Murder At Teal’s Pond — David Bushman & Mark T. Givens with a Foreward by Mark Frost

Did you know a true crime case helped inspire Twin Peaks? Neither did I! It turns out Mark Frost’s (who co-created the iconic series) early life intersected with a one-hundred-and-fourteen-year-old murder – first introduced to him by his Grandmother in the form of a ghost story.

The name of Frost’s ghost and the focus of Murder At Teal’s Pond?

Hazel Drew

I polished off Murder At Teal’s Pond in three days. (I might’ve finished it in a day, but beds need making, lawns need mowing, and meals need cooking.) Bushman and Givens did a great job of not only fleshing out the backdrop of Hazel Drew’s unsolved murder, they also created a nicely paced true crime mystery. 

A crime they believe they’ve solved with extensive research, interviews (with descendants), hard work, and the benefit of hindsight. And I must admit their solution carries water.

Now let’s talk about the hook — what got me (and I suspect many others) to buy the book — the link to Twin Peaks. 

In the foreword by Mark Frost, you learn Hazel Drew’s murder did indeed inspire the iconic character Laura Palmer.

But….(there’s always a but.)

Hazel’s tale was not the only tragic murder to touch (and inspire) Frost. During his school days, Frost’s best friend’s sister lost her life to a deranged killer. Which opened his eyes to the violence women face, even from those nearest and dearest to us. On top of which, Frost tells us he didn’t learn Hazel was real (not a fiction made up by his Grandmother to scare the pants off him as a kid) until the initial run of Twin Peaks ended. 

The idea of her, a brutally murdered girl found in an ordinary pond, one he’d seen hundreds of times, provided the inspiration — not Hazel herself.

But, authors need to sell books – so I understand and can overlook the embellishment of the Murder At Teal’s Pond tagline — ‘Hazel Drew and the Mystery That Inspired Twin Peaks’. (A statement that ignores both Frost’s memory of another girl tragically cut down and David Lynch’s contributions to Twin Peaks….but I digress.)

Bushman & Givens continue to stick closely to the cover’s tagline by subtly invoking the ghost of Laura Palmer in their prose by laying Laura’s memory over Hazel’s like a transparency on an overhead projector. By using the unanswered questions about Hazel, her life, possible loves, and murder — they created an enigma just as compelling as her fictional counterpart.

And in doing so, they robbed Hazel of her identity. 

But again, I cannot fault Bushman & Givens. In a retrospective murder investigation, they can only use the lenses crafted by others — in this case, the DA, the detectives, and the reporters. All of whom were men, all of whom possessed underlying and potentially corrupting motivations, none of whom knew Hazel before her death, and (most importantly) all of whom alienated the women closest to Hazel. Women who knew the answers to many of the questions Bushman & Givens used to craft the riddle of Hazel Drew. 

Be that as it may, I would still recommend reading Murder At Teal’s Pond. It’s well written, researched, and the author’s conclusions are sound. (Well, as sound as they can be in a hundred-plus-year-old unsolved case.) However, since I cannot divorce myself from my love of the series, I cannot say if you need to be a Twin Peaks fan to find this true crime mystery as riveting as I did. You certainly don’t need knowledge of the show to follow the case laid out between the covers. Yet, it may keep you turning the page well after when common sense says it’s time to go to bed.