WA WA - Royce 'Roy' Park, 81, Eatonville, 16 May 2007

A rifle stands in the cemetery in Eatonville bearing the American Legion cap of Royce Park. In May 2007, the 81-year-old World War II veteran was found dead outside his home. His throat had been slashed...

Even nine years later there are no suspects and no known motive for his murder...

Each Memorial Day since Park's murder, fellow veterans have remembered him during their small ceremony... “The man died without any family, so we are his family,” said Miller.

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Bees would sometimes crawl out of Roy Park’s collar when he came to town every other Thursday to sell his honey.

Once, he parked his beat-up pickup across from the post office with 80,000 honeybees in wood boxes jury-rigged to the truck bed. When a local businessman voiced concern over a bunch of bees flying loose, Park told him, “Don’t worry — they’ll follow me when I leave.”

And the bees did.

Park was Eatonville’s “Honey Man,” a loner everybody loved but nobody really knew...

Park’s body was found May 16 after a postal worker reported that Park hadn’t picked up his mail for a few days. A Pierce County sheriff’s deputy found that Park’s bloodied body had been dragged from his trailer into the woods and covered with branches. Detectives figure he had been killed two or three days earlier.

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