FanStory.com - A Frozen Secretby HarryT

In a small town called Snow Haven, ten miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska, which is in the heart of Alaska's interior, on the banks of the Chena River in the Tanana Valley. It is a place where winter's grip hardly ever lets go. Freezing conditions are familiar to Snow Haven residents. They dress in layers and joke about learning to live with the cold. But this winter was different—in the bars and churches. Rumors swirled about the shocking discovery.

It all started with a junior hockey team practicing on a small frozen lake. When the puck flew high over the net and one of the boys went to retrieve the puck, he spotted a frightening sight. He shouted to the others to come and see what he discovered. Beneath the crystal-clear ice, they saw what appeared to be a human figure. One boy called 911 on his cellphone, and then he informed his mother, who was a reporter for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miners. The other boys called their parents, and the news spread like wildfire. The police cordoned off the lake, keeping neighborhood people and others from viewing the body.

The local police chief, John Perri, notified Sheriff Tom Alexander, a competent man with a weathered face. Sheriff Alexander, in turn, called in the Alaska state police investigation team. Dr. Janice Kromer, the county coroner, oversaw the extraction of the body from the ice. Lifting the body revealed, the man's face twisted in a fearful, silent scream, reminding Dr. Kromer of Edvard Munch's painting, "The Scream."

Dr. Kromer ordered the body taken to the country mortuary. In her examining room, after the body thawed, she and her assistant, Jack Koss, photographed and dictated every detail. The man appeared to be in his late thirties. They could find no sign of foul play. The layering of his clothing suggested familiarity with the area, but a newspaper-printed sketch of his face yielded no identification.

As Dr. Kromer continued her examination, she found a small, locked leather journal inside the man's jacket pocket. She broke the lock and found that the ink was still legible. She hoped the journal would reveal the man's identity and the reason for his frozen state in the lake.

Inside the leather cover was the name Lester Parker. From the entries he was a wanderer, moving from town to town seeking work and shelter. The last few entries detailed his journey to Fairbanks and then Snow Haven, where he found work in the local sawmill near the lake. The final entry was dated two weeks ago. He wrote that evening he had a secret meeting with a friend by the lake.

Dr. Kromer shared the journal findings with Sheriff Alexander. Motivated by what he read, he developed a timeline of the events leading up to Lester's death. He interviewed the sawmill workers who worked with Lester and discovered that Lester had befriended a woman named Susan. To a man they thought she was a woman who kept secrets to herself. They all mentioned they thought she had a mysterious past. The sheriff paid Susan a visit, hoping she might have information that could shed light on Lester’s death.

When Susan opened the door, a petite woman with salt and pepper hair and light grey eyes greeted him. Her eyes darted and her face turned a dark shade of red as she asked the sheriff to come in. She offered him tea, but he said he would only have a few questions about Lester Parker. Wtshen reSusan took a seat, he noticed she was fidgeting with her hands as the Sheriff asked how well she knew Lester.

She said, "I knew Lester for a short while. We met by the lake a few times to talk. He seemed nice, but he seemed troubled."

"Do you know what he was troubled about?" Sheriff Alexander inquired.

Susan hesitated, averting the Sheriff’s eyes and then muttered, “He once said something about a hidden stash of money. He said he found it at the sawmill, hidden in a canvas bag between a pile of rejected logs. He said he planned to leave Fairbanks with the money because he thought someone had seen him when he uncovered the bag of money.

The sheriff thanked Susan and quickly left. He knew he had to return to the lake and make a more careful inspection. As he walked along the shoreline, with a flashlight to focus his sight, he spotted a bloody handprint on the ice, revealed by the newly melting snow. The handprint prompted Sheriff Alexander to order a team to search the area around the lake again. An officer discovered a small cave hidden by snowdrifts during the initial search. Inside, the officer found a canvas bag with fifty thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. He turned the bag over to the sheriff.

When the Sheriff opened the bag, he found a note that said, “Never trust anyone, you fool.”

The Sheriff now believed Lester was killed by someone who knew about the money, luring him to the lake under the pretense of a deal. The Sheriff theorized, once there, that someone had killed Lester because he wouldn't bargain, and then tossed his body onto the frozen lake. Recalling the thaw two weeks prior, the Sheriff surmised the body had sunk beneath the surface before the lake refroze.

Sherriff Alexander’s supposition sent shock waves through the neighborhood and the workers at the sawmill. Suspicion and fear spread through the neighborhood and the workers at the mill as they wondered who among them could have committed such a terrible act.

Lester's killer is still a mystery today, and an irony is that the money that was found in the bag was counterfeit.

The End or Is It?