So I first heard this one in Redmond, Oregon. Somebody mentioned it over coffee like it was local weather. Three men, a hundred years gone, still unsolved. That's the thing about the West. The land keeps its stories longer than the people do.
Winter of 1923. Three fur trappers set up in a log cabin near Little Lava Lake, up in the Deschutes National Forest: Edward Nickols (50), Roy Wilson (35), and Dewey Morris (25). The cabin belonged to a logging man out of Bend, and part of the deal was they looked after his five foxes. Valuable animals. Everybody ate.
Christmas, Nickols mushed into Bend with a sled full of furs, jovial. That's the word everybody used. Said the season was the best he'd seen. A resort owner named Wilcoxen stopped by after Christmas and found all three in good spirits. Aside from whoever killed them, he was the last man to see them alive.
April comes. Nobody's heard a word since January, and Dewey's brother notices the mink traps haven't been tended. These men were conscientious about their traps. So a party goes up.
The cabin's cold. Burnt food on the stove. Table set for a meal nobody ate. The fox pen out back stands empty. And in the corner, a claw hammer with blood on it.
Then they find the sled trail. It runs out onto the frozen lake and stops at a hole somebody chopped in the ice with an ax.
You already know what's under the ice.
When the thaw came they pulled all three out of Little Lava Lake. Nickols had taken a shotgun blast at close range. Took his jaw with it. Wilson had been shotgunned in the shoulder and then shot behind the ear with a pistol, like somebody wanted to be sure. Morris had a bullet in the elbow and his face stove in with something heavy. Maybe that hammer.
They had a suspect. Fellow named Charles Kimzey. He'd had a dispute with Nickols and had escaped from an Idaho prison years before. Not exactly a choirboy. But his alibi held, they couldn't place him there, and nobody was ever charged. A century later it's still the oldest unsolved murder in Deschutes County.
So here's what I keep thinking about, and it's not the gore. It's the foxes. Five valuable foxes, and whoever did this let them out or took them. Either way, the animals were gone before the men were found. Somebody walked into that cabin in the dead of winter, in the middle of nowhere, and did that to three armed trappers. Three men who lived by their guns.
There's always a solution if you look hard enough. That's what my grandfather taught me, and I've always believed it. But every now and then the looking just stops. The trail goes out onto the ice and ends at a hole, and that's the whole story.
I heard it in Redmond like weather. Out there, I suppose it is.