Lady of the Lake
As a child I always felt a bit nervous as our family drove around Lake Crescent on Highway 101 in Olympic National Park on a family outing. The road, in places, is right on the edge of the lake, and though curvy and fronting beautiful scenery, traveling on it was not my idea of fun. I always worried we would go into the lake.
I'd heard too many stories about the lake: the depth of 600-plus feet so cold and dark life could not live on the bottom and the stories of logging truck and car crashes into the lake when the drivers were going too fast and didn't make a corner. What really scared me, though, was the tale of the "Lady of the Lake."
In 1940, before my time, two fishermen came upon a body floating in the lake. The body was a woman clad in a green wool dress with underwear and silk stockings rolled above the knee with garters. The condition of the body was horrifying, as she had saponified, turned to soft soap like Ivory Flakes. Most of her face and fingertips were gone. Imagine the distress of those fishermen when they found the woman who had been submerged in the lake for years before she floated to the top.
It took a year before investigators identified the body of Hallie Illingworth, a vivacious, beautiful auburn-haired lady who was last seen a few days before Christmas, 1937. Hallie, wife to Montgomery (Monty) J. Illingworth - a tall, husky beer truck driver and known ladies' man, was a waitress at Lake Crescent Tavern (now known as Lake Crescent Lodge) when she disappeared. This was her third marriage. Unlucky in love, husband number three was her undoing.
Hallie Brooks Latham was born to parents Finis and Mary "Bunnie," tobacco and corn farmers in Greenville, KY. She had 13 siblings and grew up caring for them. She wished for a better life and got married young. The first marriage to Floyd James Spraker didn't work out. The second marriage to Donald B. Strickland brought her to Seattle where they opened and ran a restaurant on the corner of Broadway and Pine across from Edison Tech. One year later Hallie was again divorced and on her way to the Olympic Peninsula with her daughter, Doris, to find peace and a better life.
When Hallie met Monty in the Lake Crescent Tavern (now the Lake Crescent Lodge which recently suffered from fire) she was not aware of what was to come. He, too, was married and divorced. They married, and in tune with the Roaring 20's atmosphere, drank and partied. When they were drunk they bickered; Monty was physically abusive to Hallie. She, in turn, fell into jealous rages over his interest in other women and did her share of fighting, including a fight with a woman at Maple Grove Tavern in 1936. It was not uncommon for the police to be called to their residence in the early morning hours. Hallie always had bruises on her neck and body.
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