01/10/2023
Ed Nichols, 50, Roy Wilson, 35, and Dewey Morris, 25, were found brutally butchered near their cabin at Little Lava Lake in April of 1924. The three men were trappers and had been living in an isolated cabin on the lake for the winter months.
Friends and family of the men ventured to the cabin in the spring. Upon arrival they did not find the three men jovially presenting their winter winnings as they had expected, but discovered only a blood-stained hammer in the trapper's shed. Foul play was afoot, dear reader.
They soon discovered a patch of blood in the snow, a few inches down, and upon further investigation found a front tooth and some human hair mixed in the slush.
Once the ice melted, the party was able to extract the bodies of their friends from the lake where a hole had been cut in the ice and the bodies deposited in the dead of winter. The bodies were wrapped in muslin, and “fiendishly butchered.”
Claude McCauley, a freelance writer, described the scene in gruesome detail.
“Ed Nichols, still had his glasses on, the ones he used for reading. A shotgun, fired at close range, had carried away the lower part of his right jaw and part of his chest. A watch in his coat pocket had stopped at ten minutes after nine. Roy Wilson’s right shoulder had been almost entirely shot away by a charge of shot, and there was a bullet behind his right ear. Dewey Morris had been wounded in the left elbow by a charge of a shot and a hole a little larger than a silver dollar had been crushed through his skull at the back of his right ear.”
As motives were discussed, blame landed on a former Elk Lake Lodge employee known as Lee Collins, who had once threatened to “get even” with one of the trappers over a petty dispute.
The sheriff found that Collins’ real name was Charles Kimzey, and that he was wanted in the county for assault and armed robbery. Kimzey had escaped from the Idaho State Penitentiary in 1915 and had a long history of brutal crimes behind him. In 1923, Kimsey hired a cab driver to take him from Oregon to Idaho and in a remote location, overpowered the driver, poisoned him, and threw him into an abandoned well.
Bulletin writer Don Burgderfer called Kimzey, “a person so despicable that no crime was beyond him, not even a triple murder.”
Despite the $1,000 reward offer, it took five long years to track Kimzey down. In 1928, he was found hiding out in Kalispell, Montana. However, insufficient evidence left Kimzey unprosecuted for the cold-blooded crimes at Lava Lake.
Burgderfer called the murders, “one of the most ghastly unsolved crimes in the annals of Oregon’s history.”
The murders remain officially unsolved.
