***previous*** — ***next***

1960

June                       1960      “Information Building” or (I.B.) changes name to “Exhibit Building” or  (E.B.).  The building will be come the “Visitor Center” 20 years later. By 1995 the building reverts back to its original name: The Kiser Studio.

David Morris, future superintendent of Crater Lake National Park begins his NPS career as a seasonal fireguard.  Lived in the Ranger Dorm, which is now the Steel Center. (See: October, 16, 1991)

June 18                  1960      A small roof fire breaks out in early morning. Little damage.

Summer                1960      The new 1.1 mile Cleetwood Cove Trail opens.  Thus begins years of stabilizing projects attempting to keep the trail from eroding into Crater Lake.

(Some time during the 1960’s)  While dumping garbage at the Park’s garbage dump, the truck driver would take his girlfriend along so they could walk around the pit area and observe the many bear that were feasting on the garbage.  Glenn Happell, Lodge manager, secretly tied a fish underneath the truck. While the couple was out of the truck taking their walk, so many bears gathered around the garbage truck, the driver was prevented from getting back to his truck. (Story from Lodge manager – Glenn Happell to the author.)

June 18                  1960      John Towne, Lodge employee, swims 5 3/4 miles across the Lake, to within 1/2 mile of the Cleetwood boat dock. The can of grease was lost so the Lake was swum grease-less and Towne became too cold and had to be pulled from the water.

November 27       1960      Larry Ralph Peyton, the 19 year-old son of Ralph & Kathryn Peyton, Crater Lake Lodge owners, is found stabbed to death in his car which was parked at Forest Park in Portland. Peyton had been stabbed 23 times.  The interior of the car showed evidence of “a terrific struggle”.  Missing and presumed kidnapped or slain was Peyton’s girlfriend, Beverly Ann Allen, also 19, from Washington State.  Peyton and Allen had met the previous summer while employed at Crater Lake Lodge.  Miss Allen had been visiting the Peytons during the Thanksgiving weekend.  The two college students had left for an evening drive following dinner. Allen’s body was discovered nearly two months later lying in roadside brush, alongside a highway, west of Portland.  (The murders were eventually solved 10 or so years later, but not conclusively.)

Portland’s most sensational murder case ever. 

 From the Oregonian

That would be the Peyton-Allan case, of course: Two teenagers, necking at a secluded spot in the West Hills, both brutally murdered. For years, the city was awash in terror.

If this could happen to solid, middle-class college students, as Larry Peyton and Beverly Allan certainly seemed to be, who among us was safe?

It happened 47 years ago, over Thanksgiving vacation, 1960. Eight years later, three tough guys from Northwest Portland were arrested and put on trial. Two were convicted, one acquitted in separate trials.  In other words, the case has never been put to rest.

With no physical evidence linking the defendants to the crime, the state’s case depended upon a single eyewitness – a 17-year-old runaway named Nikki Essex – who had to be hypnotized and injected with sodium amytal to remember she was even there.

If she was, though, it’s pretty clear at this late date that the events of that night didn’t go down the way she said they did.

As Essex finally remembered, she was at a party on Northwest Thompson Road that Saturday night, when she and two of the defendants, Bob Brom and Eddie Jorgenson, went downtown on a beer run. There, she says, they ran into Peyton and Allan, who, as was the custom of the time, were out cruising Broadway in Peyton’s ’49 Ford.

Essex says they invited the couple to join them at Denny’s, a hangout of theirs, located at 17th Avenue and West Burnside Street.

After leaving Denny’s, she says, there was a drag race down 18th Avenue. Essex says Peyton ran them into a curb, causing some damage to the car her friends were driving.

Peyton and the girl drove off. After changing cars and picking up the third defendant, Eddie Jorgenson’s brother Carl, Essex and her friends found them at their parking spot in the West Hills. In the ensuing fight – which Essex says she saw only part of because she ran away – Peyton was stabbed to death, over 20 times, and Allan was kidnapped and eventually killed, with her body being dumped alongside a Portland Hwy where it was found by a highway worker some six weeks later.

Season                  1960      Visitation: 330,398  (Online says: 397,700)

***previous*** — ***next***

***menu***