Classic Adirondack hike masks a grim legacy
By Tim Rowland
Over the years, hundreds if not thousands of hikers have parked their cars along Route 86 east of Lake Placid near Connery Pond, shouldered their packs and sallied forth to Whiteface Landing before doglegging right and tackling the unrelenting ascent of Whiteface Mountain.
As they climb, they will encounter Whiteface Brook, enjoying the sights and sounds of a classic Adirondack stream without realizing that they are entering a spooky crime scene that 100 years ago was the site of one the most grisly homicides in the annals of Adirondack hiking history.
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According to a compilation of vintage newspaper accounts, several hikers from the Lake Placid Club had successfully summited Whiteface on July 4, 1924, and were chatting away as they headed back down when one of them noticed a shape protruding from the brush.
On inspection, they discovered the corpse of 56-year-old George Martin, his head crushed from a blow with a blunt instrument, and an arm and shoulder badly mutilated. A bachelor who cared for his aging mother at home in Lake Placid, Martin was doing trail work at the behest of the Shore Owners Association, along with the well-known guide Jesse Crowningshield, a 34-year-old father of four.
Despite no evidence of animosity between the two — just the opposite in fact — suspicion immediately fell on Crowningshield, who was nowhere to be found. State, county and local police enlisted a sizable posse that scoured the mountain but found nothing except a bloody cap down along the road to Wilmington. The cap was inscribed with a set of initials, but whose initials, police refused to say.
Several days later, a fisherman by the name of Abe Jewtraw was throwing a line in Whiteface Brook when he too made a ghastly discovery: Crowingshield’s body, riddled with gunshot wounds. This revelation spread terror through the town as now there was now no suspect and no leads (the coroner had studiously ruled out murder-suicide, as all Crowningshield’s wounds were in his back).
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The body had been found half to three-quarters of a mile down the mountain from Martin, so the new working theory, what there was of one, was that Crowningshield had interrupted the murder and then fled on foot, bullets whizzing past, nipping his neck and ear before a shot to the kidney brought him down.
Martin was missing his watch and a small amount of cash, so police tentatively listed robbery as a motive. But even they didn’t seem real convinced. Who hikes a High Peak with the goal of larceny? And even if they did, the tony Lake Placid Club members might have been more ripe for the picking than a couple members of a trail crew.
The posse doubled and tripled in size, and the Essex County Supervisors called a hasty meeting to set a reward — $10,000 in today’s dollars — for information leading to the arrest of the culprit. Police said “revenge” might have been a factor, but didn’t expand upon the theory. In Wilmington, murmurs about a lunatic who was known to wander the mountain yelling violent threats caught the attention of authorities, who didn’t rule out the work of a “maniac.”
But there were problems with both theories. Ballistic results indicated that Crowningshield had been hit with bullets from two different weapons, putting a dent in the “lone lunatic” supposition. And, along with the watch, the perpetrator(s) had also stolen two cans of beans and two loaves of bread from Martin’s mess kit. Might an enraged, murderous party fueled by revenge have gotten hungry and stopped for a bite? Possible, but not likely.
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But then very little of this made sense. Police initially were optimistic about an abundance of “clews,” as the papers spelled it in the day, but one by one they all dissolved into the investigative ether.
“Investigators have admitted they are completely baffled at every new turn,” wrote the Ticonderoga Sentinel two weeks after the killings. “Clues seemingly remote and far-fetched have been followed up. Theories have been changed and revised dozens of times.”
Then a new suspect entered the scene.
In 1929, five years after the murders, Helen King of Albany wanted a divorce from her husband William. The problem was that William was nowhere to be found and hadn’t been since the fall of 1923 when the railroad brakeman cum highwayman was engaged in a shootout with police on the highway between Glens Falls and Saratoga Springs.
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According to an essay by Dave Waite, a Saratoga County historian, the highwaymen made their money by ambushing bootleggers, stealing their hooch and selling it themselves. As the violence and gunfire escalated, police in unmarked cars began ambushing the ambushers.
Bailey and two accomplices countered by ambushing the ambush-ambushers (i.e. the police) and the shootout killed Trooper Roy Donivan, a 27-year-old veteran of World War I.
After a high speed chase south, King’s two accomplices were apprehended, but King himself vanished. Helen’s attorney argued that the most likely scenario was that he had been hit during the shootout and bolted off into the woods where he died, never to be seen again.
Except maybe he was seen. Nine months after the shootout and days after the Whiteface murders, an engineer for General Electric Co. was hiking at Avalanche Lake 11 miles south of Lake Placid when he saw someone matching King’s description, alone and disheveled, the sort of person who would need bread and a couple cans of beans.
Whether King died in the shootout, escaped into the mountains or something else, he appears to have vanished for good from the public record, save for Helen’s court case. Until 1938, when the state, to everyone’s surprise, abruptly reopened the Donivan murder investigation.
What had police learned 15 years after the fact? Had there been a new sighting? Did his accomplices change their stories? To everyone’s disappointment, the prosecutor emerged from a grand jury hearing to announce a list of indictments — and to tersely say there would be no news related to Roy Donivan or William King. Nor would there be.
Sixteen years after the crime, the Sentinel wrote a retrospective, calling it one of the few major unsolved crimes in State Police Troop B history, and one that still dogged the barracks. One last lead lingered in the air, a North Country prisoner who got word to an aging investigator, Herman Gorenflo, that he had information about the crime. Ill at the time, Gorenflo never made it to the prison before he died.
Locals, it was reported, knew more than they were willing to say. A woman may have been involved. Everyone had their reasons for not talking.
“The case is still open,” the paper reported with no great degree of conviction, “and some believe that the day will come when somebody will speak, when the mountains will give up their somber secrets.”
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