Hazel Drew

Case background and investigation

Hazel Irene Drew was a 20-year-old domestic servant who worked for well-to-do families in Troy, New York, in the early 1900s. Attractive, sociable and secretive about her personal life, she moved among several households and was known to correspond with a number of admirers whose identities she guarded closely. In early July 1908 she left her employment and, after visiting relatives and running errands in Troy, made her way toward the rural hamlets around Sand Lake in Rensselaer County, where her uncle kept a farm in the wooded hills near Taborton.

Hazel was last seen alive on July 7, 1908, walking along Taborton Road in the hills above Sand Lake. Four days later, on July 11, two young men on a fishing outing discovered her body floating face-down in Teal's Pond. Her corpse had been in the water for days and was identified by her clothing and distinctive gold dental fillings. An autopsy determined that she had died from a violent blow to the back of the head that crushed her skull, and her death was ruled a homicide.

The killing became a sensation, drawing reporters from across the country to the quiet farming district. Investigators led by District Attorney Jarvis O'Brien pursued a long list of suspects and persons of interest. Among them were Frank Smith, a farmhand said to have harbored feelings for Hazel; her reclusive uncle William Taylor, whose land lay near the pond; a charcoal peddler named Rudolph Gundrum who had been seen with her; and various rumored suitors including a dentist and a wealthy Albany businessman connected to a nearby resort. Each was scrutinized, but alibis, thin evidence and a lack of forensic tools left every lead unresolved.

A grand jury inquest was convened, yet no witness could place any suspect at the scene and no weapon or motive was ever conclusively established. The mysterious letters Hazel had received, her guarded double life and the political pressures of an election year all fueled speculation, but the investigation ultimately collapsed without an arrest. Within months the case faded from the headlines, and Hazel Drew was buried in Troy as one of the era's most talked-about unsolved crimes.

For decades the murder survived mainly as local folklore. Mark Frost, who co-created Twin Peaks with David Lynch, grew up hearing his grandmother's stories about the ghost of a murdered girl found by the water near Sand Lake, and those tales helped shape the show's central image of a young woman's body discovered by a lake. Renewed interest, including a 2020 investigative book, revisited the surviving records, but more than a century later no one has ever been charged. The killing of Hazel Drew remains officially unsolved, a genuine cold case whose eerie details continue to draw researchers and true-crime enthusiasts.