Inside the baffling murder that inspired Twin Peaks

Her death inspired the cult 1990s TV show “Twin Peaks.” Her ghost is said to haunt the woods where her body was found more than 100 years ago.And yet Hazel I.

Drew remains a mystery.Drew was a pretty, vivacious 19-year-old blonde living in Troy, NY, when she disappeared near her uncle’s farm on July 7, 1908.Locals spotted her body floating in a mill pond days later.Her death gripped the nation — reporters from the Big Apple to the Old West breathlessly covered the case.

Was it a suicide? A murder? An accident? Rumors swirled.A few days before she vanished, Drew had abruptly quit her job as a governess for a prominent local family.

In fact, her acquaintances whispered, Hazel had been acting sort of strange lately.She consorted with lots of men.

She had fallen ill and gone away for a month.She had arrived at the door of her dressmaker one evening begging her to make her a new shirtwaist that night for a weekend sojourn to Lake George.The papers printed every sensational claim: Hazel had been pregnant! Hazel was a sex worker! Hazel was living a double life! As if the only way a girl could have gotten herself killed was if she had asked for it.“It was a common trope in crime writing,” said Jerry C.

Drake — a civil servant, former history professor and author of the new book “Hazel Was a Good Girl” (CLASH, out June 10), which claims to solve Hazel’s murder.“This sort of archetype of the fallen woman, but in Hazel’s case, it was absolutely untrue,” he told The Post.“I wanted to give her justice.”“Hazel Was a Good Girl,” however, also aims to restore Hazel’s good name, to show the young woman behind the myth, to portray her as distinct from Laura Palmer, her dead-blonde “Twin Peaks” doppelganger.“Going into this, I thought even if I can’t solve her case, I can at least fix her reputation,” Drake said.

“I can decouple her from Laura Palmer and rechristen her as who she really was.”Hazel I.Drew was born in 1888, to a ...