Speaker 1: Monster House presents.
Speaker 2: Terrible Tragedy Next Sunday Murder was just the first step.
Speaker 2: Who killed Laura bon Now the curtain's open again. From
Speaker 2: the start, you can follow the trail of clues, of crimes,
Speaker 2: of cheating hearts.
Speaker 3: Can't let me in on whatever the hell is going on.
Speaker 2: Here, Sheriff. We've had a lot to talk about.
Speaker 4: For the first peak or the second exposure in You.
Speaker 2: Spot the Killer, everyone will be talking about it.
Speaker 3: It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 5: A giant, hairy creature in Part A Part Matt in Larkness,
Speaker 5: a twenty four a mile long bottomless lake in the
Speaker 5: Highlands of Scotland, if the creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 5: Monster Talk.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Speaker 1: Blake Smith.
Speaker 3: And I'm Karen Stolsner.
Speaker 1: It's been a while since we've had on author and
Speaker 1: researcher Jerry Drake, but he's back, so check the show
Speaker 1: notes for links to previous visits where we talked about
Speaker 1: ghost lides and grimoires and all sorts of fun stuff.
Speaker 1: But today we're going to be talking about murder. Specifically,
Speaker 1: we're going to be talking about Jerry's new book, Hazel
Speaker 1: was a good girl solving the murder that inspired Twin Peaks. So,
Speaker 1: if you're a true crime fan, or a Twin Peaks fan,
Speaker 1: or a Monster Talk fan who occasionally dips their toes
Speaker 1: into either, you're going to enjoy this interview and you'll
Speaker 1: doubtless enjoy Jerry's book with David Lynch is passing earlier
Speaker 1: this year. It's a little bittersweet to be talking about
Speaker 1: Twin Peaks, but it's definitely a bit of American culture
Speaker 1: that changed the way we watch television and what we
Speaker 1: come to expect from a series. Americas were glued to
Speaker 1: their sets wondering who had killed Laura Palmer and finding
Speaker 1: out the answer only made things weirder. So grab your
Speaker 1: log Hydra Diary, and get a cup of damn fine
Speaker 1: coffee and let's get to some morangetutor.
Speaker 3: So, Jerry, we've invited you want to talk about your
Speaker 3: forthcoming book. It's going to come out in about a
Speaker 3: month now, I believe, June tenth. June tenth. Yeah, So
Speaker 3: Hazel was a good girl solving the murder that inspired
Speaker 3: Twin Peaks. So, yeah, you've been talking about this with
Speaker 3: us for quite some times. It's really exciting that you've
Speaker 3: gotten to this stage. And yeah, we want to hear
Speaker 3: about how you became interested or rather drawn into, as
Speaker 3: you've said, the case of Hazel drew.
Speaker 6: You know, I it's interesting Hazel. Hazel was the girl
Speaker 6: that inspired Mark Frost to write the original screenplay for
Speaker 6: Twin Peaks. Everybody knows David Lynch, but what fans of
Speaker 6: that show didn't realize is that Mark Frost is the
Speaker 6: guy that actually wrote most of the canonical episodes, the
Speaker 6: ones that he and Lynch wrote worked on, and he
Speaker 6: also wrote the sideline war material. There are a couple
Speaker 6: of books that came out in conjunction with Twin Peaks
Speaker 6: to Return, which I think today might be the eighth
Speaker 6: anniversary of that show premiering. So Mark Frost is really
Speaker 6: the guy who who was behind the story of Twin Peaks,
Speaker 6: with Lynch being the tour that put it on screen
Speaker 6: and then kind of modified it. You know, his process
Speaker 6: is to film what he films and it happens. You know,
Speaker 6: he invented the character of Killer Bob because of a
Speaker 6: shot that went wrong, and all this stuff like it's
Speaker 6: there's you could write a whole book about Twin Peaks,
Speaker 6: and there's probably a bunch out there.
Speaker 4: But at the heart of it.
Speaker 6: In upstate New York, there's a town called Troy that's
Speaker 6: immediately it's on the east side of the Hudson across
Speaker 6: from Albany, which is the capital, and it sits at
Speaker 6: the bottom of the Taconic Mountains. There's a big hill
Speaker 6: in the middle of Troy, which they unimaginably called the
Speaker 6: Hill and on top of his polytechnic University, and Rensler
Speaker 6: is the oldest polytechnic in the world. It was founded
Speaker 6: by one of the descendants of Killian van Rensseler, who
Speaker 6: was the last great patroon of Old New York. When
Speaker 6: you study New York history, he's the last land baron
Speaker 6: in the area. He was on the Dutchyst India Company
Speaker 6: board and was a pearl merchant and had a million
Speaker 6: acres of land. And there's a little piece of land
Speaker 6: called Slider's Corners near a place called Sand Lake where
Speaker 6: this girl was found face down in a little mill
Speaker 6: pond about seven days after she was killed in July
Speaker 6: of nineteen oh eight. Her name was Hazel Drew and
Speaker 6: her murder for some reason became international news for that month.
Speaker 6: It was twenty three days. It was in all the
Speaker 6: major papers, even in the German and Australian press later
Speaker 6: that August, all around the world. And it followed up
Speaker 6: on probably one of the most famous solved murders in
Speaker 6: American history, which was the death of Billy Brown, who
Speaker 6: was killed by Chester Gillette. In fact, Chester was executed
Speaker 6: by Edison's electric chair right about the time Hazel's body
Speaker 6: was being found, and so a lot of people thought
Speaker 6: this was going to be the next big pretty white
Speaker 6: girl murder. And they sent a guy up from New
Speaker 6: York names named Clements. Will Clements, who styled himself as
Speaker 6: the Srilock Holmes of America. He was very modest, and
Speaker 6: he claimed all these outrageous things, and there's a little
Speaker 6: there's a couple chapters about Clemens the book where he
Speaker 6: kind of makes himself out to be this great criminologist
Speaker 6: and he solves the murder.
Speaker 4: He didn't.
Speaker 6: He got sued actually for libel and lost his suspects
Speaker 6: suited him for libel, and he invented really the character
Speaker 6: of Laura Palmer with that story. A wrong woman living
Speaker 6: a double life who got killed by a lover. It
Speaker 6: turns out none of that stuff was true, and that's
Speaker 6: what really got me interested in the story is that,
Speaker 6: you know, I'm I mean, at the end of the day,
Speaker 6: you know, my professional area of study is nineteenth century
Speaker 6: history and labor history. I mean, that's what I did
Speaker 6: all my work in college on you know, long before
Speaker 6: when I was ever in the government. You know, that's
Speaker 6: what I was primarily interested in. So I was like, well,
Speaker 6: you know, I'm fascinated by Troy, a factory town. You know,
Speaker 6: this is giving me something to really read about. And
Speaker 6: you know, I was in bed COVID hadn't happen yet.
Speaker 6: I had the flu in a friend of mine who
Speaker 6: was moving to Troy. There publishers. In fact, you know,
Speaker 6: full disclosure that the people that are publishing this book.
Speaker 6: I decided to let them have it since they were
Speaker 6: involved in the in the adventure. They were moving from
Speaker 6: New Hampshire to Troy to kind of set up their business,
Speaker 6: you know, business blowing up blah blah blah. And my
Speaker 6: friend texted me and said something about this dream that
Speaker 6: she had about finding this book in a cafe or
Speaker 6: a library. We tell the story in there, and it
Speaker 6: was called the absence of memory, and I, while suffering from.
Speaker 4: A fever, dreamed about the same book.
Speaker 6: And I opened it up, and in the front of
Speaker 6: the book, you know, on a stack of Bibles of
Speaker 6: atheist I'll swear on a stack of Bibles. But I
Speaker 6: saw this person's name, Hazel, I drew in the dream,
Speaker 6: and I wrote it down and I texted it to
Speaker 6: my friend and it turned out she's a real person,
Speaker 6: and she was murdered and the girl who inspired Twin Peaks.
Speaker 6: Now I will quickly put on my skeptics hat and say,
Speaker 6: you know, I watched Twin Peaks in high school, and
Speaker 6: I watched the return, and it's entirely possible.
Speaker 4: I knew all that right, And I was triggered.
Speaker 6: My subconscious was triggered by my friend moving to this
Speaker 6: town that I already had an interest in. You know,
Speaker 6: I would love to teach at Rensseler whenever I retire
Speaker 6: rentally or as they pronounce it. So I probably already
Speaker 6: knew all this stuff. But that's how I got interested
Speaker 6: in the story. It's great story, So I told the
Speaker 6: story as it happened.
Speaker 3: That's a good story.
Speaker 1: That kind of experience, though, even even if you have
Speaker 1: an explanation for it. It's still it still feels liminal.
Speaker 1: You still feel the weirdest.
Speaker 6: The whole thing is, the whole thing is liminal. And
Speaker 6: I put my tongue right right deep in my cheek
Speaker 6: and rode with it because it's a great story. You know,
Speaker 6: sometimes you see Bigfoot and sometimes Bigfoot sees you, right.
Speaker 4: So I started digging into it.
Speaker 6: And then COVID at my friend and I were down
Speaker 6: in San Antonio for AWP.
Speaker 4: I was thinking about doing something on some stuff.
Speaker 6: We talked about, you know, doing a casebook of you know,
Speaker 6: all the cases I'd worked on and something fun like that,
Speaker 6: and we really started talking about Hazel and she's like, to.
Speaker 4: You want to dig into this?
Speaker 6: And then we were in San Antonio when COVID lockdown started.
Speaker 6: In fact, I got the last flat out of town
Speaker 6: I could get back to DC before the lockdown happened.
Speaker 6: And I was like, I'm working on it and I
Speaker 6: was interested in And then I got COVID and I
Speaker 6: was home for two three weeks and they never let
Speaker 6: me come back to work. We had shut down, so
Speaker 6: I was in my house teleworking all day. I was
Speaker 6: locked in this smaller house a small, you know, little
Speaker 6: bitty row house in York, Pennsylvania, with all my occult
Speaker 6: books waiting on Blake Smith that ask me to send
Speaker 6: him a book so i'd have something to do, right,
Speaker 6: you know, and you know that kind of thing. And
Speaker 6: I was like, well, I'm just going to dig into this.
Speaker 6: I've got ancestry, I've got newspapers, dot com. I'm going
Speaker 6: to dig into it. And the more and more I
Speaker 6: dug into it, the more clues I found that other
Speaker 6: people who had looked into it hadn't found. And then
Speaker 6: whenever I got stir crazy, you know, I realized my
Speaker 6: friend and I were the last people who had had
Speaker 6: sort of public contact with each other.
Speaker 4: So we arranged a visit.
Speaker 6: I booked time at the libraries, you know, went in
Speaker 6: and kind of under you know, Cloak and Dagger was
Speaker 6: able to get some time research time in the libraries.
Speaker 6: They were just as bored as I was, so they
Speaker 6: gave me full run of the New York State Library
Speaker 6: and you know, the Troy Public Library, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: And by the end of.
Speaker 6: It, you know, I not only had a person who
Speaker 6: I think is the suspect, and some new clues. You know,
Speaker 6: even if my guy didn't do it. The fact that
Speaker 6: he was so heavily looked over and such an obvious suspect,
Speaker 6: you know, means that there was there was more going
Speaker 6: on than than what people at the time seem to
Speaker 6: let on. So, you know, I think a person in
Speaker 6: her home did it, a person who was obviously a
Speaker 6: very likely suspect, like the police, This would be the
Speaker 6: first person police would investigate today. And the fact this
Speaker 6: guy was ignored satistically, statistically makes no sense unless you
Speaker 6: explore the political connections and things like that that I
Speaker 6: lay out in the book.
Speaker 1: First of all, it's in talking about Mark Fraut. You
Speaker 1: reminded me that like Mark Frost, super influential on Twin Peaks,
Speaker 1: Mark Snow did the music for the X Files.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was like, what's up with.
Speaker 1: These cold marks? I don't know, man, a little weird, right, Yeah.
Speaker 6: You know, And I mean, I mean, you remember that time,
Speaker 6: like Twin Peaks and the X Files. Oh my god,
Speaker 6: that was the best time to be.
Speaker 1: All I have such you know, as you talk about
Speaker 1: in the book, you went to a bowling alley to
Speaker 1: watch this, and I had to go to my best
Speaker 1: friend Mike's house because my parents were, it was all
Speaker 1: shut down for me. And so his mom has passed away,
Speaker 1: but she was such a glorious influence on me and
Speaker 1: I just I loved the fact she'd let us watch
Speaker 1: these shows, and she loves talking about Twin Peaks, and
Speaker 1: she wasn't as into the X Files, but she loved
Speaker 1: the fact that we got to hang out and talk
Speaker 1: about it together. It was great, but not quite a
Speaker 1: serious question, but at what point during this research did
Speaker 1: you realize you had become a hazel nut?
Speaker 6: I mean tonight, this was the first time I've heard
Speaker 6: that joke. And you know, I'll do this that it's
Speaker 6: it's it's it's going in something. I mean, yeah, it's
Speaker 6: going on a website when we get it fired.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 1: Here's my serious question though, So part of this this case,
Speaker 1: you know, and you would have to do this narratively
Speaker 1: anyway to tell a story, but I think you make
Speaker 1: the point that it matters a little bit more in
Speaker 1: this case. The setting, Yeah, the where it happened, the
Speaker 1: when it happened, These factors matter in your investigation. Can
Speaker 1: you talk a little bit about when the story took
Speaker 1: place and where and what was going on there at
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 6: So it's it's nineteen oh eight, it's upstate New York.
Speaker 6: New York is in a you know, we think of
Speaker 6: New York as this you know kind of you know,
Speaker 6: the number one population in that area today or of
Speaker 6: Italian descent. At that time, it was primarily Irish Methodists
Speaker 6: that control the politics of the area, and New York
Speaker 6: was transitioning from the old Lincoln Republican part to the
Speaker 6: new Theodore Roosevelt Republican Party, the Progressive Party, and the
Speaker 6: political machine was shifting in that area from a kind
Speaker 6: of corrupt machine politician politics to Theodore Roosevelt's more clean
Speaker 6: cut progressive politics and what would eventually become the Democratic
Speaker 6: Party under Franklin Roosevelt a few years later. There was
Speaker 6: also a shift in local hegemony. The Irish aristocrats that
Speaker 6: ruled the area and controlled all the political offices in
Speaker 6: upstate were being starting to be pushed out by an
Speaker 6: incoming Italian population that we're moving up from New York.
Speaker 6: So it's a hegemonic shift. The middle classes, we knew
Speaker 6: it didn't exist then, but Hazel would be considered a
Speaker 6: part of the professional middle class at that time. She
Speaker 6: was a governess and a live in housekeeper in the
Speaker 6: wealthiest homes in Troy, New York, and all of her
Speaker 6: bosses were politically connected to this Irish Methodist Republican political machine.
Speaker 6: And her aunt had worked in some of the wealthiest
Speaker 6: houses and at the hotel where all these guys kind
Speaker 6: of hung out sort of gangster style, and probably got
Speaker 6: her her jobs. So she was not a scullery maid
Speaker 6: or somebody doing, you know, scrubbing out shoes. She was
Speaker 6: a young, you know, good looking lady, twenty years old
Speaker 6: when she died. She'd been working in these houses since
Speaker 6: she was fourteen. She was literate, very literate. In fact,
Speaker 6: she read a lot, She wore glasses, she took care
Speaker 6: of her teeth, she had had some advanced dental surgery.
Speaker 6: Her parents lived in a big house on Fourth Street,
Speaker 6: even though they were working class people. So these were
Speaker 6: you know, these were not four people. They were not
Speaker 6: disadvantaged people, but they were, you know, members of the
Speaker 6: local establishment. Her aunt marries into this political elite after
Speaker 6: Hazelis is killed and leaves the legacy behind. So they're
Speaker 6: what we would consider today sort of like the equivalent
Speaker 6: of a of an oiled field services worker in Houston.
Speaker 6: You know, somebody who's got a high school education but
Speaker 6: makes a you know, a low six figure salary by
Speaker 6: having a specialized job.
Speaker 4: You know, that's my family, right.
Speaker 6: You know, none went to school, but they all made
Speaker 6: a damn good living laying pipe and working in the
Speaker 6: oil fields. That's what Hazel was. So when she got killed,
Speaker 6: I mean, this was killing one of the local elite.
Speaker 6: There were a lot of murders that year, but they
Speaker 6: weren't pretty white Irish Methodist girls, so the city got
Speaker 6: nervous about it. Also, She's found killed about eight miles
Speaker 6: from her house out at Teal Pond, on the land
Speaker 6: of a guy named Farmer Conrad Teal. They called him Coonteal.
Speaker 6: He was a local descendant of the of the Dutch
Speaker 6: aristocrats that lived there. I believe the farm is still
Speaker 6: in the family down to this present day. And it
Speaker 6: was right across the street from where her uncle, William Taylor,
Speaker 6: her mother's brother, was living. So Hazel spent her last
Speaker 6: sort of dollar two three dollars after she was fired
Speaker 6: or left or quit her employer's house a guy named
Speaker 6: Professor Carey, who was a teacher at Renseleer, an engineering
Speaker 6: professor there. She leaves his home and is found dead
Speaker 6: a week later in this pond across the street from
Speaker 6: her from her uncle's house. Some witnesses had seen her
Speaker 6: at the local train station. She said she was going
Speaker 6: down to New York or down the river, which meant
Speaker 6: New York.
Speaker 4: In those days.
Speaker 6: She may have gone to Albany. I think she stayed
Speaker 6: on a riverboat. I found some evidence that she may
Speaker 6: have spent the night on a riverboat, which would have
Speaker 6: been a way that a woman could travel in those
Speaker 6: days without having to have a chaperone to book her
Speaker 6: into a hotel. She's found dead. There's no public transportation
Speaker 6: to get you right up to that pond. Anybody that
Speaker 6: did the murder would have had to have been seen,
Speaker 6: or they would have had have known the area and
Speaker 6: been able to sneak in an automobile. There were a
Speaker 6: lot of people traveling that area that night. So a
Speaker 6: huge chunk of the book is an attempt to set
Speaker 6: the stage and to meticulously recreate all that witness testimony.
Speaker 6: And a few people have looked into this case. I'm
Speaker 6: the only one that's ever done that like that just
Speaker 6: took that took over a year to do, to go
Speaker 6: through all those hundreds of newspaper articles and go, oh,
Speaker 6: this person said they were here at this time and
Speaker 6: the moon set at this time, you know, and this
Speaker 6: person said they saw that person.
Speaker 4: So we reconstruct that timeline.
Speaker 6: My wife helped me do that, you know, sitting around
Speaker 6: the kitchen table, you know, to find out exactly how
Speaker 6: the movements up and down that road happened that night.
Speaker 1: It's cool, though, that's good detective work. Yeah, I mean, oh,
Speaker 1: it's really good work. Yeah.
Speaker 6: I mean, that's how you saw the case like this,
Speaker 6: and it just took a lot of work. But I
Speaker 6: think it eliminated some of the other suspects from them
Speaker 6: because it's somebody that had to be in an audio mobile.
Speaker 6: Tire tracks were witnessed. Cars of Henry Ford's model T
Speaker 6: doesn't come onto the market until November of that year.
Speaker 6: This is July, so cars were still rich people's stuff
Speaker 6: in New York at those days. So it really gives
Speaker 6: us an understanding of who the suspects would be.
Speaker 3: Well, I just want to go back to an earlier
Speaker 3: part of the book, paranormal lack experiences that you had
Speaker 3: that you wrote about in this book, and you've already
Speaker 3: spoken about the dreams, but your cemetary experience. I think
Speaker 3: that that was really fun the way you document that
Speaker 3: as part of your hands on research.
Speaker 6: So you know that was not any original draft of
Speaker 6: the book. I didn't put it in there because I
Speaker 6: didn't want to seem crazy. And I took photos. Hazel
Speaker 6: took photos after it happened, and I thought about it
Speaker 6: and I thought about it, and I wrote the original
Speaker 6: draft of the book. I think that story doesn't get
Speaker 6: in until about draft five or six. The original book
Speaker 6: was one hundred and sixty thousand words long. So all
Speaker 6: that came out, and in a cold winter day here
Speaker 6: in New in DC, right before.
Speaker 1: Would you say, a crosty days mark.
Speaker 6: Trusty day with a lot of the with a lot
Speaker 6: of this stuff going, she called me up and said,
Speaker 6: you gotta, you gotta put the cemetery story back in there.
Speaker 6: You gotta do it. People want to read it. It happened,
Speaker 6: It's interesting, so put it in there. So I put
Speaker 6: it in and it did happen to heaven. Just liked
Speaker 6: that it was cold. It was impossibly cold, and I
Speaker 6: had on some north faced boots that I had not
Speaker 6: taken out of the closet in years, and they fell apart,
Speaker 6: so my feet were wet. And we went up to
Speaker 6: that weird old tree and she was freaking out and
Speaker 6: there's no there's about a foot snow on the ground,
Speaker 6: there's no snow under the tree. She was acting tweakerl word.
Speaker 6: Puts her hand on this tree and starts freaking out.
Speaker 6: And I put my hand on that damn tree, and
Speaker 6: again this could be you know, I I know I
Speaker 6: don't have a cardiac problem because I've gone to the
Speaker 6: cardiologist since then, and my vegetarian diets served me well.
Speaker 6: But I got sick. I got violently said. I went
Speaker 6: down that hill. I thought I was having a heart attack.
Speaker 6: I thought I would not be able to drive my
Speaker 6: car back. I got one of those weird BMW's that
Speaker 6: you have to have magic powers to drive. So I'm like,
Speaker 6: my friend's not gonna be able to drive us out here.
Speaker 6: We're gonna die out here in a snowstorm. And I
Speaker 6: threw up and it fell on the ground and we
Speaker 6: were out looking for Hazel's grave. We couldn't find it.
Speaker 6: It was too cold. It was stupid for us to
Speaker 6: even try to go out there in the snow because
Speaker 6: it's bone white and the snow is bone white, and
Speaker 6: I fell over. I fell on the ground, and when
Speaker 6: I stood up and looked down, I was on top
Speaker 6: of her tombstone. And it happened exactly like that. You
Speaker 6: can even see in the pictures, my stumbling feet coming
Speaker 6: down the hill, and instead of going straight to my
Speaker 6: car where I was headed, I took a right lost
Speaker 6: my balance, went down on the ground, beat full of
Speaker 6: snow and muck, and looked up and I see on
Speaker 6: top of this grave, it says Hazel. And I'm like,
Speaker 6: oh man, you found it.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you said that. We've had you know, we
Speaker 1: get iTunes reviews and some of them were some of them,
Speaker 1: some of them are awesome. There's lots of great five
Speaker 1: star reviews, which is wonderful. Occasionally we'll get like a
Speaker 1: one star reviewer. It's like the host reject all paranormal.
Speaker 1: You know, how could you live your life like this?
Speaker 1: And it's like, no, it's not really like that. Honestly,
Speaker 1: the lived experience of being a human is even if
Speaker 1: you rationalize, if you can come up with an explanation
Speaker 1: of everything, you still have the emotional surprise, the heartfelt experiences.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're just because we try to put an
Speaker 1: explanation of things, doesn't mean we don't have these magical moments, right,
Speaker 1: And I think it's really it's really powerful when you
Speaker 1: have these these kind of moments, because you know, even
Speaker 1: if you could say it's statistics, or it's it's a coincidence,
Speaker 1: or any any number of rational explanations, doesn't matter. You
Speaker 1: lived this weird moment where suddenly it felt like the
Speaker 1: universe was lining up. We're gonna be talking a little
Speaker 1: bit about that in the upcoming thing we're doing on
Speaker 1: the Psychedelics. It's like, it's just, yeah, it's something.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I had some of that long time ago. That's
Speaker 4: going in another book. But I lived by this out
Speaker 4: of control musoming. I live by this motto that is
Speaker 4: uh w W j D what would Joe do?
Speaker 6: And by Joe Joe Nickel, you know he's pastor, but
Speaker 6: you know a guy I had a long relationship with
Speaker 6: and just love dearly.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 6: In my opinion, the master skeptic. You know, he didn't
Speaker 6: think people were diluted. He took experiences at face value,
Speaker 6: and more than anything else, he went into the field
Speaker 6: and did research, and you that changes every experience you have.
Speaker 6: It really does you know I I am a witness
Speaker 6: in this story, not the investigator. So I'm not going
Speaker 6: to tell you what I think happened because I don't
Speaker 6: know what happened. I would need a Joe Nichol to
Speaker 6: come in and say, well, Jerry, you know, you were,
Speaker 6: you know, going through a midlife crisis in a time
Speaker 6: of heightened and you've done all this research and you've
Speaker 6: seen a million photographs of this cemetery. So of course
Speaker 6: Carl Jung kicked in and you know, blah blah blah. Okay,
Speaker 6: I buy it. You know, I'm not a believer. I
Speaker 6: buy it. But I wrote the story not trying to
Speaker 6: explain that, which is again, that's probably what happened, but
Speaker 6: from the experience that I had, and that's what makes
Speaker 6: it interesting. That's I mean, you know, I'm an anthropologist
Speaker 6: by training. It gets the lived experience versus the explanation,
Speaker 6: and I'm solving the murder. I break a lot of
Speaker 6: true crime rules in this book. If you're bored by
Speaker 6: true crime, you'll like this one. I put myself in
Speaker 6: the story, which is apparently a no no in true crime,
Speaker 6: and it's written as a casebook and an adventure and
Speaker 6: I liked it that way. So you're getting the story
Speaker 6: from my perspective, not from a god godlike investigator that's
Speaker 6: off the state.
Speaker 1: At the time time of the crime, people had a
Speaker 1: story they wanted to tell about what kind of person
Speaker 1: Hazel was. Yeah, journalism and journalism, yeah, and.
Speaker 4: I mean that.
Speaker 1: But we faithfully we live in an enlightened age now
Speaker 1: where that never.
Speaker 4: That never happens.
Speaker 6: Actually, I think that's why this book has a lot
Speaker 6: of relevance, because we're in that same media environment. Yeah,
Speaker 6: there's a case going on right now, this care this
Speaker 6: poor woman, there's a podcast about it, who may have
Speaker 6: run over and killed her her boyfriend who's a cop,
Speaker 6: and she's been that's hot.
Speaker 1: That's a hot topic right now.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and it's like, you can't you don't know what's real.
Speaker 6: You exactly, I'm confused. You don't know what's real and uh.
Speaker 6: And that's the same environment we're dealing with in Hazel's day.
Speaker 1: But you've got the advantage of you've got the passage
Speaker 1: of time, right, and time cools off the hot media
Speaker 1: and you can actually go back and sort of figure
Speaker 1: out what's really going on. You can look at more
Speaker 1: evidence based approaches. So what kind of person did people
Speaker 1: say Hazel was and what kind of person did you
Speaker 1: uncover in your research?
Speaker 6: So so they say she was a duplicitous woman, a manipulator,
Speaker 6: a quote unquote horror, that quote gets knocked around, a
Speaker 6: person who was on the make, you know, trying to
Speaker 6: get in with men to get money in favors. I'm
Speaker 6: not a prostitute, because prostitution was more or less accepted
Speaker 6: in Troy at that time. Main Faith, America's most famous
Speaker 6: nineteenth century prostitute was in Troy about three blocks away
Speaker 6: from the police station. So, you know, legitimate I'm going
Speaker 6: to give you money for sex work was acceptable in Troy.
Speaker 6: So Hazel wasn't doing that. But they accused her of being,
Speaker 6: you know, what they would call a good time girl,
Speaker 6: somebody who traded favors maybe sex for.
Speaker 4: Money and.
Speaker 6: You know, dinner's out, that kind of stuff, And that
Speaker 6: was a common person. There was a woman in town
Speaker 6: named Handla Bell who was doing that, you know, and
Speaker 6: she gets tangled up in this story by giving Hazel
Speaker 6: the name of somebody she could go hang out with
Speaker 6: in New York who seemed not to be interested in her.
Speaker 6: Hazel was not that she's when we start to unpack
Speaker 6: who she really was. She had a bunch of letters
Speaker 6: in her trunk that Will Clements, the guy who worked
Speaker 6: for the Pulitzer paper, the Yellow journalists said were from
Speaker 6: men and boyfriends, to the point that two of those
Speaker 6: letters were probably concocted. You know, it's generally agreed that
Speaker 6: he made one of them up. He probably made up
Speaker 6: the other because they only appear in his media. And
Speaker 6: this is a story that was covered all over the country,
Speaker 6: and other reporters didn't cover Will the story the same
Speaker 6: way Will Clements did. They They don't mention facts in
Speaker 6: their coverage that he mentions. And Clemens had a reputation
Speaker 6: for making stuff up. He made up a whole case
Speaker 6: in New York a couple of years before this that
Speaker 6: ended up. I can't remember if he got sued or
Speaker 6: got beat up or something bad happened to him because
Speaker 6: he was making up nonsense. So that was sort of
Speaker 6: his stock in trade. And he paid her in this
Speaker 6: one article as a woman who was he calls her
Speaker 6: coy and a coquette, and you know, he was to
Speaker 6: keep it relevant for the kids. He was kind of
Speaker 6: one of these, you know, in cel. You know, woman hating.
Speaker 6: He man types the shirt of America and he paints her,
Speaker 6: you know, in the stripes of all his weird fantasies
Speaker 6: of what a of what a fallen woman is. And
Speaker 6: I mean that was a thing. Then that's something people
Speaker 6: talked about. It was in the moral conversation. It was
Speaker 6: driving the push for prohibition. You know, this is at
Speaker 6: a time when people are starting to do prohibition pushes
Speaker 6: and all that kind of stuff. But Hazel wasn't that.
Speaker 6: She was actually a young woman who read a lot.
Speaker 6: In her last job, she ends up working in a
Speaker 6: professor's house, and when people came to see her, they
Speaker 6: said she was usually sitting on a couch reading. The
Speaker 6: letters in her trunk were actually not from uh lurid men.
Speaker 6: They were from doctors. Her adult letters in her trunk.
Speaker 6: She was she had something wrong with her health. She
Speaker 6: was seeking medical advice. So all these trips that you know,
Speaker 6: I'm actually the first person to publish this clue. It's
Speaker 6: not in any other stuff. So this is good stuff.
Speaker 6: All these trips she was taking supposedly to get in
Speaker 6: with men, she was actually going to get seek medical advice.
Speaker 6: And most of the letters in her trunk were either
Speaker 6: from friends or they were juvenilia. They were letters, childhood
Speaker 6: letters that she had received and hung on to from
Speaker 6: people she knew, because I don't forget she was twenty,
Speaker 6: you know, so a lot of the French that she
Speaker 6: had made she had made when she was a kid,
Speaker 6: and a couple of them were still kids. Was seventeen,
Speaker 6: eighteen years old, you know.
Speaker 1: So does that make her she's doing extensive correspondence about
Speaker 1: medical issues, Yeah, to make her some kind of typeochondria actively, I.
Speaker 4: Mean it's possible.
Speaker 6: I mean, she spent way more money on her teeth
Speaker 6: than a person of her station would spend.
Speaker 4: She'd already have.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: She had a pair of handground glasses. Now you know, these.
Speaker 4: Set me back two hundred fifty bucks from you know,
Speaker 4: for the losers.
Speaker 1: He's holding his glasses.
Speaker 6: Oh well, I'm sorry, Yeah, I'm holding up my glasses
Speaker 6: from Warby Parker sponsorship. Two hundred and fifty bucks. But
Speaker 6: a set of handmade glasses, like in the old days,
Speaker 6: you went in and you tried on glasses, like reading glasses,
Speaker 6: until you got something that kind of worked. But she
Speaker 6: had a set of glasses made and and you know,
Speaker 6: gold rimmed Cotney pencenose glasses, handmade. I think I ran
Speaker 6: the numbers for it was like a like twelve hundred
Speaker 6: dollars in modern money, Like this is not something a
Speaker 6: housekeeper spent their money on. So she was unusually obsessed
Speaker 6: with her health. She had been really sick with the
Speaker 6: grip earlier in the year before she died. The grip
Speaker 6: is a particularly pernicious flu. Spanish flu hadn't happened yet.
Speaker 6: The flu was bad that year. And also this is
Speaker 6: when typhoid. Mary was, you know, one hundred and fifty
Speaker 6: miles away in New York, so people were terrified of typhoid,
Speaker 6: and the early stages of typhoid and flu are very
Speaker 6: very similar. So Hazel quarantines herself around Christmas of nineteen
Speaker 6: oh seven, and Clemens of course, thought she was pregnant
Speaker 6: and had an abortion. And that's the story that he tells,
Speaker 6: and that goes that falls into the lore right down
Speaker 6: to the present day. You listen to a podcast about
Speaker 6: this thing, and that's the story they're going to tell.
Speaker 1: Well, it's a very easy story to help you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes great sense. There's your motive, you know all
Speaker 1: that stuff.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's sensationalist. That's exactly people want to hear.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure the autopsy bore that out right.
Speaker 6: The autopsy was done by three doctors. I mean, this
Speaker 6: is kind of serious. The autopsy was done by three doctors.
Speaker 6: And I actually pulled some medical books to see you
Speaker 6: can tell if somebody had been pregnant or had an
Speaker 6: abortion in nineteen oh eight, and oh yeah, the doctor
Speaker 6: said no, she had not had an abortion. There was
Speaker 6: also no no evidence of sexual contact, so she wasn't
Speaker 6: raped when she was killed. In fact, she had no
Speaker 6: marks on her other than the contusion at the back
Speaker 6: of her head. And I'm holding my hand up at
Speaker 6: a kind of about a ninety degree agle. She she
Speaker 6: had a contusion on the back of her head that
Speaker 6: didn't break the skin. So my theory is is that
Speaker 6: she wasn't murdered. Most people assumed she was clobbered over
Speaker 6: the head with a stick or hit with a club
Speaker 6: or a rock. But she was five feet tall, so
Speaker 6: you know, to hit her like that, she'd have to
Speaker 6: be leaning over and it would have busted her head open.
Speaker 6: I think she was wearing a whalebone corset. I think
Speaker 6: someone she got into an argument and her killer shoved her.
Speaker 6: And it's super rocky out by teal pond. You know
Speaker 6: you're going to fall down out there in good boots
Speaker 6: on a warm on any on a given day, she
Speaker 6: was out there in the middle of the night. I
Speaker 6: think somebody shoved her. With that corset on, she wouldn't
Speaker 6: have been able to bend her body forward to guard
Speaker 6: her head, and I think she just went straight back.
Speaker 6: And one of the clues I found that's unique to
Speaker 6: my book is that they found her glasses. A couple
Speaker 6: of reporters were out walking around and they found her
Speaker 6: her glasses laying by a rock. So you know Pensne's glasses.
Speaker 6: If you don't know what they look like, you know,
Speaker 6: think of you know, the old cartoon. I'm trying to
Speaker 6: at the Monopoly Man. This is in the in the
Speaker 6: in another universe, he wears glasses. I don't know what
Speaker 6: their glasses without rems and they just sort of sit
Speaker 6: on your nose. And in the old days, people really
Speaker 6: liked them because they they didn't look louse. This was
Speaker 6: before contacts. They didn't really look like you were wearing glasses.
Speaker 6: So if you're really concerned about your looks, you could
Speaker 6: wear these glasses and have a lower profile. And Hazel
Speaker 6: wore those things for the last two years of her
Speaker 6: life all day long, so you know, she was clearly
Speaker 6: wearing her glasses when she got clobbered. And what I
Speaker 6: think happened is that there was an argument, she got shoved,
Speaker 6: she couldn't adjust her footing. She was wearing city boots,
Speaker 6: so that would have been a flat fronted book boot
Speaker 6: with a little two inch heel, and her feet went
Speaker 6: out from under her. She hit this rock, uh, and
Speaker 6: it caused a contusion that stops her heart, and the
Speaker 6: autopsy discovered that. But the hit was so gentle that
Speaker 6: it didn't even break the skin. And this is super
Speaker 6: common amongst people that ski. This was not an assassination.
Speaker 6: This was probably a quarrel.
Speaker 3: I think you do such a marvelous job of honoring
Speaker 3: her her name and her name as well just as
Speaker 3: a woman. It's very important to me that he did this.
Speaker 3: And I think it's interesting when you talk about her
Speaker 3: being a good time girl, and it just makes me
Speaker 3: think of the Flappers a couple of centuries on. You know,
Speaker 3: so not a whore, not someone like that, not a
Speaker 3: sex worker, but someone who just likes having a good time.
Speaker 6: I appreciate you saying that, because that was a part
Speaker 6: of this story that really concerned me. It is hard
Speaker 6: to write this kind of history as a white man,
Speaker 6: ye without setting a lot of context.
Speaker 4: The Long Book.
Speaker 6: Told this story in detail and set a lot of context.
Speaker 6: And now people just have to just kind of understand
Speaker 6: that the Gilded Age, you know, before women's liberation, before
Speaker 6: women could vote, had a whole different way of approaching attitudes.
Speaker 6: And I took a lot of this from like my
Speaker 6: grandmother's story, my my grandma grandma.
Speaker 4: I never called her grandmother grandma.
Speaker 6: My my mimi. My mom's mom ran away from home
Speaker 6: when she was, you know, fourteen, fifteen years old, and
Speaker 6: she joined the Works Progress Administration PA WPA, and she
Speaker 6: was ballet dancer, and she ended up out in San
Speaker 6: Francisco and she danced with this girl named Edith something
Speaker 6: I can't remember he name is. She was from New
Speaker 6: York City, and they realized they could make more money
Speaker 6: just going out with dudes at night and just doing stuff,
Speaker 6: and she ended up being an.
Speaker 4: Adult dancer, you know a few years later.
Speaker 6: You know, that was that was something people in my
Speaker 6: own family did and you know, I come from the
Speaker 6: same socioeconomic background as Hazel. You and I in the
Speaker 6: first college grad you know, and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 6: So you know, my my grandmother did that. And she
Speaker 6: was a nice lady and went to church, you know,
Speaker 6: and the whole thing. But she was a good time
Speaker 6: girl back in the back in the late twenties and
Speaker 6: early thirties, because that's how you could.
Speaker 1: Get everybody's got to eat.
Speaker 6: Everybody's got to eat, you know. And I think Hazel
Speaker 6: had a real strong interest in going to New York City.
Speaker 6: She loved to travel. She had gone down there Memorial Day,
Speaker 6: you know, the anniversary of that trips coming up next weekend,
Speaker 6: what they called Dedication Day back then, I believe, and
Speaker 6: she left to party. And she spent all of her
Speaker 6: money on partying. Because when you were a housekeeper, you
Speaker 6: got three hots and a cot, you got you got food,
Speaker 6: you got clothing. You know, you got us and you
Speaker 6: made it a pretty damn good salary because you were
Speaker 6: in charge of the people's kids. So you know, it
Speaker 6: was a great job for somebody who liked to hang out,
Speaker 6: and that's what she was doing. It was innocent fun,
Speaker 6: it was girl stuff. It was not, you know, and
Speaker 6: you know, she had some tight relationships with some of
Speaker 6: her girlfriends. She seemed not to be interested in having
Speaker 6: a out of male relationships, especially according to her brother.
Speaker 6: So she was just having a good time and it
Speaker 6: seems like she must have got in with somebody who
Speaker 6: who who got a little carried away?
Speaker 1: Well no, I know that some of our listeners would
Speaker 1: be like, wait, this is not a true crime podcast, right,
Speaker 1: So we're monster talk. We talk about weird stuff and monsters.
Speaker 2: And.
Speaker 1: So there was a spiritualist element to this case. So
Speaker 1: what was the involvement of psychics astrologers?
Speaker 6: So I'm glad you're bringing that up. That's that's my
Speaker 6: favorite chapter in the book. And I would have yanked
Speaker 6: this book from publication if they made me pull it.
Speaker 6: There was a lot of that man, and that's why
Speaker 6: I wanted to come on to your your show and
Speaker 6: wanted to other than I just love you guys, and like.
Speaker 1: To quote Terry Guard, the feeling is mutual.
Speaker 4: Yes, So but no, there was weird stuff that happened.
Speaker 6: There's a point where the DA says, I keep getting
Speaker 6: all these tips and finally the press are like.
Speaker 4: Come on, the guy's name is Jarvis Peel, Drivis p O'Brien.
Speaker 6: You know, you can just big mustache cigar, you know,
Speaker 6: just the classic robber baron.
Speaker 4: He really was a railroad lawyer. He was a robber
Speaker 4: baron lawyer.
Speaker 6: Finally revealed what all the letters were, and it was
Speaker 6: people having dreams about Hazel Drew and solving the case
Speaker 6: and their dreams. I don't know if Mark Frost knew that,
Speaker 6: but that's right out of how Dale Cooper gets his
Speaker 6: information in the in the TV show. So I thought
Speaker 6: that was bizarre. Yeah, And then okay, the mother talks
Speaker 6: to the several papers, the New York Times, the Gray Lady,
Speaker 6: and the New York Times. You know, maybe it's the
Speaker 6: failing New York Times today quote unquote, but it was
Speaker 6: a big effing deal in nineteen oh eight.
Speaker 4: It was the paper.
Speaker 1: This was before word ale, So this is impressive.
Speaker 6: Way before it was a gaming platform. It actually carried
Speaker 6: news and information. It was the national paper of record.
Speaker 6: And they cover this story and they say, and Hazel's
Speaker 6: mom says, I believe she was taken out by a
Speaker 6: well to do man of Troy, and he had power
Speaker 6: over my daughter. He hypnotized her, and he murdered her. Well,
Speaker 6: that's a great quote, except I turns out the guy
Speaker 6: I think killed Hazel was into hypnotism.
Speaker 1: That's funny, that's really.
Speaker 5: Because when I.
Speaker 6: Found that clue, I was like, dude, you have got
Speaker 6: to be kidding me. And sure enough, he does have
Speaker 6: a high a tie to the most famous hypnosis of
Speaker 6: the of the era was a guy named Xena Xenophon
Speaker 6: Lamont somebody, and he was a personal friend of Mussolini
Speaker 6: and was a wild dude, and my suspect had had
Speaker 6: a tangible a tie to him.
Speaker 3: I want to ask about that. I mean, do you
Speaker 3: think that this was a mother's grief or do you think,
Speaker 3: because you've alluded to towards the end, that they knew
Speaker 3: who this person was.
Speaker 4: I think Hazel's family knew who the killer was.
Speaker 6: I certainly think Hazel's aunt many knew who the killer was,
Speaker 6: because she acts like she knew who the killer was.
Speaker 6: She I tails it. She This is a lady who
Speaker 6: made it to forty years old without ever being married
Speaker 6: in nineteen oh eight.
Speaker 4: That carries spinster again.
Speaker 6: My partying grandmother's sister was a spinster aunt who had
Speaker 6: a special friend she lived with for a long time.
Speaker 1: You know, they didn't have a Subaru but a lie.
Speaker 6: But they wouldn't have I think they had a Chrysler.
Speaker 6: But she had that special friend and was a typist
Speaker 6: and you know, wore jeans when people didn't wear jeans
Speaker 6: and stuff like that. You know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 6: I do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think anybody who's serious will find plenty
Speaker 1: of loved ones who had that profile. Yes, yeah, yeah, and.
Speaker 6: Aunt many at at the age of forty, about six
Speaker 6: months after Hazel dies Is killed. Mary's a member of
Speaker 6: the Republican establishment, a guy who eventually made a good
Speaker 6: amount of money in the water trade in Troy. We
Speaker 6: don't think of, you know, New York for having that good,
Speaker 6: good water, but they actually do. Troy's right close to
Speaker 6: Saratoga Springs.
Speaker 1: Oh no, I actually I love New York City water,
Speaker 1: which comes from the mountains. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's why the.
Speaker 4: Pizza is good. That's why I'm fat. You know.
Speaker 3: Well, do you think her getting married, do you think
Speaker 3: that that was a reward or do you think that
Speaker 3: it was her kind of I think it was an.
Speaker 6: Award, a reward in a way to protect herself because
Speaker 6: everybody shut up O'Brien's It kills O'Brien's political career. His
Speaker 6: failure to solve this case ends his political career, and
Speaker 6: he had a stellar political career. His brother had ties
Speaker 6: all the way to the Roosevelt's White House, so O'Brien
Speaker 6: could have gone a long way as a part of
Speaker 6: the establishment. But what he got instead of politics was
Speaker 6: an f ton of railroad money.
Speaker 4: And he and.
Speaker 6: The killer and one of the other suspects all had
Speaker 6: ties to the railroad that still runs through Tryan, Albany today,
Speaker 6: and they were just about to launch a massive, what
Speaker 6: we would call multi billion dollar project right at the
Speaker 6: time Hazel is killed. And that project happened and they
Speaker 6: all got nice, big houses and lived happily ever after.
Speaker 6: Uh So, politics be damned, you know, the railroad came
Speaker 6: through for him, you know.
Speaker 4: And I think that's a lot of what what happened.
Speaker 6: I mean, we we think of the railroad now as
Speaker 6: this lame, slobbering, lame thing that is dying, But at
Speaker 6: that time it ruled the country. I mean, it was
Speaker 6: it was the the premier industry in the United States
Speaker 6: before before World were World War One.
Speaker 4: So they got they got their stacks.
Speaker 6: And uh and went on and lived and lived happily
Speaker 6: ever after, and many clammed up and uh and had
Speaker 6: a nice life too. She eventually had servants of her own.
Speaker 6: She never had to work a day in her life
Speaker 6: after Hazel died.
Speaker 1: But I guess one question I think readers are going
Speaker 1: to want before they buy the book is how confident
Speaker 1: are you've solved the mystery? Like do you do you
Speaker 1: have it? Do you think you are? You pretty confident here?
Speaker 4: Well, you know, I don't think I'm gonna get sued.
Speaker 3: Myself.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I do.
Speaker 6: Wonder about that, like like you know when you write
Speaker 6: true chrime, and a lot of people who solve contemporary
Speaker 6: murders straight up get sued like the But this this
Speaker 6: case is over one hundred years old. I am when
Speaker 6: I'm three beers in, I am one hundred percent confident.
Speaker 6: I saw at nine o'clock in the morning, I'm about
Speaker 6: seventy five to eighty percent confident. And when you read
Speaker 6: the book, I lay this out. The reason why I'm
Speaker 6: so confident is because the clues lead to a tiny
Speaker 6: suspect pool, and there is only one suspect who meets
Speaker 6: all the criteria. He had a car, he knew the area,
Speaker 6: he could navigate his car up and down that area.
Speaker 6: He was in Hazel's house. I mean, you guys are
Speaker 6: talking about now, but I not say it captivating, interesting,
Speaker 6: well read, smart hypnotist.
Speaker 4: And they were.
Speaker 6: Going to bury Hazel across the street from his house,
Speaker 6: and the day of the murder, or the day of
Speaker 6: her funeral, they moved the grave. So that's one of
Speaker 6: the reasons why I think the family knew who did it,
Speaker 6: because you don't You're not going to marry the bury
Speaker 6: the murder victim where this guy.
Speaker 4: Nobody's going to do that.
Speaker 6: Her, even I, who am not superstitious, ain't doing that.
Speaker 6: So they moved her body to another cemetery where Hazel
Speaker 6: had no family. Her whole family's buried there now. But
Speaker 6: they were gonna they were going to bury her right
Speaker 6: across the street in the family platform where I think
Speaker 6: the murderer lived. And they changed that on the day
Speaker 6: of the on the day of the funeral. Wow, So
Speaker 6: I think they knew who did it. I think a
Speaker 6: lot of people in Troy knew who did it. And
Speaker 6: I have talked to some people in Troy who think
Speaker 6: I'm right about this. They're not going to go on
Speaker 6: the record, but they're like, yeah, you know, it makes sense.
Speaker 6: And the problem is we had just come off the
Speaker 6: Billy Brown murder, right, so a rich guy with power
Speaker 6: over the young girl kills her. The fact that my
Speaker 6: suspect was not investigated is really problematic because they weren't
Speaker 6: that dumb. I mean, the FBI was just getting started.
Speaker 6: Scotland Yard had been around, I talk a little about this,
Speaker 6: you know, the CIRTE was up and running under VIDOC
Speaker 6: and all that stuff. They knew enough about crime, and
Speaker 6: they knew enough about crime from what had just happened
Speaker 6: one hundred miles away in their state. Two of at
Speaker 6: least asked this guy some questions that the inquest.
Speaker 1: He lies.
Speaker 4: At the inquest, he tells a story different from what
Speaker 4: he had been telling the press, so he's already perjuring
Speaker 4: himself and nobody followed up. Today.
Speaker 6: This would be the guy they would take into custody
Speaker 6: first and shake down without his wife, for kids or
Speaker 6: anybody else present. Like the suspect that I think dead.
Speaker 6: It is the guy the cops would immediately arrest today.
Speaker 6: And I think even if he didn't do it, man,
Speaker 6: it's so suspect, that he was not taken into custody,
Speaker 6: that he wasn't questioned when people, the most off the
Speaker 6: wall people were questioned about this murder, just the most
Speaker 6: random dudes. And at the end O'Brien, after investigating the
Speaker 6: whole thing, at the Corner's inquest, tries to mark it
Speaker 6: down as a suicide and he can't find any of
Speaker 6: the there's three coroners who worked on it, and there's
Speaker 6: the corner stroke more strope who's doing the question, and
Speaker 6: none of them will say this was a suicide. They're
Speaker 6: all like, this is a murder. And he brings in
Speaker 6: a doctor to swear it was a suicide. And the
Speaker 6: doctor is his buddy from the railroad that the suspect
Speaker 6: and the work for. He's a railroad surgeon. He does
Speaker 6: the word suicide doesn't even appear in the book that
Speaker 6: he wrote about railroad surgery.
Speaker 4: So if that's not a.
Speaker 6: Cover up, Yahn, then it's the world's worst police investigation.
Speaker 3: I think it's an excellent theory. I think that the
Speaker 3: person that you point to is just so suspect and
Speaker 3: I picked it up on that very early on. Maybe
Speaker 3: we can talk about that later, But there was just
Speaker 3: one thing that you mentioned that that had me tweaked
Speaker 3: so right to the end. I was very satisfied when
Speaker 3: you named this person. And I think it's just so
Speaker 3: incredibly sad that she died at such a young age
Speaker 3: and this person went on to live a very long life.
Speaker 3: It's just very unfair.
Speaker 6: I appreciate that if he didn't do it, and I
Speaker 6: fingered a guy.
Speaker 3: Who did, the hell was it?
Speaker 4: Then then you.
Speaker 6: Know the guy should have at least done more right,
Speaker 6: like at least he had a responsibility from his position
Speaker 6: to have at least ponied up some of the reward.
Speaker 6: I mean, a grocery store cloak clerk put up a
Speaker 6: reward and this guy didn't.
Speaker 3: So, you know, I want to ask you, why is
Speaker 3: interest in this case enduring? And are there any living
Speaker 3: family members too?
Speaker 6: There are living family members. There are still Drews in
Speaker 6: the area. They have an ancestry page. I reached out
Speaker 6: to a couple of them, and you know, I think
Speaker 6: they're done. You know, they're not interested in this, and
Speaker 6: that's fair. You know, I got to see one of
Speaker 6: the family members showed me some pictures I'm not allowed
Speaker 6: to use, so I got to see more images of
Speaker 6: Hazel than the anybody else will ever get to see.
Speaker 6: And I'm very I got to see what many really
Speaker 6: looked like, you know, what Hazel looked like, you know, for.
Speaker 3: Real, see that one picture or the two versions of
Speaker 3: that one picture.
Speaker 6: So there is still family around there, not the Druis anymore.
Speaker 6: But you know, I hope they'll read this book and
Speaker 6: enjoy it. But this is a part of their history.
Speaker 6: I think they're kind of they're kind of finished with now.
Speaker 6: If any of Hazel's relatives are listening to this and
Speaker 6: I didn't talk to you, and you want to talk,
Speaker 6: let's do it. Because at the end of the book
Speaker 6: I talk about this. There's a little section at the
Speaker 6: end called this Isn't Over. There were over a thousand
Speaker 6: people who visited the crime scene, and there were over
Speaker 6: one hundred people who saw her body in the funeral home,
Speaker 6: and a lot of them took photographs somewhere in Troy.
Speaker 6: There are pictures. There are pictures of the crime scene,
Speaker 6: there are pictures of Hazel, and they're in addicts there.
Speaker 6: I went to a garage sale in Avril Park and
Speaker 6: bought some stuff that had clearly come out of the
Speaker 6: attic and had nothing to do with Hazel.
Speaker 4: So you know, if people.
Speaker 6: Related to Hazel, or people related to any of the
Speaker 6: folks in this book are still around want to talk
Speaker 6: or have artifacts, I hope they'll bring them because I'll
Speaker 6: do another version.
Speaker 4: I'll do a part two. I'd love to.
Speaker 1: There's this high and we've talked about briefly about Twin Peaks.
Speaker 1: Did you get a vibe on why Frost was interested
Speaker 1: in this case or why was he aware of it?
Speaker 1: And like, how did I mean? I see several elements.
Speaker 6: So the local lord, there's even there's a pick in
Speaker 6: the version of the book. You haven't seen it yet,
Speaker 6: but while I was writing this book, they actually put
Speaker 6: up a monument to Hazel right across from teals Pond,
Speaker 6: and it tells the Mark Frost story. People think Hazel
Speaker 6: haunts the place where she died. People have seen her
Speaker 6: ghosts there for years, and Mark Frost's grandmother told the
Speaker 6: story of Hazel Drew within the context of a ghost story,
Speaker 6: So she is a ghost. Plus, if you go to Troy,
Speaker 6: go to Manry's Diner, go to the woods around Teal's Pond,
Speaker 6: it's the real Twin Peaks.
Speaker 1: I mean to have damn find coffee that's.
Speaker 6: Really restaurant in Troy has damn fine coffee and they
Speaker 6: roasted and blended themselves.
Speaker 1: It's fantastic.
Speaker 4: It's great.
Speaker 1: This was This was such a great read. And when
Speaker 1: is it coming out again?
Speaker 6: It is June tenth, and I don't know this. This
Speaker 6: may be out by the time it comes. It's Amazon,
Speaker 6: Barnes and Noble. It's going to be in stores. Please,
Speaker 6: if you like paper books, God, go to Barnes and
Speaker 6: Noble and buy it. That would make me so happy Amazon,
Speaker 6: of course. But with this kind of thing, I'd like
Speaker 6: to keep doing this.
Speaker 4: Guys.
Speaker 6: You know, I've got another case I'm working on that's
Speaker 6: never been publicized that's even weirder than this one. I
Speaker 6: won't say the name, but it's uh voodoo murder in Philadelphia.
Speaker 6: The book is going to be called Blake get Ready
Speaker 6: Hexan City.
Speaker 4: So so good.
Speaker 6: I'd like to keep doing this, but you know, I
Speaker 6: can only do this if if people buy this stuff,
Speaker 6: so i'd sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I totally understand. Well, wonderful job. Jerry, really loved
Speaker 3: the book, and I'm excited to see what you do next.
Speaker 1: Rite Jerry again, thank you for coming back. And it's
Speaker 1: always going to see you. And that book again is
Speaker 1: out June tenth, and check it out Guards.
Speaker 4: And Noble, all the places.
Speaker 1: Monster You've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show
Speaker 1: about monsters. I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner. You
Speaker 1: just heard an interview with author and investigator Jerry Drake
Speaker 1: discussing his new book, Hazel was a Good Girl, solving
Speaker 1: the murder that inspired Twin Peaks. It was fun to
Speaker 1: see how Jerry applied his work skills and amateur investigator
Speaker 1: skills to tackle this mystery. And we hope that you
Speaker 1: grab a copy when it comes out on June tenth.
Speaker 1: Links in the show notes to pre order. Monster Talk
Speaker 1: theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.
Speaker 7: You know this is Excuse me a damn fine cup
Speaker 7: of coffee.
Speaker 1: This has been a Monster House presentation.