twin Peaks
Authors’ Introduction
So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.
—Epicurus
Welcome to the town of Sand Lake, New York, population 8,425: a beatific, pastoral town nestled in the south-central corner of Rensselaer County, about thirteen miles east of [page 15] Albany, the state capital. On the town’s outskirts, deep within the woody terrain, lies the neighborhood of Taborton, named after Mount Tabor in Lower Galilee, Israel, which is where, according to the New Testament, the transfiguration of Jesus occurred; he radiated with light and conversed with the great prophets Moses and Elijah.
Taborton Road, the main route in and out, twists and turns for eight and a half miles from the bottom of Taborton Mountain, at the so-called Four Corners of Sand Lake, up past the Kipple (a variation of the German word gipfel, meaning “summit,” about 1,850 feet above sea level), past Big and Little Bowman Ponds, and, finally, on to the eastern tip of the mountain, where you arrive at a crossroads: turn left and you’re bound for East Poestenkill or Berlin; turn right and your destination is Cherry Plain.
It’s a lonely stretch of woods with acres and acres of trees, vegetation, and wildlife—you can walk for miles without ever encountering another person.
A lonely stretch of haunted woods, some might say. Folklorist Harold W. Thompson wrote in Body, Boots & Britches: Folktales, Ballads and Speech from Country New York of a Taborton farmer who had encountered a series of curious incidents in his barn: the tail and mane of one of his horses had been inexplicably braided; and the animal was so fatigued that the farmer was convinced someone had taken it out driving all night. Late at night, he checked in on the horse and discovered a strange black cat perched upon its back. Determined to frighten the cat away, he stabbed the feline in the back with a three-tined pitchfork. The following morning, the farmer’s mother—rumored by many in the woods to be a witch—was so ill that she was unable to rise from bed, but then the horse’s braiding abruptly unraveled, and the animal regained its vigor. Three days later, a doctor, examining the farmer’s mother, discovered three deep wounds in her back.
This sometimes charming, sometimes eerie little town is where Hazel Drew perished, and where our journey began. [page 16]
Technically, our journey began in 2013 at a retrospective tribute to the television series Twin Peaks at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Mark Frost, who cocreated the show with David Lynch, commented that his own inspiration for the series—although not Lynch’s—was an unsolved murder from the early 1900s in Upstate New York, where he and his family would spend summers at the home of his maternal grandmother, Betty Calhoun. Betty would regale Mark and his brother, Scott (who also wrote for Twin Peaks and is the author of the companion book The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes), with stories, many of them embellished—if not outright fabricated—including one about the murder of a young woman in the woods around the turn of the twentieth century that had never been solved. According to Betty, the ghost of the victim, whose body was discovered in a pond, still lingered in the woods, waiting for her slayer to be publicly exposed.
As Mark would later recall: “She would tell us all sorts of fantastic stories about life on the mountain, and one that really caught my ear was when she was a young girl she’d been told a story, something along the lines of a guy who had gone down to a tavern, kind of gotten a toot on, and was walking his way back up the mountain late at night, and he heard what he thought were the moans of a ghost. He saw something white flashing in the moonlight and scuttled home in terror.”
Mark couldn’t be sure, but he believed the woman’s name was Hazel Grey.
We have both long been obsessed with Twin Peaks. One of us (Mark) hosts a podcast about it, titled Deer Meadow Radio (https://deermeadowradio.libsyn.com); the other (David) has authored articles, essays, and books about it. We both also love a good mystery.
We were going to solve the murder of Hazel Grey!
Except there was no Hazel Grey. And “Upstate New York” wasn’t much of a clue (or clew, as it was spelled back then). [page 17]
There was, however, a Hazel Drew, slain in the woods of Sand Lake, New York, in the summer of 1908. Her murderer was never identified or apprehended.
We were on our way.
***
We first visited Sand Lake in 2016 after connecting with town historian Bob Moore, a friendly, snowy-haired man with spectacles who looks exactly like the middle school history and social studies teacher he used to be. Bob showed us vintage postcards, guided us on tours, answered countless emails and phone calls, even fed us seafood chowder and offered up a spare bedroom. On our behalf, Bob consulted a psychic, who told him maybe he was so obsessed with the case because he was a reincarnated iteration of the murderer. (We kept our eye on Bob for a while after that and made a note never to have him return to that psychic.) Most importantly, he organized a community: a group of people—some lifelong residents of Taborton, others descendants of people involved in the case, still others simply interested locals— who, over the course of the next four-plus years, would become our Baker Street Irregulars. They shared their knowledge of, and insights into, the region and assisted us as we tracked down clues. (We even roped in a former FBI agent—not Dale Cooper—to help with the probe, but he disappeared somewhere along the way; we still don’t know what happened to him.)
Chills crawled down our spines as descendants and family members of crucial figures in the case shared firsthand recollections of their ancestors, such as the grandchildren of Hazel’s cousin Etta Becker, who spent the July Fourth weekend with her in 1908, less than forty-eight hours before her death. Unfortunately, whatever they talked about during those final conversations never shook that far down the family tree.
We learned, among other things, that the Taborton woods may or may not be haunted by otherworldly spirits, but they almost certainly hosted feverish anti-Catholic meetings of the Ku Klux Klan-like American Protective Association inside their caves, not far from where local youngsters erected tree-[page 18]houses and teenagers trysted away from the eyes of their parents.
We heard a long-standing rumor among locals that three influential townspeople—a doctor, a lawyer, and an undertaker—had played a role in Hazel’s death and the ensuing cover-up, though none of the three has ever been definitively identified. In Sand Lake rumors were easier to track down than actual names.
We hit roadblocks—plenty of them. There’s nothing easy about investigating a 113-year-old cold case. Bob Moore tried valiantly to pry records from the Larkin Brothers Funeral Home, where Hazel’s autopsy was performed, but all we wound up with was an entry in a logbook. We located a photo of a very young Hazel Drew with her mother but couldn’t persuade the family to share it. We searched high and low for the county’s investigative records; turns out they were likely shipped off for storage and destroyed in a flood. Nothing remains—no paper records, no physical artifacts, no physical evidence whatsoever. One afternoon, the Rensselaer County clerk dropped a huge box of coroner reports on our laps, including parchments from as far back as the 1870s. Anything from 1908? Of course not.
Most devastatingly, we lost one of our “amateur sleuths,” lifelong Taborton resident John Walsh, who passed away on October 11, 2019, at the age of fifty-five. It was Walsh who had first helped Mark Frost research the case, decades earlier, while Mark was developing Twin Peaks.
We came very close—we briefly thought—to blowing the case wide open with the discovery that Anna LaBelle, who worked at Frear’s department store in Troy and knew Hazel Drew (the extent of their friendship remains a mystery), shared a name with a small-time madam in Troy (alias: Alice Davis) who was active in the city’s red-light district, known as the Line. This Anna LaBelle, the madam, left her estate, valued at about twenty-six thousand dollars, to Abbott Jones, a powerful Troy lawyer who defended gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond in 1931 against charges of kidnapping and assault [page 19] (never mind that he was gunned down the day after his acquittal following a romp in the sack with his mistress). Jones was elected district attorney of Rensselaer County shortly after the Hazel Drew murder, defeating Jarvis O’Brien, who had led the investigation.
Were the two Anna LaBelles one and the same? If so, did it have any bearing on the Hazel Drew investigation?
Question two became irrelevant once we discovered the answer to question one: there was no connection between the two Anna LaBelles.
So that’s what it felt like for the detectives trying to crack the case in 1908.
That lead came courtesy of Mark Marshall, a retired Averill Park school messenger who ran point for us on the ground in Sand Lake and is responsible for many of the ideas and revelations that follow. Mark grew up in Griswold Heights, a housing project on the east side of Troy, about six blocks from where Hazel Drew last lived; his current neighborhood, in East Poestenkill, still houses the remains of the church that the Drew family attended. Soon we were calling him “the Detective.”
If Mark Marshall and Bob Moore had been around in 1908, the murder of Hazel Drew would have been solved.
***
Hazel Drew was killed in Taborton but lived in Troy, about ten and a half miles northwest of Sand Lake. We soon discovered this was really a tale of two cities (technically one town and one city). Six years ago we hardly knew anything about Troy; now we could write a book, except it’s already been done, many times, usually by local historian Don Rittner. Who knew that Uncle Sam was the namesake of Samuel Wilson, a Troy butcher who supplied meat to the troops during the War of 1812? That “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” was first published in the Troy Sentinel, submitted by the daughter of a Trojan rector? President Chester Arthur grew up in Troy; Herman Melville wrote Typee and Omoo there. George Washington [page 20] Gale Ferris Jr., inventor of the Ferris wheel, graduated from Troy’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
There are scoundrels and ignominy, too: Mary Alice Fahey (Mame Faye) ran her ridiculously profitable prostitution business on the streets of downtown Troy (with protection from police). Jack “Legs” Diamond was acquitted in the courthouse there, and it was Troy hatter Thomas P. “Boston” Corbett who put a bullet in the head of John Wilkes Booth in a Virginia barn in 1865.
***
Twin Peaks brought us here, and it is to Twin Peaks that we now return.
Similarities between the Hazel Drew murder and the TV series poked at us, relentlessly. Sand Lake, we found out, has twin peaks of its own: Perigo Hill, in the northeast corner of the town, and Oak Hill, near the center, each rising to an elevation of nine hundred feet. The eastern part of the town, including Taborton, is rich with woods, evoking the anagogic Ghostwood of Twin Peaks. Laura Palmer’s body was discovered on the bank of a lake by lumberjack Pete Martell as he went out fishing early one morning; Hazel’s in a mill pond by two young men on a weekend camping and fishing outing. Back in the day—before the denuding of the forests—lumbering was big business in Sand Lake; the mills, powered first by water and then by steam, employed over two hundred people, enriching their owners, just like Twin Peaks’ Packard Mill. When the mills shut down in Sand Lake and Troy, industry moved on, and those jobs were lost for good, evoking the third season of Twin Peaks.
Colorful characters like Hazel’s erratic parents, charcoal burner Rudolph Gundrum, “half-witted” farmhand Frank Smith, belligerent Aunt Minnie Taylor, and recalcitrant Uncle William Taylor seemed like real-life counterparts to the Log Lady, Dr. Jacoby, Major Briggs, and Sarah Palmer.
Finally, during one particularly exhilarating moment, we came across the name Thomas Lawson, who one day, many years hence, would become the maternal great-grandfather of [page 21] Mark Frost, the man who had sent us on this journey in the first place. Lawson, a highly respected professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy at the time, was a minor player in the story of Hazel Drew—a colleague and friend of her last employer, fellow RPI professor Edward Cary, who doubled as city engineer for a time—but even still! We admit to momentary anxiety over the discovery—neither one of us wanted to be responsible for discovering that Frost’s great-grandfather was somehow implicated in the death of the woman who inspired his great-grandson’s most acclaimed and enduring creation. Thankfully, neither of us had to make that phone call.
The deeper we probed, the more striking the similarities between the two women at the center of these stories—Hazel Drew and Laura Palmer—became. Both were beautiful and beguiling young women who inspired male obsession. Laura, as her psychiatrist, Dr. Jacoby, famously said, built fortresses around her secrets; Hazel, too, had secrets, and those around her either failed to penetrate them or went to their graves protecting them. In Laura’s case, clues were everywhere, yet everyone in her orbit ignored them, resulting in her death. Might Hazel, too, have been saved if people had been paying closer attention?
True, Laura came from a wealthy family—her father was a successful attorney employed by the wealthiest man in town—while Hazel was of modest means at best; her father was a rapscallion who loved booze and couldn’t seem to hold a job. But Hazel did leave home at an early age and would go on to interact with some of the most influential, politically wired families in town, exposing her to a lifestyle foreign from her own.
Both Laura and Hazel dreamed of escape and reinvention; in the end, fate determined otherwise.
If Hazel had been a man, or a person of wealth, might her murderer have been apprehended? Perhaps.
Still, Hazel’s murder and the ensuing investigation didn’t lack for attention; rather, it became front-page fodder for [page 22] newspapers across the country. Why? A working-class girl from a poor family is murdered in a remote section of woods that most people had never even heard of. Something about this story was obsessively compelling, drawing the attention even of famous journalists like Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer (pen name: Dorothy Dix) and William M. Clemens.
As we continued to investigate, reasons started to suggest themselves. First, there was the political angle. Hazel’s employers were powerful people. District Attorney Jarvis O’Brien was up for reelection. Rumors of wild sex parties and young women held captive against their will at a camp (or summer home) not far from the scene of her death surfaced. Allegations of secret affairs and possibly even an unwanted pregnancy were tossed around daily in newspaper articles. We started out wondering who killed Hazel Drew; we wound up just as immersed in another, even more rudimentary mystery: Who was Hazel Drew? Because almost all of the people who controlled the narrative contemporaneously—chiefly investigators and reporters—were men, the story was filtered through the male gaze, and Hazel—like Laura Palmer and her antecedent, the eponymous protagonist of the 1944 Otto Preminger film noir Laura—became a projection on a screen, absorbing whatever qualities or shortcomings these unreliable narrators assigned to her: woman as defined by male obsession.
***
As we said earlier, investigating a 113-year-old cold case wasn’t easy. We do, however, believe we’ve uncovered the murderer, and we make a pretty strong case for the prosecution. The solution is explosive. Read on to find out who—and why. Hazel Drew has been dead for 113 years. Epicurus notwithstanding, Hazel is still here.
© 2022 by David Bushman and Mark T. Givens. Published by arrangement with Cinergistik Inc.
MLA citation (print):
Bushman, David, and Mark T. Givens, with Mark Frost. "Murder at Teal’s Pond: Hazel Drew and the Mystery that Inspired Twin Peaks." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 11-22.