Thirty-five years after she first captivated a television audience, Laura Palmer – the tragic beauty at the center of the Twin Peaks mystery – continues to haunt us.
After the death of filmmaker David Lynch in January, the cult TV show attracted a new generation of fans who began following the series’ heroine, a girl-next-door who leads a ‘double life’ and is brutally murdered.
While the Twin Peaks town and its eccentric inhabitants are pure fiction, co-creator Mark Frost was actually inspired by the real-life murder of Hazel Drew.
In 1908, Hazel was found dead in the small town of Sand Lake, New York, and, after a hasty investigation, the case was abruptly closed.
Though the death of the 19-year-old was suspected to be a murder, no one was ever charged – and her ghost is said to still haunt the woods just over 150 miles north of New York City.
In Twin Peaks, FBI Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan), investigates the mysterious death of Laura Palmer. Now, an amateur sleuth sleuth believes he has uncovered the truth of Hazel’s murder.
And he claims that it was Hazel herself who pointed him towards the killer from beyond the grave.
‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ insists Jerry C Drake in his new book about the case, Hazel Was a Good Girl. ‘But I’ve seen a ghost and her name is Hazel Drew.’
Thirty-five years after she first captivated a television audience, Laura Palmer – the tragic beauty at the center of the Twin Peaks mystery – continues to haunt us
Hazel was just 19 when she was found dead (left) and her case inspired the fictional story of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks (right)
Drake admits he became ‘obsessed… maybe even a little crazy’ by the case after Hazel ‘visited’ both himself and a friend in their dreams years ago.
In 2019, his friend had just bought a home in Troy about 10 miles from Sand Lake, and recalled a dream in which a strange woman had appeared in the house and presented a book with a turquoise cover, titled The Absence of Memory.
‘A few days later as I was sick in bed, shivering with fever in my DC condo, I fell into a heavy sleep and encountered this book myself,’ Drake explained. ‘In my dream I opened the book, a hardback, and saw that the first blank page contained a bookplate that read: Ex Libris Hazel I Drew.
‘Ex Libris is Latin for “from the library of” and was a common moniker on bookplates a century ago.’
After he awoke in a sweat, he googled Hazel’s name and was immediately hooked by the story of her unsolved murder.
Hazel had been working as a governess to a wealthy family when she left her job abruptly. Just days later, her body – wearing a lavish dress she had commissioned the same week – was found floating face down in a local stretch of water called Teal’s Pond.
An autopsy determined that she had died as a result of blunt force trauma to the back of her head, ruling out suicide.
The case became a national news spectacle, with lurid claims of jilted jealous lovers, prostitution, pregnancy, and scandal.
Then, everything went quiet.
Hazel remained nothing more than the subject of town gossip and rumor until 80 years later, when Frost – whose grandmother lived near Troy – heard about her story, and immortalized Hazel in his hit television series.
Mark Frost first came up with the idea of the beautiful girl next door who leads a ‘desperate double life’ and ends up brutally murdered (Pictured: actress Sheryl Lee as the deceased Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks)
Grace Zabriskie as Sarah Palmer, Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer and Ray Wise as Leland Palmer in the Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me movie
The cult show features a wildly eccentric cast of inhabitants of a fictional town
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Drake claims the spirit of Hazel ‘led’ him to the person supposedly responsible for her murder.
In the winter of 2020, he was visiting his friend in her new house in Troy when the pair sought out Hazel’s grave in the local cemetery.
‘Really, it was the wrong time of year to go,’ he said. ‘It was very, very cold, a harsh winter, but we were obsessed.
‘I didn’t have the right kind of boots on… and they burst open on me while I was walking around out there because the leather was so dry.’
After searching, fruitlessly, for more than an hour, he suddenly and inexplicably felt a wave of sickness come over him, and was convinced he was having a heart attack.
‘That cemetery is far from hospital, and there’s no cell phone connection out there, and my friend could never drive my car,’ he recalled. ‘And I thought “I’m dying. I’m an old man who got too excited, and I’m out here in this cemetery, and I’m straight up gonna die.”‘
As he stumbled back towards the parking lot, he took a turn and leaned against a large, gnarly oak tree.
‘My world started to spin, and I could feel the little bit of food and coffee I had in my guts churning. I was getting dizzy.
‘Finally, pouring cold sweat in that frozen landscape, my stomach gave up and I puked up pure liquid on the snow. I could see my friend’s silhouette just staring back at me, unmoving.
‘I kept pushing myself towards the car, but I’d lost the path. I was facing the wrong way now and I realized I was simply not going to make it. The ground rose up to meet me and I fell down, landing on my knees.
‘And when I looked up, I had literally put my hands on a tombstone with a single word carved in bone white marble: HAZEL.’
Twin Peaks gained a new generation of dedicated fans following the death of filmmaker David Lynch (pictured left with his co-creator, Mark Frost, right)
The case made national newspaper headlines, including in the New York Times (left) and the Ocala Evening Star (right)
He adds: ‘That is one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had in my life. People talk about possession or obsession or whatever, and if that was psychosomatic, OK, I’ll believe it, but it didn’t feel like it.
‘It felt like something had come into me that didn’t belong there. And in the moments it had me, it took me to that place which I could not find.’
Once his hands touched Hazel’s grave, he claimed his symptoms curiously disappeared.
But the chilling encounter was only beginning.
Looking up at his friend, her eyes grew wide as she described feeling a tap at the back of her head, accompanied by a woman’s voice shouting: ‘Like this! Like this!’
She told him she saw what she believed was a version of the murder through the eyes of Hazel Drew.
Almost immediately they claimed they both had another vision, this time of a well-dressed man approaching them, a smile on his face.
‘Did you just hear a man speak?’ his friend whispered, terrified.
‘Yes,’ Drake replied. ‘He said, “Hello, beautiful.”‘
Spooked, the pair quickly left the graveyard, trying to make sense of what they had just experienced.
Visiting his friend in the winter of 2020, they sought out Hazel’s grave in the local cemetery
He claims that once he put his hands on Hazel’s grave, his symptoms disappeared
In October 2024, the Sand Lake Historical Society put up a historical marker to commemorate Hazel’s death and her continued presence in the area
Though he took long stretches away from his investigation over the years, Drake claims Hazel refused to leave him alone.
‘I got COVID, and I had a strange dream that I was in Hazel’s uncle’s house,’ he said. ‘And her sister-in-law comes in and says, “Who is this fella?” in this thick upstate accent. And then Hazel says, “Why? He’s some kind of Pinkerton man. I think we need to take care of him.”‘
A Pinkerton man was another name for a private detective in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
‘When I woke up from that dream, I suddenly started to feel better… I told my friend about it, and she said, “Hazel wants you back on the case.”‘
On another occasion, which he describes as ‘the weirdest Twin Peaks moment,’ he was staying at an Airbnb in Troy when he had a dream that Hazel took him to a restaurant called Manory’s. When he woke up, there was a crow walking around in his room.
‘I was like, “Man, I’m getting out of here,”‘ he recalled. ‘And I went down to Manory’s – it felt just like the real version of the diner from Twin Peaks.
‘That was the day I found the first photograph of the man I think was her killer,’ he continued. ‘That guy in the picture was the guy we saw in the cemetery who said, “Hello, beautiful.” I’m getting kind of weird chills talking about it now.’
Though, he concedes that all of his dreams and visions could have been his subconscious working overtime. ‘I’m a pretty skeptical person, so it’s almost hard to articulate that stuff, especially without a few whiskies.’
Either that, or Hazel desperately wanted her story told.
In his investigation, he scoured local newspaper cuttings, examined contemporary photographs, and reviewed the various theories presented to the cops.
He identified what he believed were key shortcomings in the original investigation, claiming that Hazel was the victim not just of misrepresentation by a scandal-hungry press, but also of a cover-up by powerful men at that time.
Investigator Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan in the show (pictured right), claims he has finally solved the case
Drake’s investigations created what he calls his ‘crazy wall’ of evidence and clues
‘I went down to Manory’s – it felt just like the real version of the diner from Twin Peaks… That was the day I found the first photograph of the man I think was her killer’
‘That guy in the picture was the guy we saw in the cemetery who said, “Hello, beautiful”‘
While other books have investigated the case in the past, his is the first to go as far as to name the man he believes is guilty for the murder.
‘When I’ve had three pints, I’m 100 percent convinced he’s the killer,’ he said.
‘Early in the morning on a cup of coffee, I’m about 80 percent convinced. And the reason why I am so convinced is because I’m a data scientist by profession, and the data doesn’t lie. We know who kills people. We know who the prime suspects are.’
And the man in the diner photograph would have been suspect number one.
‘The person who I suspect was never properly questioned. He was the first person on the stand, and he lied. He told us the story incorrectly at least twice,’ Drake said.
‘It’s very strange to me that… he never gives a reward, he never makes a statement. He just hunkers down and lets it blow over.’
He hopes that, in time, more photographs may emerge that shed new light on the case and prove beyond reasonable doubt that his theory is correct.
‘There will always be new clues. Every year, more and more resources come online,’ he continued.
‘And I do think as the silent generation passes away, people are going to clean out houses in Troy, and they’re going to find things.’
In the meantime, any hopes that he may have laid Hazel’s ghost to rest have proved impossible, claiming that he sees and feels her presence ‘a lot’ – and even ‘dreams about her.’
‘Peter Ackroyd said there are no haunted houses, only haunted people. And I guess I’m a haunted person now,’ he said.
‘I will never be done with Hazel Drew. Not ’til the day I am a ghost – and I may haunt Troy myself.’
Hazel was a Good Girl: Solving the Murder that Inspired Twin Peaks by Jerry C. Drake is published by Clash Books
