This view shows Lake Crescent from the pier of the Lake Crescent Lodge in Olympic National Park, Washington. A popular historic resort on the national register of historic places, there is plenty of recreation around the lake & trails leading to adjacent mountains. The lodge was also where Hallie Illingworth, known as the "Lady of the Lake" worked before she was found deceased in the lake in an unusual state. Info below:
The Lady of the Lake is a true story and one of the more enduring legends on the Olympic Peninsula. This tale of murder, a body that turned to "soap," and the hunt for a killer has absorbed readers and storytellers for generations.
Hog Tied and StrangledThe story began in the summer of 1940 when a woman's body floated to the surface of Lake Crescent in Olympic National Park. The woman was wrapped in blankets and hog tied with heavy rope. She had been strangled.The case was especially macabre because of the condition of the body. The woman's face was unrecognizable, but her body had not decomposed. In a bizarre chemical transformation, the flesh had turned into a soap-like substance that could be scooped away like putty.The public's imagination was caught by the grisly discovery, and the murdered woman became known as the "Lady of the Lake." It was a fitting appellation for a mystery woman who had emerged from Lake Crescent, a cold, deep lake that had a reputation for never giving up its dead.Hallie and MontyThe Lady of the Lake was Hallie Latham Illingworth, a Port Angeles waitress who was married to Montgomery "Monty" J. Illingworth, a beer-truck driver and a known ladies' man. Hallie had been missing since shortly before Christmas in 1937.Hallie arrived on the Olympic Peninsula about three years earlier after two failed marriages. She was born on January 8, 1901, to a hardworking farm couple in Greenville, Kentucky. As a young adult, Hallie repeatedly moved west searching for a better life. She wound up working at the Lake Crescent Tavern (now Lake Crescent Lodge) where she met Monty, who became her third husband on June 16, 1936.The two had a volatile marriage. Five months into their marriage, the couple got into a pre-dawn fight that was so fierce the police were called to break it up. Hallie showed up for work at a Port Angeles restaurant with bruises on her face and arms. Sometimes she had black eyes.The DisappearanceThen as the holidays approached in 1937, Hallie disappeared. After the night and morning of December 21-22, no one saw Hallie again. Monty told friends that his wife had run off with another man. But as months went by, even Hallie's close-knit family had no word from her.Monty moved to California with a woman he had met in Port Angeles -- a woman whom, reportedly, he was seeing romantically before Hallie's disappearance.And then on July 6, 1940, almost three years after Hallie disappeared, two fishermen spotted the body of the woman --The Lady of the Lake -- floating on the surface of Lake Crescent.Ivory Soap FleshThe body was taken into Port Angeles, where a young medical student, Harlan McNutt, examined the body. He noted that the upper part of her face, her upper lip and nose were gone. Because her hands had been exposed, the tips of the fingers were gone. There was no way to get any fingerprints, and no way to tell what the woman looked like.And then there was the unusual state of the corpse. The dead woman's flesh had turned to something like Ivory Soap, McNutt said later, describing a condition known as "saponification." The soap-like condition resulted from minerals in the lake interacting with the fats in the woman's body. The lake's near-freezing temperatures had virtually refrigerated the corpse for years.A visual inspection of the body and a subsequent autopsy showed that the woman met a violent death. Her neck was bruised and discolored, and her chest showed evidence of extensive hemorrhage. She had been beaten and strangled.Though there was little with which to make an identification, the body had a distinctive, upper dental plate.It proved to be the clue that led to her killer.Authorities eventually identified the woman as Hallie Illingworth, thanks to an alert South Dakota dentist who identified the dental plate as one he had made for her years before.Finding the KillerInvestigators closed in on Monty, living in Long Beach, California. On October 26, 1941, Monty was arrested and taken into custody by Los Angeles sheriff's deputies. Not long after, he was charged with murder.Monty was brought back to Port Angeles and put on trial for Hallie's murder in Clallam County Superior Court. The trial began on February 24, 1942, and was so sensational that it competed with news from the fronts of World War II.Trial developments were splashed daily across the front pages of local newspapers. Spectators arrived early. Homemakers, teenagers and curiosity seekers converged on the courtroom and at times during the nine-day trial spilled out into the hall.Monty's defense was that the dead woman wasn't Hallie, and he swore she was still alive when he last saw her. But the old dentist from South Dakota was a credible witness, and he insisted the dental plate found on the murdered woman belonged to Hallie. Moreover, Hallie's friends identified clothes worn by the dead woman as belonging to Hallie.The key evidence against Monty was the rope used to tie up Hallie before she was dropped into Lake Crescent. Monty had borrowed 50 feet of rope from a storekeeper at the lake, and the store still had remnants from the rope. The fibers matched.It took the jurors four hours to reach a verdict. On March 5, 1942, the jury found Monty guilty of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.Monty served nine years in prison and was paroled in 1951. He died on November 5, 1974, in Los Alamitos, California.
From: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/20841050/hallie-brooks-illingworth#:~:text=found%20July%206%201940%20Lake%20Cresent%2DClallam%20county.&text=Hallie%20came%20out%20of%20her,tourist%20lodge%20on%20Lake%20Crescent.
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