It’s hard to imagine a horror movie setting more unsettling: an isolated cabin deep in the snowy woods, near a lake covered in creaking ice. The pelts of skinned animals curing on the log cabin walls. A man bent on ill deeds lurking among the trees.

But the setting isn’t from a scary movie nor yet a Halloween story. It was the real-life scene of a shocking murder that left three men dead in the mountains outside of Bend in 1924.

The case was never solved.

Missing trappers

In April 1924, Bend’s H.D. Innes was worried. His brother-in-law, Harry LeRoy “Roy” Wilson, hadn’t been to town for months. The trapper, who wintered with two other men at a cabin near Little Lava Lake to trap marten and tend a small fox fur farm, routinely stopped into Bend for supplies and companionship, according to historical reports. But his expected trip to town in March never happened. He hadn’t been seen since a friend stopped by the cabin in January.

So Innes and Owen Morris, brother of one of the other trappers, headed from Bend to Little Lava Lake to check on the men.

What they discovered was disturbing.

An emaciated cat fled from the cabin when the door was opened, according to newspaper accounts. Long-untended breakfast dishes sat in a dishpan while the remains of a meal in progress mildewed on the stove.

There was no sign of the men. Their caps and coats were stowed in the cabin, as were their guns, traps and snowshoes, untouched. The calendar hanging on the wall was still turned to the January page.

Sled tracks led through the snow away from the cabin.

Initially, the searchers thought the trappers might be out checking their trap lines for martens or restocking from a cache of supplies at nearby Crane Prairie, according to accounts published in The Bulletin. But that seemed unlikely with the guns and winter clothing still stored at the cabin.

The next day, Deschutes County Sheriff’s Deputy C.A. Adams joined in the search, and the likelihood that a crime had been committed seemed more plausible. Searchers found a hole cut in the ice of Big Lava Lake (now called Lava Lake) three-quarters of a mile away, according to Phil Brogan in his “East of the Cascades” history of Central Oregon. A bloody sled was discovered nearby.

Marten pelts worth $3,000 were missing, according to accounts, along with the pelts of the valuable foxes the men tended. The foxes had been killed and skinned expertly but quickly, according to The Bulletin; their feet were chopped off to hasten the skinning.

Gruesome find

Ten days after the trappers were discovered missing, the ice on Big Lava Lake broke up. The bodies of Wilson, 35, Dewey Morris, 25, and Ed Nichols, 50, floated to the surface of the water some 200 feet from shore. (Nichols’ name is spelled Nickols on his gravestone, but all other historical records spell it Nichols.)

The Bulletin reported the find in breathless accounts that day; the paper published a record-setting five editions in 24 hours as news of the murders trickled out.

For murder it was. All three men, dressed in their shirtsleeves, had been dumped into the lake after being shot or otherwise attacked. A coroner’s report showed Nichols had been killed by a shotgun blast to the right jaw and breast. Wilson had a bullet wound to the head and had been shot in the back with a shotgun. Morris had been injured by a shotgun blast to his elbow, but it was a hammer blow to his skull that killed him.

Deputy Adams speculated that the murderer entered the cabin posing as a friend, had an accomplice create a disturbance outside, and then shot the men in the back as they went outside to investigate.

What isn’t speculation is what happened next. The bodies were loaded on the sled and hauled over the ice on Big Lava Lake, where they were dumped into the icy water. Nichols still had his spectacles on, and his pocket watch had stopped at 9:10.

Suspect emerges

From the time the trappers were discovered missing, suspicion settled on Charles Kimzey, an escapee from the Idaho penitentiary who had been spotted in the area the previous fall and who had allegedly robbed Nichols the prior August. Deschutes County Sheriff Samuel Roberts offered a reward of $1,500 for the capture of Kimzey and his alleged accomplice, but with months between the presumed January murders and the April discovery of the bodies, the search for Kimzey was not productive.

Investigators did learn that a man matching Kimzey’s description and using Nichols’ trapping license had sold four fox pelts to a fur dealer in Portland on Jan. 22, 1924, and he told the dealer he had a lot of marten pelts, as well.

Kimzey vanished, despite a search for the convict all over the Pacific Northwest. Nine years later, he was captured in Montana and convicted of a different crime: attacking a Bend taxi driver, throwing the bound man into an isolated cistern on the High Desert and stealing his car. The taxi driver survived, and Kimzey was sentenced to life in prison for attempted murder. An unconfirmed report says he was paroled in 1957, but Oregon prison records do not corroborate.

Nichols, Morris and Wilson were buried in adjacent graves at Greenwood Cemetery in Bend, adjacent to Pilot Butte Cemetery. Aging grave stones mark their final resting places.