
Twin Peaks fanatics have descended on a tiny New York town trying to solve the century-old murder of a young woman whose death inspired the cult TV classic.

Sand Lake residents are now gearing up for a surge in tourism as the long-awaited new series, including original cast members, including Kyle MacLachlan as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper.

The townsfolk of Sand Lake are getting used to tripping over Twin Peaks fans poking around in the local woods and pouring over old documents in the town hall.

Sand Lake historian Bob Moore's phone has been ringing off the hook with amateur detectives offering their take on who killed 20-year-old Hazel Drew in July 1908.

Twin Peaks creators David Lynch and Mark Frost set the surreal 1990s show in Washington State near the Canadian border. But writer-director Frost found his inspiration 2,500 miles away in the pretty hamlet where he spent his childhood summers.

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20-year-old Hazel Drew (left) was murdered in 1908 in Sand lake, sparking the cult TV classic Twin Peaks which Sheryl Lee (right) starred in as the fictional version of Drew - Laura Palmer

Hazel Drew is buried in Brookside Cemetery in Poestenkill, NY. There are still many theories about her death. 'No one was ever arrested,' history teacher Ron Hughes told DailyMail.com. 'But there were so many suspects and so many unanswered questions'

Drew's gravestone can be seen here. Twin Peaks fans are now poking around in the local woods and pouring over old documents in the town hall to see if they can uncover clues about the woman's suspicious death

Documents and photos are currently on display in Sand Lake, showing what the town was like during the time of Hazel Drew's murder

The series – now considered to be one of the greatest TV dramas ever made – opens with the discovery of Laura Palmer's naked body in a river. FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, slowly uncovers her double life aided by an eccentric cast of locals and his own spooky dreams.

Dark hints of the occult run throughout the 30 episodes and Frost confessed he took some of those ideas from his grandmother's stories about the ghost of a young woman haunting the woods surrounding their home in Taborton, near Sand Lake.

That was enough to set government consultant Mark Givens, who runs a Twin Peaks podcast, on the investigation trail.

'I thought I'd do a show on it,' he tells DailyMail.com. 'But what I found was huge.

'Mark Frost had mentioned the name Hazel and that the murder was 20 miles from Albany. I started Googling and looking at maps of the area before finally finding her full name. That was the Rosetta Stone moment.'

Along with TV curator David Bushman, who wrote the every-thing-you-ever-wanted-to-know book 'Twin Peaks FAQ,' Givens has been spending his spare time sifting through suspects in the hope of solving the crime. They are now planning a book on the murder.

Drew - a blond bombshell with a 'well-formed figure' - was last seen picking raspberries by the side of Taborton Road at 7pm on July 7, 1908. Her badly decomposed body was found in Teal Pond four days later.

Police honed in on a dozen suspects, including a 'dim-witted' farm boy, a drunken charcoal peddler, a dentist who had proposed to Drew despite being married and a professor who employed her.

Then there was Drew's 'suicidal and melancholy' uncle William Taylor - who sounds like a character straight out of Twin Peaks - who lived near the pond and helped pull her body from the water.

Locals who had no obvious connection to Drew also came under suspicion, notably the 'half-witted' son of a Sand Lake widow who was believed to torture farm animals.

A 'florid-faced' stranger spotted near the pond and a man with a 'dark-complexion' seen with a girl who looked like Drew on a trolley bus were also suspected.

Drew's skull had been smashed in and a piece of ribbon was wrapped around her neck. But that didn't stop people speculating that she'd been mowed down by a reckless 'automobilist' in a newly-invented 'touring car.'

It was briefly suggested that the driver had panicked and tried to make the accident look like murder.

Drew's death was the newspaper sensation of the day. Journalists arrived from all over the US to report on the twists and turns of the 'Teal Pond mystery.'

Like Twin Peaks' Palmer - a seemingly perfect young woman who was secretly a cocaine-abusing prostitute - gossips suggested that Drew wasn't all that she seemed.

Twin Peaks fanatics have descended on a tiny New York town trying to solve the century-old murder of the young woman whose death inspired the cult TV classic. Sand Lake residents are also gearing up for a surge in tourism as the long-awaited new series begins in May

Drew's death was the newspaper sensation of the day. Journalists arrived from all over the US to report on the twists and turns of the 'Teal Pond mystery.' Like Twin Peaks' Palmer (right) - a seemingly perfect young woman who was secretly a cocaine-abusing prostitute - gossips suggested that Drew (left) wasn't all that she seemed

FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan (pictured left with fellow co-star Michael Ontkean), slowly uncovers her double life aided by an eccentric cast of locals and his own spooky dreams. MacLachlan stars in the reboot

Twin Peaks creators David Lynch (left) and Mark Frost (right) set the surreal 1990s show in Washington State near the Canadian border. But writer-director Frost found his inspiration 2,500 miles away in the pretty hamlet where he spent his childhood summers

Drew had 'no known sweetheart' but there was speculation about a group of older men she allegedly had relationships with and gossip about orgies at a camp site in the woods.

And Drew's mother Julia believed a man from nearby Troy - said to have hypnotic powers - had exerted a 'mysterious influence' over her.

Drew had been employed by Professor Edward Cary as a servant-turned-governess to his children. But she abruptly left the job on the morning before she disappeared without giving a reason.

She checked a suitcase packed with clothes into storage at Troy railroad station – though no one ever found out why – and was seen catching a train to Albany. Her final 24 hours remain a mystery.

Today Sand Lake is a quiet residential area with just a handful of local businesses. But in 1908 it was known as the 'Coney Island of the North' with a funfair, a dozen big hotels and numerous summer campgrounds packed with tourists.

Forensic science barely existed - the process of fingerprinting criminals in New York had begun just three years earlier - and the murder investigation looked slip-shod compared to modern standards.

Suspects were named and shamed willy nilly, others were never even traced. Drew's aunt Minnie Taylor, the last family member to see her alive, refused to cooperate with the police and told her niece's friends to do the same.

Givens and Bushman, who plan to call their book 'Who Killed Hazel Drew? The Murder Mystery That Inspired Twin Peaks,' have yet to narrow down a chief suspect.

'It's a tricky one,' says 42-year-old Givens, who lives in Washington DC. 'We are still in the research stage. It's not like reading a history book. The stories start with assumptions, then theories that are then disproved.

'There were probably two dozen suspects in all – it changed on a daily basis.

'There are lovers and secrets - all very Twin Peaks. There are uncanny coincidences between the real murder and Laura Palmer's.'

Bushman, a former TV writer who now works for the Paley Media Center in New York, contacted Givens initially after listening to his Deer Meadow Radio Podcast and then joined him on a research weekend in Sand Lake.

Today Sand Lake is a quiet residential area with just a handful of local businesses. But in 1908 it was known as the 'Coney Island of the North' with a funfair, a dozen big hotels and numerous summer campgrounds packed with tourists

Many of the photos show a dusty town dotted with prominent homes, including this white clapboard building with locals sitting outside on the porch

Others, like this photo stamped with the words 'property of town of Sand Lake,' depict individuals with somber looking clothes in front of a house and neighboring church

This old photo shows a horse and cart representing C.A. Nash Grocery Store in Sand Lake

Shots also show a large family or group of people in formal clothes sitting outside a ivy-draped store

Automobiles were a very new invention at the time, and some people speculated that Drew had been mowed down by a reckless 'automobilist' in a newly-invented 'touring car'

'I'm a huge fan of Twin Peaks. I have seen probably seen the show 20 times,' he says. 'When I heard Mark Frost talk about a murder, I started researching it too.

'Will we solve the murder? We will probably come up with our best guess but we're not there yet.'

History teacher Ron Hughes is also writing a book about Drew's murder and believes he has narrowed the suspect list down to just two - her melancholy uncle William and the 'dim-witted' farm boy Frank Smith.

'No one was ever arrested,' he tells DailyMail.com. 'But there were so many suspects and so many unanswered questions.

'Hazel was drop dead gorgeous, beautiful. It was said that even the pretty girls would stop to check her out.

'She was very classy, polite and fashionable. The autopsy report said she had a well-formed figure. A newspaper article quoted one of her friends saying she had a very large bust.

'Hazel worked as a governess or servant - depending on which newspaper you read - for Professor Edward Cary and his wife. They loved Hazel, couldn't speak highly enough of her.

'But she came back from a weekend away with her cousins and abruptly quit after Mrs Cary asked her to do the laundry.

'Her cousins said Hazel had been in a good mood at the weekend, she hadn't met anyone else and she hadn't been upset.

'The police quizzed Professor Cary and then there was a married dentist, Edwin Knauff, who had apparently proposed to Hazel. The police looked very closely at him.

'Hazel checked a suitcase into storage but no one ever found out why. There was a newspaper clipping in the case, a notice that said Edward LaVoie had departed for Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Teal's Pond (pictured here with a fresh coat of ice) in Sand Lake is where Hazel Drew's body was originally found

Rumors also swirled that a scream was heard by someone in this home in 1908 on the night of Drew's death

Dark hints of the occult run throughout the 30 episodes of the show and Frost confessed he took some of the ideas about Drew's death from his grandmother's stories about the ghost of a young woman haunting the woods surrounding their home in Taborton (pictured), near Sand Lake

'The police - and the newspaper reporters - thought that could be a clue, that maybe she was going away with him.

'I found out a lot about LaVoie but, like the police, I couldn't connect him, although later in life he got into trouble in a stock manipulation scheme.'

Hughes, who grew up near Sand Lake and now teaches high school history in the Catskill Mountains, started researching the murder after reading about the case in a Troy newspaper on the 100th anniversary in 2008.

But after sifting through newspaper clippings he quickly came to the conclusion that the media and the district attorney were spreading a fair amount of disinformation.

'The district attorney was under tremendous pressure to solve the murder, so I think he tried to throw the press off his back by suggesting Hazel could have been hit by a car.

'He knew that wasn't the case, her body did not show the effects of being hit by a car and her clothes weren't ripped.

'Reporters came from all over America and some were very tabloid-ish. There was speculation about Hazel's involvement with four older businessmen, including the man who owned the funeral home where her body was taken.

'Towards the end of the investigation when the reporters were bored they went to a summer camp where it was rumored that men in cars - a fairly unusual occurrence in 1908 - would take women they had picked up for orgies.

'At the inquest, the owner of the camp vehemently denied it.'

Hughes, 53, was surprised at how quickly Drew's murder dropped off the newspaper front pages and the police investigation faded.

'From start to finish it was just a month,' he says. 'The police said it was on-going but no one was ever arrested.'

Like Hughes, Sand Lake historian Moore thinks 17-year-old farmhand Frank Smith, described in some reports as 'loutish' and in others as 'dim-witted,' Drew's uncle William and aunt Minnie knew more than they let on.

'The uncle was recently widowed and had attempted suicide,' he says. 'He lived very close to Teal Pond and helped pull her body out.

Bob Moore, a 67-year-old retired school teacher, first delved into the Drew archives when he took over as the town's official historian three years ago

'Hazel was close to his sister Minnie and they spent a lot of time together, possibly even double dated, although Hazel was 20 and Minnie 33.

'Minnie refused to co-operate with the police and refused to reveal the names of Hazel's friends and associates, claiming she did not want to drag innocent people into the affair.

'The farm boy fancied Hazel and was amongst the last to see her alive. There are many things that don't add up.'

Moore, a 67-year-old retired school teacher, first delved into the Drew archives when he took over as the town's official historian three years ago.

'There were pages and pages of 1908 newspaper cuttings,' he told DailyMail.com

'I thought I'd maybe write a story about it but I kept putting it on one side. Then Ron Hughes contacted me, he was very familiar with the case and we talked at length.

'Then David Bushman and Mark Givens got in touch, so I took them on a little tour of the area. Mark Frost's family lived on the hill in Taborton, near Sand Lake, and he heard stories from his grandmother about the Drew murder.

'I went to Taborton and got chatting to a man - it was Mark's brother Scott, who wrote some of Twin Peaks, and still has a house in the area.

However, Ron Hughes (pictured), was surprised at how quickly Drew's murder dropped off the newspaper front pages and the police investigation actually faded before the show took off

'Then a guy called John Walsh came to see me. It turned out I had taught him social studies at school. He helped Mark Frost with some of the local history. I wrote a short story for the local paper and now I am getting phone calls from all sorts of people offering clues.

'Who knows if it will ever be solved? There's no one left from 1908 so it is all hearsay or hypothetic. But people are really psyched up.

'Locals remember stories their grandparents told them, talk in the taverns and all sorts of theories.

'One theory has four local businessman who were supposedly involved with Hazel and she got pregnant, so they did her in. One of them owned the funeral home and he did the autopsy.

'Then there is a little occult. One of the doctors used to tend to animals that were sick. He would insist on working alone and it was believed he practiced the dark arts.

'There were some pretty wild things apparently going on up Taborton Mountain. Women were seen running around half-naked in 1908. One newspaper report had a woman 'clad only in a rubber overcoat.'

'According to the newspapers, Hazel had no known sweetheart. Her family said she'd had "very little to do with men" after having her heart broken two years earlier by a fiancée who ran off with one of her friends. Apparently she preferred to keep the company of women.

'The automobilist theory has the driver of a new touring car knocking her down. But people today say it is unlikely as that mountain road is hard for modern cars, let alone back then.

'I didn't really watch Twin Peaks when it came out but I am catching up now on Netflix and the similarities between the fictional Twin Peaks and Sand Lake are stunning.

'Sand Lake was also a mill town, there was the big, family-owned Crepes Hotel, just like the one in Twin Peaks and very similar scenery. We have our own twin peaks in the distant Catskill Mountains.

'Suddenly there's a lot of interest in Sand Lake and the murder. A local silk screen business is planning to print up 'Who Killed Hazel Drew' t-shirts. And there's talk of holding a Twin Peaks convention here.'

Enigmatic Frost, 63, has occasionally dropped hints about the real stories behind Twin Peaks but his most telling observations were in an essay he wrote in a Sand Lake newsletter about his maternal grandmother.

One of Mark Frost's homes is this stately property in Taborton Hamlet near Sand Lake. Frost, whose family home on Big Bowman Pond in Taborton has since been sold, used other real-life stories from the area in Twin Peaks

And now the new series of the show is clearly making a comeback. Pictured, Actor Kyle Maclachlan introduces the band Real Estate at the Clive Bar last week, where Showtime hosted a 'Twin Peaks' event at SXSW

The limited series will consist of 18 episodes, premiering on Showtime on May 21 on Showtime

'The inspiration for the television series Twin Peaks sprang from a nightmarish little bedtime story my grandmother Betty Calhoun planted in my ear as a young boy,' he wrote.

'Betty, whose interest in the facts was, at best, glancing, framed this tale more along the lines of a cautionary ghost story: don't go out in the woods at night, etc.

'Poor Hazel's body was found on the banks of the pond. Mystery ensued. Uncertainty about the perpetrator lingered, and may still.

'Some weeks later, a calf, stuck in the mud and bleating for help under a dim half moon, was mistaken for the spirit of the lost girl by a couple of local drunks, who fled the scene in terror.

'Some twenty years later, half-remembered details of this sad tale swam through my sub-conscious during the creation of a similarly doomed character named Laura Palmer.'

Frost, whose family home on Big Bowman Pond in Taborton has since been sold, used other real-life stories from the area in Twin Peaks and called the town's medical center, where much of the action is set, the Calhoun Memorial Hospital - after his grandparents.

His grandfather Douglas Calhoun was a doctor and, in another twist, Frost cast his own actor father Warren Frost as kindly physician Will Hayward and turned him into a star.

Frost, whose younger brother Scott wrote two episodes of Twin Peaks and the accompanying book, 'The Autobiography of Special Agent Dale Cooper,' jokingly called it 'reverse nepotism.'

Warren was 60 and had just retired from teaching theater in Minnesota when he was cast as Doc Hayward. He followed that up with an instantly recognizable role as the father of George Costanza's fiancé on Seinfeld.

He's also in the long-awaited new series of Twin Peaks, which starts on Showtime in May, but his appearance will be bitter sweet for Frost and his family. Warren died in February aged 91.