Foul Play

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Story 1: The Lava Lake Murders.

During the early days of 1924, three fur trappers working out in the wilds of central Oregon were murdered in a brutal and savage manner.

Almost a century later, the full circumstances surrounding their deaths still remain a mystery.

Who was responsible for the lava lake murders?

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The weather conditions had been harsh and unrelenting for two solid weeks before their journey had commenced, and the thick layers of snow which now covered the landscape had made progress particularly hard-going for the two travellers.

Having finally caught sight of their objective, both men found themselves mired with a creeping sense of foreboding.

Ahead of them lay a solitary wooden cabin, situated just on the outskirts of a densely wooded area, which extended as far as the eye could see.

As the pair laboured on towards their destination, they grimly noted the absence of any tracks in the snow which blanketed the path leading up to the lodge.

and observed that no smoke was emanating from the chimney.

The signs of life and habitation which they had so desperately hoped to see were sadly not present.

For Owen Morris, this was a journey which had proven particularly harrowing.

It had been over three months since he had last heard from his younger brother.

Now,

as he and his fellow traveller approached the remote cabin where Dewey Morris and two other men had been working as trappers, his worst fears were on the cusp of being confirmed.

There was no reason for such a long period without contact, which could only mean that something bad must have happened.

Cautiously nudging open the front door, Morris drew his pistol and motioned for his companion to do the same.

For the briefest of moments, Pearl Lins had looked startled at the request before regaining his composure and complying.

Being the superintendent of a local fish hatchery, he rarely had cause to carry a firearm, but Morris had been insistent that he bring one along on this journey.

As the two men stood and surveyed the interior of the cabin, both came to the realization that there was little chance of finding the occupants alive.

The hunting equipment belonging to the trappers lay discarded to one side, and the remains of a morning meal were welded to the base of a pan sitting on the nearby stove.

having blackened and burned long before the fire beneath it had died away.

Morris felt his grip tighten tighten on the handle of his revolver, his head swimming with a mixture of sadness and anger.

He took in the papers and rubbish strewn around the cabin floor and the emaciated body of a cat which lay dead in the corner before turning on his heel and walking back outside.

There was no way that the trappers would have ventured out into the forest without their rifles.

Not whilst they still drew breath.

He would spend the next few minutes checking the nearby traps and lines, all of which contained the frozen remains of animals that had clearly died some months previous, before a cry from Linz brought him running back to the rear of the cabin.

A small holding pen had been built there to keep any foxes which had been captured alive by the trappers.

Abandoned on the ground, directly in the centre of this structure, lay a discarded wooden mallet, covered in blood.

It was the dying dying weeks of 1923 that Dewey Morris had been approached by one of the local logging contractors and offered employment for the duration of the coming winter.

Ed Logan had explained to the 23-year-old that he owned a small cabin, situated a short hike from the shores of Little Lava Lake, and that he was looking for a team of trappers to spend the Christmas period there.

The youth had jumped at the opportunity, being unemployed at the time and fully aware of the high price which pelts from the nearby Deschutes National Forest could fetch at market.

And so it was that he found himself spending the festive season out in the wilderness, alongside two other local workers by the names of Edward Nichols and Roy Wilson.

Two days before Christmas, Morris and his colleagues had briefly returned to their home town of Bend, their sled heavily laden with the skins of animals which they had captured in their traps.

Even after handing the bulk of their labours over to Logan, the three hunters had managed to make a healthy profit from their share of the Endeavour, which Morris had been keen to spend on an evening of drinking with his family.

The group were seen on one more occasion following that weekend, by a resort owner named Alan Will Coxon, who had stopped by the cabin on the 15th of January whilst en route to Bend to pay his regards.

He would later recount how all three men had been in high spirits, having enjoyed a high degree of success with their undertaking.

By the start of April, there had been no further visits or correspondence from the trio, which prompted Logan to enlist the help of Dewey's older brother, requesting that he go check on the three trappers.

What Owen Morris and his friend Paul Linz discovered at the cabin after they had fought their way through the snow-covered wilderness would cause them to turn around and hurry straight back into town to report the matter to the local sheriff.

A large search party was immediately mustered by the townspeople, led by Deputy Sheriff Clarence Adams, who enlisted the services of a number of trackers and game hunters familiar with the area.

Upon reaching the cabin, this group then divided into a number of smaller parties and spread out, in order to cover as wide an area as possible around the abandoned dwelling.

One group, led by Adams, made their way directly towards the nearby lake.

After travelling a quarter of a mile, they came across a wooden object, half buried in a large drift.

They immediately began to dig away at the thick layers of snow, soon discovering the sled which belonged to the missing trappers, its rear wooden panelling stained with what appeared to be blood.

Adams and his team pushed a further 100 meters to the shores of the lake itself, where they encountered a large hole which had previously been cut into the surface ice and had since frozen over again.

Not far away, under a thicket of trees, lay a further grisly discovery.

Alongside the battered remains of a number of foxes, presumably the ones that had been kept in the pen behind the cabin, lay a torn and bloodied scalp of dark brown hair and several human teeth.

Despite being no strangers to the harsh and savage nature of the isolated environment they lived and worked in, several of the search party immediately pulled away in revulsion, clearly upset by the horrifying nature of the remains.

It fell to the sheriff to pull his people back into line, ordering them to break up the ice in and around the frozen hole that they had discovered.

A short time later, the bodies of the missing men were located, floating just beneath the surface of the lake.

All three corpses displayed wounds consistent with having been shot by a pistol or shotgun, with evidence that someone had also used a hammer of some kind to inflict additional injuries, both before and after the point of death.

A gaping shotgun injury had hollowed out most of Roy Wilson's right shoulder, but the wound which ultimately ended his life had been administered after this, with a pistol.

The fatal round had entered his skull just below the right ear.

Similarly, Young Dewey Morris's left arm had been completely shattered by a close-range shotgun discharge, and he had subsequently been dispatched with a shot to the back of his head by a low-calibre weapon.

But it was the body of Edward Nichols that provided the most telling evidence of what had transpired.

Chillingly, whilst the lower part of his jaw had been decimated, most likely by a shotgun blast, he was still wearing his reading glasses.

More importantly, The pocket watch which was retrieved from inside his jacket had been shattered by the same impact and had stopped at 9.10am.

This evidence combined with the remains of the breakfast that had been found back at the cabin suggested that the three trappers had somehow been lured outside and then murdered in cold blood, just after they had awoken one morning.

Adam surmised from the injuries that the victims had had no ability or opportunity to defend themselves during the attack.

As he had watched the bodies being loaded onto sleds to take back into town, he found himself struggling to come up with a motive for the murders.

The three dead men were still in possession of their personal effects, and a number of valuable pelts had been left behind at the crime scene.

But of one thing he was quite sure, the local community would expect an answer, and for an offender to be brought to justice for this savage and senseless crime.

Suspicion for the murders initially fell on a local woodsman and moonshiner known as Indian Erickson, who resided on the banks of Coltis Lake, half a dozen miles southwest of the crime scene.

He was a heavy drinker, with a history of troublemaking and petty theft, and it wasn't a great leap to propose that he was the perpetrator of a robbery gone wrong.

Although when Erickson was arrested and questioned about the killings, It soon became clear that there were a number of witnesses who could provide alibis on his behalf, and the case against him was quickly dropped.

It was in the aftermath of Erickson's release that Edward Logan approached the sheriff's office and voiced his suspicions about a rival trapper named Lee Collins.

He told the authorities that Collins was suspected of stealing from the traps and lines that had been laid down by his employees, and that there was also an existing issue between him and Ed Nichols, who had once caught Collins stealing his wallet in a bar.

Accordingly, Deputy Sheriff Adams began to make inquiries, which immediately added considerable weight to Logan's claim.

In reality, Lee Collins was in fact a convicted criminal by the name of Charles Kimsey, who was already wanted by the authorities in connection with an alleged attempted murder.

In 1923, he had attacked a stagecoach driver named W.O.

Harrison, throttling the man and then throwing him down a well.

Harrison had somehow survived the ordeal, managing to climb out of the well and make a statement to the sheriff.

Upon hearing of this development, Kimsey had then fled into the wilderness, before he could be located and apprehended.

Immediately after Kimsey had been named in the national newspapers as prime suspect for the slayings, Adams was contacted by the Portland City Police Department.

On January 22, 1924, A week after the last known sighting of the victims, Kimsey had been encountered by a traffic officer asking for directions to a reliable fur dealer.

The deputy sheriff hastily made his way across to Portland and began to question all of the known fur dealers in the city.

It was soon discovered that not long after Kimsey's encounter with a traffic officer, a man had attended the Schumacher fur company seeking to sell a number of high-value animal pelts.

The owner of the business, Carl Schumacher, had paid him $110 for the skins.

At the end of this transaction, the customer had signed a receipt for the payment, using the name and trapper's license of Edward Nichols.

Frustratingly, it would be some time before the police were able to trace the fugitive.

Reports came in from far and wide claiming he had been sighted, sometimes in two different states at the same time.

It would be a further five years before he was located, hiding out in the town of Calispal in neighbouring Montana.

Kimsey was quickly charged with the triple murder and thrown in jail awaiting his trial, though the case against him collapsed at court.

In addition to the two main witnesses failing to pick him out from an identity parade, Kimsey was also able to produce a number of alibi witnesses, who confirmed that he had in fact been working in Colorado at the time of the murders.

on the construction of the Moffat Tunnel.

One man who was able to identify Kimsey from the line-up was W.O.

Harrison, who was adamant that the fugitive was the same man who had tried to kill him.

On the basis of Harrison's evidence, Charles Kimsey was convicted of robbery and attempted murder, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

He would later go on to die within the confines of the Oregon State Penitentiary, still protesting his involvement in the Lava Lake murders, despite the overwhelming evidence against him.

The Deschutes County Sheriff's Office remained convinced of Kimsey's guilt, and consequently closed the case with no other suspects ever identified for the crime.

The notion that one man alone could have overpowered and killed three fit and healthy hunters does however seem a bit of a stretch, alongside the evidence that at least three different weapons were used to perpetrate the crime, suggesting multiple assailants.

Had Kimsey acted alone, the question has been raised as to why he would attempt to conceal his actions.

Knowing that he was already wanted for attempted murder, living a transient and nomadic lifestyle under assumed identities, why would he bother to transport the bodies on a difficult and lengthy journey through the snow to Lava Lake?

And why would he expend the time and effort to saw a hole in the ice and hide the bodies under its surface, rather than just leaving them at the scene before fleeing?

In recent years, a familial link has since been discovered between Charles Kimsey and a man named Ray Van Buren Jackson, who was a school teacher in the locality.

Jackson had long been suspected of involvement in the deaths of at least six local residents during the early 1900s, all of whom passed away in circumstances that proved controversial or unsolved.

And whilst he was never arrested or charged with any of these killings, which included staged suicides and poisonings, he was found to have direct links to all six of the deceased.

The savage nature in which the victims at Lava Lake were killed, and the brutality in which the injuries were administered, suggests that this was a crime in which the killer displayed a severe emotional disconnect, much like the Villiskrax murders which had taken place 20 years before.

And whilst the profiles of the victims and the circumstances are very different to those killings, The clinical and efficient manner in which they took place does raise the prospect that a serial killer, or killers, may have targeted the unfortunate trappers.

With the amount of time which has elapsed since the Lava Lake murders, it is now unlikely that this mystery will ever be solved.

The most obvious hypothesis remains that Charles Kimsey was indeed the killer, and only the possibility that his physical appearance had altered so drastically during the lengthy time taken to apprehend him saved him from being convicted of the crime.

But the manner of the killings, and the possible links to another suspected serial killer raise uneasy questions.

And whilst we may now never know the answers, we take heart in the hope that by sharing this story, someone may again at some future point attempt to solve this tragic and senseless crime.

Story 2: Lost in Las Vegas.

In this episode, we will be exploring a disappearance which took place in the American state of Nevada over the Christmas period of 2009.

A mystery in which substantial evidence was uncovered and made accessible, yet provided little assistance to the investigators.

The story of a man who became lost in Las Vegas

Those assigned to the challenging task of finding a missing person often face their toughest challenges in cases devoid of any traceable evidence that could aid the investigation.

In these instances, individuals seem to have vanished without a trace, leaving behind no indicators of preparation or clues regarding the manner of their departure.

With the advancement and increased availability of technology to the general public, the information it offers has become a crucial aspect of missing persons' cases.

And yet, Despite such invaluable data as call records and GPS location services being seemingly advantageous for investigators, in a minority of cases, they can paradoxically work against the intended benefit.

The electronic output of the missing person's phone or computer can often be too limited, or too open to interpretation to help in developing a working hypothesis for what has taken place.

The most recent and high-profile example of this is the case of missing British housewife Nicola Bulley, who disappeared after last being seen walking her dog along a river footpath.

When her phone was found unlocked and still active on a nearby bench, social media commentators and contributors immediately began to circulate wild theories of foul play.

They quickly declared the matter a murder or kidnapping.

prompting some viewers to breach police cordons and interfere with search operations, attempting to will their own speculations into existence.

Ultimately, this only added more emotional torment for her family, with no actual evidence that a crime had even taken place, but still having lost their loved one under some tragic circumstance, whatever that circumstance may have been.

The misleading and uncertain nature of such evidence is also true of a case from the US state of Nevada, which occurred in December of 2009.

On the afternoon of the 17th of December, the Las Vegas Police Department was contacted by a woman named Deanne Ketcher, who wanted to report her son missing.

Having gone on to record the necessary details, investigators did not initially anticipate that there would be anything in the way of aggravating factors connected to the case.

The department received an average of 300 such reports every month, with the vast majority of the tourists and visitors involved eventually being found alive and well.

But as the case unfolded, with evidence from several sources coming under examination,

it became increasingly difficult to construct a viable hypothesis in relation to what had occurred.

30-year-old Stephen Ketcher didn't have any tangible links to the city of Las Vegas, having been born and raised in Texas and spending the majority of his adult life living and working in Utah.

He had no known issues with alcohol or substance abuse and was not known to the police in relation to any crime, largely as a result of his Mormon upbringing.

A former missionary who had worked for a period of time in Brazil, he assisted with leading services at his local church and helped to organise charity events for those in need.

He presented as a happy and helpful personality who was very close to the other members of his tight-knit family, as well as the wider community.

The only negative factor investigators could find in Stephen's background was that the economic downturn in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis had rendered him unemployed for some time.

Acting upon the information provided by his mother, Officers were dispatched to a quiet cul-de-sac located in the city's southern Henderson district.

There, they found Stephen's Chevrolet Cavalier parked up and unattended at the side of the road, with no obvious signs of damage or having been interfered with.

The estate where the car had been parked was part of a retirement village complex, prompting questions as to why it was at that particular location.

Inquiries with residents revealed that the Chevrolet had been present in the road since the afternoon of December 13th and that nobody had been seen either inside or in the vicinity of the car.

CCTV footage from a camera in the street showed Stephen parking up just before midday on that date before exiting and securing the vehicle.

He was smartly dressed, apparently holding a sheaf of papers.

or possibly a file of some kind in one hand, before then walking up the road and out of shot of the camera.

Several minutes later, a second camera on an adjacent road captured his reflection, walking out of the northern end of the estate, but no other footage of him was to be found.

Police informed Diane that it had still only been a relatively short period of time since her son had been missing, but nevertheless began the process of examining his finances and telephone records.

However, they soon came came to realize that none of these inquiries were going to assist in any way whatsoever regarding the whereabouts of the missing man.

It did not take long for investigators to retrieve the electronic data from Stephen's mobile phone, which had remained active for 48 hours after he had last been seen.

But what they discovered was immediately puzzling.

failing to generate the lines of inquiry they had anticipated and which they had promised Stephen's mother would be forthcoming.

Contained within the report compiled by the service provider were three GPS signals, all of which suggested Stephen had continued on a northerly journey after leaving his vehicle.

The first of these had been received by a phone mass situated at a junction of two roads, Arroyo Grande Boulevard and American Pacific Drive, five hours after Stephen was last seen.

This location was situated 10 miles to the northeast of where the Chevrolet had been parked up.

Two hours later, at around 7pm,

the phone had been picked up again by another mass sighted a further two miles to the north, not far from Whitney Ranch.

The final handshake from Stephen's device had taken place the following morning, in the vicinity of an intersection between US Route 93 and Russell Road.

The phone signal had then continued to emit from somewhere near to this final location for the remainder of the two days before it then terminated.

During this time, the handset was used to open a text message from Stephen's landlord and to access the voicemail account before the battery had then apparently run down.

Frustratingly, at all three locations, There was an absence of CCTV footage that might have determined if Stephen had been on foot at the time or or had been travelling in a vehicle.

With all inquiries into the aftermath of the disappearance having now run their course,

investigators turned their attention to digital evidence from the days leading up to the event.

Analysis of the phone's GPS data was compared with Stephen's bank records.

and then followed up with statements from all those that he had interacted with.

The picture that was in turn generated by these inquiries only proved to undermine any of the possible scenarios the detectives had been working towards.

In the days and weeks leading up to his disappearance, Stephen Ketcher had made repeated road trips across the lengths and breadths of both Utah and Nevada.

When presented with these locations, His family could not find any obvious connections behind any of the places he had been visiting, with the route taken presenting as almost random in nature.

The vast distances travelled also made little sense, with Stephen having little money as a result of being unemployed, but apparently spending what he did have on fuel for these journeys.

During the 48 hours before he had vanished, Stephen had racked up more than 1100 miles, travelling between Salt Lake City, West Wendover and Mesquite.

There was no suggestion that he had planned to leave his home for any significant amount of time, having committed to a family party and to lead a local church sermon over the holidays.

Throughout that period, he had made no reference in regards to these trips to the people he interacted with, offering different excuses depending on who he spoke to.

At one point, He had unexpectedly visited the home of an ex-girlfriend, staying there for lunch with her family when he found that she was not present.

When asked where he was heading at the end of the meal, he had informed his hosts that he was going to Sacramento to visit family.

But during a similar phone conversation with his mother later that same day, Stephen had instead referred to having made inquiries into a potential job he had applied for.

The only consistent element between all statements recorded by officers was that Stephen had presented as untroubled and rational to the people he had spoken to, showing no signs of having been in any distress or danger and not asking for anything in the way of help or financial assistance.

Despite employing the techniques which had proven successful in resolving other such lengthy missing persons' investigations, The police were never able to locate Stephen.

Searches of his home and vehicle were carried out using drugs and firearms dogs, none of which indicated any evidence of foul play.

There followed a series of press appeals and interviews with his family on national television programmes, with no further lines of inquiry being generated.

Several searches of the area where his phone had last been detected also took place over the years.

failing to uncover any indication that he had been physically present.

Thorough examinations of Stephen's home computer and written diaries found no evidence that he had been in crisis or planning to end his life.

A check of his car found it to still be half-fuelled, indicating he had been planning to return home, with items inside apparently purchased as Christmas gifts for his family.

His mother and siblings have maintained their belief that he had travelled to Las Vegas in order to find work, citing his smart attire at the time as being indicative of attending a job interview.

And yet, no evidence of this could be found on Stephen's computer or phone, or after speaking with the owners and management staff of local businesses in and around the place he disappeared.

It is therefore perhaps natural that those who have since looked into the matter have maintained that the missing man must have fallen victim to an unexpected mishap.

There was either a fatal accident or crime-related incident within a certain radius of where he left his vehicle, which had been missed by the general public or covered up by the perpetrator.

This means that Stephen's remains must have been removed from the scene by whoever was responsible and then concealed elsewhere, most likely a remote location given that nothing was found in the vicinity of where his mobile phone signal had last been detected.

In the years that followed, there was much speculation linking the event to another high-profile disappearance.

The week before his trip to Las Vegas, a woman named Susan Powell had gone missing from her home in a quiet and unassuming suburb of Salt Lake City.

For a long time, her husband Joshua Powell was suspected of having murdered her.

acting upon his notion that she was involved in an extramarital affair.

Despite significant evidence that he had killed her and concealed her body, Joshua was questioned on the matter but never arrested.

He subsequently went on to take his own life in 2012.

Joshua's family would later suggest that Ketcher visited Salt Lake City as it was he who was having the affair with Susan and that the pair had eloped, framing Joshua for her murder.

But despite this theory having gained some traction in a number of online forums, there has never been any evidence that Stephen or Susan had ever met one another.

It is the existence of so many oppositional factors in the case of Stephen Ketcher that makes it so difficult to formulate a viable explanation for what could have taken place.

The missing person was not only law-abiding and deeply religious, but additionally so connected to his family and community that it doesn't make sense for him to simply up and leave.

There is also the mystery of how such a significant amount of digital evidence was readily available, providing a high degree of detail surrounding his movements both before and after he was last seen, none of which seems to have assisted the investigation in any way.

The urban area in which Stephen was last seen and apparently passed through was filled with potential CCTV evidence, but nothing had been captured.

This suggests that either he went to great efforts to prepare for and then stage his disappearance or that whatever happened to him was completely unplanned and unexpected.

With the passage of time and the lack of any traction gained from subsequent revisits to the investigation

It is increasingly unlikely that this mystery will ever be solved.

The only hope that remains is that as the outlying areas and infrastructure of Las Vegas continue to expand into the surrounding wilderness, further clues may be found, either items that can be identified as having belonged to Stephen Ketcher or the remains of the missing man himself.

Ultimately, This would provide some final clarity on how and why such a beloved member of his family and community could be lost under such senseless circumstances.

We can only hope that Stephen is either found alive and well, or that his family eventually receives the closure they so desperately need.

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