Lake Crescent and the Woman in the Water

Lake Crescent is six hundred feet deep and cold enough, at its lower reaches, that bodies do not decompose normally. The lake's chemistry, low in bacteria and high in dissolved minerals, enables a biological process called saponification: the conversion of subcutaneous fat into a waxy, soap-like substance that can preserve soft tissue for years when immersed in cold, still water.

In February of nineteen forty, two fishermen near the eastern shore of the lake found something floating wrapped in a cloth bundle. Inside was the body of a woman whose face was still recognizable and whose cause of death was apparent to the medical examiner: manual strangulation.

The woman was Hallie Illingworth. She had been reported missing by her husband, Monty Illingworth, in December of nineteen thirty-seven, more than two years earlier. Illingworth told investigators she had left him. The lake had held her body for twenty-six months in near-perfect preservation. The evidence that convicted him was preserved by the same cold chemistry that fills the lake you are driving past now.

The case was covered nationally under the phrase Lady of the Lake, a romantic formulation that erased the victim's name and turned a murder into a setting. Hallie Illingworth was thirty-six years old when she was killed. She had worked as a waitress at the Lake Crescent Lodge. Monty Illingworth was convicted of second-degree murder in nineteen forty-two. He served nine years in prison and was paroled in nineteen fifty-one.

The Lodge, built in nineteen sixteen and still operating, sits at the western end of the lake. The water is a deep and luminous blue-green, glacially carved and extraordinarily clear. It looks exactly as beautiful as it is.