OR OR - Albert Jones, 56, & Charles Culhane, 53, Crater Lake, 19 July 1952

athy

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here is an interesting cold case i found:

http://www.craterlakeinstitute.com/crater-lake-news/crater-lake-murders.htm

Was it a mob hit? A robbery? The mystery, 50 years old today, is far from forgotten

On July 21, 1952, a trail crew discovered the bodies of two General Motors executives murdered in the woods of Crater Lake National Park. The men had been shot in the head execution style. Their mouths were gagged with their own neckties. Their shoes had been removed from their feet, and one pair had been stolen.



Fifty years later, FBI agents still haven’t identified the killer. One man insists, though, that if the FBI had taken him seriously then — or even if his story came out today — the crime could be solved.
 
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from a 2015 article:

CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK, Ore. -- It has been 61 years since Detroit, Michigan, businessmen Al Jones and Charles Culhane walked into Crater Lake National Park and never walked out.

Their bodies were found gagged and shot through the head. Their cash, watches and shoes were stolen. Investigators found no evidence at the scene.

Alan Eberlien was at the park when the murders happened. His father sold parts for United Motors, the same company that Jones and Culhane worked for. They flew in, did their business with Eberlien's father, and were set to meet the Eberliens again at Union Creek. But their 1951 Pontiac never made it that far.

"We figured they were probably just sight-seeing around here," said Eberlien. "Maybe had looked here and walked up the canyon a ways to take a look. And so we waited for about 45 minutes and they didn't come back."

While his father went to the park's south entrance to launch the search that led to the bodies of Jones and Culhane two days later, Eberlien sat in the businessmen's car. He saw another car come up beside him, pause, and speed away.

"When the car sped off, I turned around to see what it was," Eberlien said. "All I could see was the tree. I never could see the car. All I saw was a black fender disappear behind the tree."

The park was nearly empty, Eberlien said. He's convinced the car belonged to the murderers.

Former Crater Lake National Park Lodge employee Lincoln Linse agrees.

Linse said he drove a truck loaded with canned goods up the steep dirt highway when he saw the Pontiac. He said he saw an abduction; four men disappeared into the woods. Two of them were dressed like businessmen.

He saw the other two men the next day.

"I pulled in to the service station on the inside of the pumps and shortly after that, this car with the two men pulled in on the other side of me," said Linse.

"I could tell he had a tattoo on his arm. The tattoo was of a naked lady with a bikini," Linse said. "Also at that time, he had a beaded belt. There was a name on the beaded belt: Ralph."

The FBI discredited Linse as a witness in the case. Linse said his friend at the service station wouldn't corroborate his story.

There was another hole. The overlook where Jones and Culhane's car was found abandoned was about one mile from where their bodies were found.... More at link.

LINK:
Crater Lake murders still a mystery 61 years later
 
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When Albert Jones and Charles Culhane failed to show up at Union Creek on July 19, 1952, their friends thought they were lost. The two representatives of United Motor Service, in the area on business, had planned to join the friends that afternoon for a fishing trip.

When their bodies were found two days later a quarter-mile from Crater Lake Highway, gags in their mouths and bullet holes through their heads, it sparked one of the largest interagency murder investigations in state history. Investigators from the FBI, Oregon State Police, the Klamath County Sheriff's Office and the National Park Service worked on the case. But more than 63 years later, no arrests have been made or official suspects publicly named.

"It was a nationwide manhunt for those individuals (responsible)," says Jones' granddaughter Alice Simms. "I was told it was the most sensational murder of the time."...

... The most popular theory held that members of the so-called "Mountain Murder Gang" were behind the men's robbery and murder. Led by Jack Santo and Emmet Perkins, who gained notoriety for the brutal 1952 murder of a grocer and his three children in Chester, Calif., the gang was believed to be responsible for a string of murders and robberies throughout the western United States. Santo, investigators determined, also had links to Oregon, including as a suspect in a number of burglaries in the Medford area with which he apparently was never charged.

Santo and Perkins were ultimately sentenced to death for the 1952 murder of 63-year Mabel Monohan, a Burbank, Calif., widow they had planned to rob of gambling winnings they believed were hidden in her home....

Long story at below link...

LINK:
Murder at Crater Lake
 
As a child growing up in Southern California in the 1950s and ’60s, Alice Simms occasionally heard her mother mention a startling fact: her father, Albert Jones, Alice’s grandfather, had been murdered in Crater Lake National Park, in southern Oregon, in 1952. Her mother was 28 and Alice was a year and a half old when it happened. The killers were never caught.

“She never talked about it in great detail, how or why it happened,” Simms says. “Maybe she didn’t want to relive it. I always regretted not talking to her about it.” Her mother passed away in 1993 still not knowing who had killed her father.

The next year, Simms woke one morning with a sudden determination to figure out what had happened. “I don’t know why,” she says. “I just thought, I have to do something about it. I’m sure it was my mother contacting me.” She asked her father if he knew anything about the murder. As a matter of fact, he said, he had recently found something among his wife’s belongings that might help.

That afternoon, Simms drove to his house and he handed her a manila envelope. Inside were three old newspaper clippings about the crime. There were also two sealed envelopes addressed to newspapers that had published stories about the case. Each envelope contained a letter typed by her mother, asking if the newspaper had any more information. They had never been mailed.

“My mother, God love her, but she was a procrastinator,” Simms says. Raising seven children was consuming most of her attention and energy. “She probably thought she had mailed them and didn’t hear back, and that was that.”

The discovery of the unsent letters launched a quarter century of dogged research that would take Simms, now 69, deep into one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in the Pacific Northwest. The search introduced her to descendants of the original investigators and of the potential murderers, with their connections to other horrific crimes and, bizarrely, an Oscar-winning film.

“I’m doing this to say, No, Mom, you did not come to a dead end,” Simms says. “I know you are here, and I hope I can find some answers.”
The Search of a Lifetime
 
Medford, Oregon
July 21, 2002
By DANI DODGE

Was it a mob hit? A robbery? The mystery, 50 years old today, is far from forgotten

On July 21, 1952, a trail crew discovered the bodies of two General Motors executives murdered in the woods of Crater Lake National Park. The men had been shot in the head execution style. Their mouths were gagged with their own neckties. Their shoes had been removed from their feet, and one pair had been stolen...

Fifty years later, FBI agents still haven’t identified the killer. One man insists, though, that if the FBI had taken him seriously then — or even if his story came out today — the crime could be solved.

A 24-year-old truck driver for the Crater Lake Lodge at the time, Lincoln Linse believes FBI investigators discounted his eyewitness account after branding him a smart aleck.

“I feel for these two guys that lost their lives, and I also feel the follow-up of the murder case should have transpired a lot different,” said Linse, now a retired accountant living in Portland. “I don’t feel like they got justice, and that hits me right between the eyes.”

Linse says he was driving canned goods to the lodge July 19, 1952, when he saw two men in work clothes taking two “white-collar types” into the woods where the executives’ bodies were later found. As he continued driving slowly to the lodge, he heard two bangs that sounded like firecrackers.

Later that day and the next, Linse was followed and harassed by two scruffy-looking men. He’s come to believe those two men were the killers.

The older one was the most distinctive. He wore a beaded belt that appeared to spell out “Ralph.” He had a tattoo of a bikini-clad female on his right forearm. He was missing a finger.

Linse, coincidentally, also is missing a finger.

Asked if he murdered the businessmen, Linse replied Friday — the 50th anniversary of the actual shooting — “Absolutely not. But I’d sure like to find out who did.”...

On July 19, 1952, two out-of-town executives from United Motor Service, a General Motors subsidiary, decided to do a little sightseeing at Crater Lake.

Charles Patrick Culhane, 53, of Detroit was the national sales manager for the company. Albert Marston Jones, 56, was the manager of the San Francisco zone office. The two men were touring Jones’ sales area, but it was Saturday, and they didn’t have another meeting until Monday. They left Klamath Falls at 11:30 a.m. It was 71 degrees and the sky was clear.

The men expected to meet up with business associates Frank Eberlein and John Vaughn, operators of a Klamath Falls auto parts firm, later in the day at Union Creek, a popular fishing spot.

Vaughn, Eberlein and Eberlein’s 13-year-old son, Alan, left for Union Creek after closing the shop at noon.

The locals passed the old south park entrance at 2:45 p.m. A few miles on, they saw Culhane and Jones’ green ’51 Pontiac sedan sitting by the side of the Highway 62 at the Annie Creek Canyon viewpoint. The right front door was open. The keys were in the ignition. The luggage and Baby Brownie camera were still in the car.

“I reached my hand in the grill and put it on the radiator,” Alan Eberlein said this week. “It was hot enough so I yanked my hand off it. The car hadn’t been there too long.”...

LINK:

The Crater Lake murders and the 9-fingered man – July 21, 2002
 
July 19, 1952

Albert Marston Jones, 56, of Concord, Calf. and Charles Patrick Culhane, 52, of Detroit, Mich., are found murdered on the South Road, 3.5 miles north of the south boundary. Both men were executives with United Motors Service, a subsidiary of General Motors. The case has never been solved.

The two men, taking a shortcut through the Park, had driven on ahead of their wives, agreeing to meet at a summer cabin at Union Creek. The men’s wives found the car the men had been driving, a green 1951 Pontiac, parked along a turnout overlooking Annie Creek Canyon. The doors to the car were standing open. When the missing husbands could not be found, the rangers were alerted.

The two bodies were found a short time later, about a quarter of a mile off the road, in an open stand of Ponderosa Pine. Both men were found with their hands bound with rope, their shoes removed and powder burns to their heads, indicating an execution style of murder. The two men had been gagged but not tied up. Their stockings were clean which indicated they had not walked after removing their shoes. While Jones’ shoes were lying nearby, Culhane’s shoes were never found.

In the excitement of the discovery, dozens of people trampled the murder site, destroying much of the evidence. Since the entrance rangers during these years recorded the license number of every car entering the park, the FBI began a massive investigation, taking years to trace each tag number. Some people were even tracked to Europe. Several local suspects were identified, but lacking hard evidence, no arrests were ever made.

Virginia Jones Cota, A.M. Jones’ daughter, always felt that the killing of the two men was actually a murder, made to look like a robbery. Even though over $300 was taken from their wallets and their watches taken, the men’s luggage was left in the car.

In a letter to his daughter one month before he was murdered, Jones wrote, “Things are worse than they have ever been.” In a letter dated, Sept. 29, 1990 to the Mail Tribune, but never mailed, Ms. Cota writes, “I know who was responsible for my father’s murder. I don’t know the murder’s name, but I know the organization that arranged for my father’s death. I just don’t believe the story that it was a simple robbery. I have a feeling there was so much more to this, that the people who killed them knew them.”

LINK:

Smith Brothers Chronology - Deaths at Crater Lake
 
It really looks like a mob killing. Both tied and executed
 

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