WARNING!: Description below may be disturbing to some readers.

The Annie Creek picnic area pullout is located along Highway 62 in Crater Lake National Park, Oregon.  This is the area I believe where an infamous unsolved 1952 double homicide occurred in the park, the abandoned vehicle left here while the murdered victims remains were found 1/2 mile south of here in the woods.  From a news article below:

On Saturday, July 19, 1952, the clear sky above Crater Lake National Park was almost as blue as the water. It was the height of the summer tourist season, and the park was full of thousands of people who had come to marvel at the deepest and purest lake in the country.

Around two in the afternoon, two cars came into the park through its southern entrance. The drivers, Jack Vaughan and Frank Eberlein, ran an auto parts firm in Klamath Falls, 50 miles south of the park. Eberlein’s 13-year-old son, Alan, rode with his father. Their plan was to meet up with Albert Jones and Charles Culhane, sales managers for United Motor Service, in Union Creek, just outside the park’s western entrance, and spend the day sightseeing and fishing.

Three and a half miles past the gate, Vaughan and Eberlein were surprised to see their friends’ dark green 1951 Pontiac sedan parked at a scenic overlook above a deep canyon carved by Annie Creek. The front doors were open, the keys were in the ignition, and luggage and suit coats were in the back seat. They pulled over and waited, assuming Jones and Culhane were nearby. Out of curiosity, Alan stuck his hand through the Pontiac’s grill to touch the radiator. “It was hot enough so I yanked my hand off it,” he later told a reporter. “The car hadn’t been there too long.”

When the men still hadn’t returned after 45 minutes, Vaughan and Frank Eberlein drove back to the ranger station in one of their cars, leaving Alan in the other in case their friends showed up. While he waited, the boy heard the crunch of gravel as a vehicle pulled in off the road from the north. He caught a glimpse of a dark-colored car as it raced back onto the highway.

The park rangers who arrived at the scene assumed the men had either gotten lost in the forest or somehow fallen into the canyon. Two rangers climbed down into the canyon to search. Twelve members of a trail crew were sent into the trees. The search lasted until sunset—food and bedrolls were lowered so men could spend the night in the canyon—and continued throughout the next day.

By Monday, the Oregon State Police and the FBI had joined the investigation. (National parks are under federal jurisdiction.) Around 1 p.m., in the forest half a mile south of the road, the trail crew found the bodies of Jones and Culhane, about 48 hours after they had last been seen.

The men lay five feet apart, both gagged and shoeless. Their watches were missing and their wallets were empty. Each man had been shot in the head at close range.

The missing watches, shoes, and cash—the men were believed to have been carrying about $300, or about $3,000 today—suggested a robbery gone wrong. But a number of strange details about the crime scene puzzled investigators from the start.

There was the car, parked in the open at a heavily trafficked spot and left as if its owners would be back in a minute. Park records showed that the Pontiac had passed through the southern entrance at 1 p.m. on Saturday, but the coroner estimated that the time of death was around 4 p.m. What had happened during those three hours?

Both men were lying on their backs, gagged with their neckties and what turned out to be parts of Culhane’s undershirt, torn in half. But why did both men have their dress shirts on, and why were their dentures in their shirt pockets? Their socks were clean, so their shoes must have been taken off where they were killed. Jones’s shoes were found nearby, but Culhane’s size 9½ wingtips were missing.

Autopsies found that Jones’s skull was fractured, and both men had been struck in the groin area hard enough to leave bruises. The men were solidly built, so the evidence of a struggle suggested that there had been more than one killer. Investigators found two brass cartridges on the ground, shot by a 7.65 mm automatic pistol of foreign manufacture. Why hadn’t the killers bothered to pick them up?

News of the shocking double murder made the papers as far away as New York and Chicago. The Klamath Falls Herald and News ran a photo of the bodies on its front page.

Soon the FBI, the Oregon State Police, the Klamath County Sheriff’s Office, and the National Park Service were involved in the case. The FBI questioned over 200 suspects, examined 180 pistols, and tracked down hundreds of cars that had come into the park on Saturday through the license plate numbers recorded at the entrance.

There were numerous leads, at least at first. A couple camping nearby reported seeing two “dirty, unkempt men” in a late-model car near the crime scene. In the weeks after the bodies were found, someone tried to sell a pair of men’s wingtips—size 9½—at a barber shop in La Grande, Oregon, about 400 miles from the park. On August 2, a person driving a Chrysler sedan with Oregon plates used Jones’s credit card to buy gas in Colton, California. A reclusive prospector who had shot and killed a state police trooper the month before was an early suspect, but he was found to have been far away from the park at the time of the murders.

One of the most promising leads started with a phone call. An hour before the search party stumbled on the crime scene, a man called the only auto garage in Fort Klamath, Oregon. He gave a name and a local address and told the garage owner’s wife that his friend Al Jones was in the hospital in Medford. He asked if they could pick up Jones’s green 1951 Pontiac sedan where it was parked at Annie Creek, adding that the keys were in the ignition. If they could bring it back to the garage, he said, Jones would come pick it up when he got out of the hospital.

The woman recognized Jones’s name and immediately called the local authorities. They identified the call as coming from the lobby of the railroad depot two blocks from police headquarters. But when they dashed over, the caller was gone. A baggage handler said he had seen a man wearing a gaudy red and yellow sport shirt on the phone. Two fingerprints were found on the phone, but no matches ever turned up. The name and address were both fake.

A former local sheriff told the Herald and News that, after inspecting the scene and examining the evidence, he was sure the killers were “young punks…all excited and probably hopped up on beer or marijuana.” Whoever committed the murders, the paper wrote, “the case suggests this rather paradoxical conclusion: the killer is either very stupid or very clever.”

Despite what became one of the largest dragnets in Oregon history, every lead hit a wall or fizzled out. Because it was murder, the case was never closed. But as the years passed, whoever had killed Jones and Culhane walked free.

From: https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a34840416/crater-lake-murders-julian-smith/