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Photojournalist Monty Orrick claims to have solved the Crater Lake murders.
Back in 2011, the murders of Albert Jones and Charles Culhane near Crater Lake in 1952 first gripped Orrick’s imagination while on a family trip to Crater Lake National Park, leading him to further investigation. More than a decade later, his findings turned into his 2023 book, The Crater Lake Murders (Genius Book Publishing, 315 pages, $17.95).
Orrick will discuss The Crater Lake Murders with KGW news anchor Tim Gordon on July 15 at Annie Bloom’s Books in Multnomah Village.
“The nutshell is that the Crater Lake murders are the largest, longest, unsolved federal homicide case in Oregon—and it is solved,” Orrick says. “The FBI and the friends of the murderers both, in their own way, suppressed this story for years for different reasons and at different times. That’s why I could come in 70 years later and solve it.”
Jones and Culhane, two General Motors executives, were found dead in Crater Lake National Park. Public interest in the Crater Lake murders soared after the FBI began its investigation. But by the end of the 1950s, the bureau hadn’t named any concrete suspects.
Orrick says that in 1966, a man named Oscar Arrell in Silverton made a deathbed confession to his wife, revealing the murderers’ identities. Arrell reportedly named Kenneth Moore and John Wesley Cole as Jones and Culhane’s killers, saying Moore confided in him about the murders.
Orrick finds Arrell’s story credible, believing it’s corroborated by the FBI’s case files. He attributes the FBI’s disregard of Arrell’s testimony to J. Edgar Hoover’s publicity-focused view of running the bureau.
“It would’ve been professionally embarrassing to them,” Orrick says. “By the time they realized that Kenneth Moore and John Wesley Cole had probably done these murders, both men had been dead for four years. The FBI realized they would never actually be able to bring anyone to justice and they had basically bungled the case. Rather than shed more light on it, they just swept it under the rug.”
Orrick began his career as a journalist writing short stories for fly fishing magazines. Additionally, Orrick worked as a photojournalist at KATU for several years. In 2012, he used his experience in broadcasting to co-author an instructional book with Gordon entitled Feeding the Beast: A Handbook for Television News Reporters and Photographers. The Crater Lake Murders is Orrick’s second nonfiction book.
Even with the true crime genre’s popularity, Orrick says he is surprised that The Crater Lake Murders did not generate as much public discussion as he anticipated.
“No one so far has written a story where the headline is like, ‘Photojournalist Solves 72-Year-Old Cold Case,’” Orrick says.
GO: Monty Orrick reads from The Crater Lake Murders, with Tim Gordon, at Annie Bloom’s Books, 7834 SW Capitol Highway, 503-246-0053, annieblooms.com. 7 pm Monday, July 15. Free. All ages.