Your answer all but motivated me to dig further into finding out the story behind it - since it seems so mysterious and all that and so many not giving much more details... well, I FINALLY found the whole enchilada that explains everything... for everyone to read, here it is:
Deep in Lake Crescent, divers solve mystery of couple missing since 1929
PORT ANGELES, Washington (12 August 2004) -- Bob Caso had kept the ring binder for nearly 50 years, squeezed among boxes and files. Even the dust on it had been untouched for decades.
Inside were his handwritten notes of an old police case that he had stumbled upon. It was about a local couple, Russell and Blanche Warren, who vanished July 3, 1929, leaving behind two young sons. The case was never solved.
The Warrens were ordinary people: He was a logger, she was a homemaker. Their disappearance was barely noted outside of this port town on the upper Olympic Peninsula.
In 1955, Caso, then 30, a longshoreman by trade and a chronically curious guy by nature, was so moved by the story of the orphaned sons that he spent a summer trying to solve the case on his own but turned up nothing.
Without intending to, he became one of a succession of men, spanning three generations, who kept the case alive. Each man was captivated by the story in his own way and built on the others' work.
"Can you imagine not knowing what happened to your mother and father?" Caso said. "They drive off one day and never come home. Can you imagine the void?"
Caso lost a daughter in a car accident. He kept photos of her in a ring binder. For years, that binder sat close to the one on the Warren case, two stories of loss, side by side.
Then in 2001, as he approached the age of 77, Caso, feeling the need to begin wrapping up his affairs, "to close my books," as it were, again thought about the boys.
He pulled down the Warren binder, dusted it off and marched into the nearest government office. There he found an unsuspecting park ranger.
"I have something you should look into," Caso recalled saying.
It was a fateful handoff.
The Warren tale began in the mid-1920s, when Russell, a tall, ruggedly built man who lived off the land, moved his family from his native Wisconsin to the remote western edge of the Olympic Peninsula. They lived in a small rented cabin along the Bogachiel River, just west of Forks. He cut pulp wood on contract.
The few relatives who remember him said work was all Russell did.
In 1929, he was 37. Blanche was 33. She had dark hair, dark eyes and a shy, winsome smile. Relatives said she was a devoted mother and a favorite among kids. That summer, she fell ill and landed in the hospital at Port Angeles, 50 miles east on the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
On July 3, Russell drove to Port Angeles to pick up his wife, who had promised their sons Frank, 13, and Charles, 11 she would be home to celebrate the Fourth of July. Blanche was discharged at 3:30 in the afternoon. Sometime that day, the couple bought a washing machine and some groceries, which they loaded in the back of the car.
Neither the Warrens nor their car were seen again.
Almost two weeks passed before the local newspaper noted their disappearance. Frank and Charles were taken in by nearby tavern owners. Relatives described the sons as "frantic with grief." Other kids teased the boys, saying their parents had abandoned them.
It was a theory Clallam County Sheriff Jack Pike had to consider. According to news clippings, Pike devoted much of the next two months looking for the Warrens, sorting fact from fiction. He eventually ruled out the theory that the couple ran away.
"A man who paid the hospital bill, paid $100 on a grocery bill, made two months payment on his automobile and bought a washing machine for his wife certainly wasn't contemplating running away," Pike told the Port Angeles Evening News in August 1929.
Other rumors swirled: They were killed by drunks. They were carrying moonshine and killed by a local gang. Pike even investigated what one woman reported to be a fresh grave near the Warrens' cabin. Police dug up a dead cow.
Six weeks after the disappearance, a local man reported what he thought to be "signs of a disturbance" on the west end of Lake Crescent. He found tire tracks, some broken glass and a fallen tree shorn of some branches.
Open Water
The lake, west of Port Angeles, is about 8 1/2 miles long, shaped roughly like a crescent with the points facing north. Carved by glaciers thousands of years ago, the lake is bordered by jagged, snow-capped peaks.
The Olympic Highway, which opened seven years earlier, ran along the lake's southern boundary. It was a rocky, winding road with no shoulders or guardrails. The Warrens would have driven along this stretch on their way home.
Pike sent divers into the lake, descending as far as 78 feet. At that depth, the divers could not see the bottom. According to Indian legend, the lake was bottomless: What fell into Lake Crescent, it was said, was lost forever.
The spot, called Madrona Point at the time, is now known to plunge close to 400 feet. In the middle, the lake goes down beyond 600 feet, and some divers claim there are isolated pockets that descend to 1,000 feet. Given the technology of the day, Lake Crescent might as well have been a black hole.
In September 1929, according to news clippings, Pike closed the investigation.
Frank and Charles waited years for their parents to return, rushing to the front door of wherever they were staying when there was a knock, relatives said. For a time, they moved in with Blanche's mother in Montana, living in an old chicken coop. Eventually they would be separated, passed to different family members.
Frank grew up to have a lot of anger, relatives said. He would express it in his swagger, drinking and boisterous behavior. At 57, Frank died of acute alcoholism.
Charles "was hurt all his life" by his parents' disappearance, said Louise Allen, 88, a cousin who grew up with him.
"For years, he would talk to me about it," Allen said. "He'd ask me what I thought happened. Of course I didn't have an answer. Then at one point Charles just stopped talking. He bottled it all up. But sometimes I'd look in his face and I'd see the hurt still there."
At 47, Charles, a fisherman, was lost at sea off the coast of Northern California. The remains of his boat (police believe it had been rammed) were located but his body was never found.
It was 1954 when Bob Caso, an avid diver, first got the notion that he wanted to find a sunken Spanish galleon. "I thought," Caso said, "wouldn't it be great to have a cannon from one of those ships?"
Caso, now 80, sat on the floor of his Port Angeles apartment, recalling the story.
He went to the library and was disappointed to learn that Spanish galleons never came this way. But he continued to search newspapers for shipwrecks in the region. One day, he came across an item on the Warrens' disappearance.
The story intrigued him, especially the part about the search at Lake Crescent. He went back to the library day after day, taking notes from newspaper articles. He researched the police investigation and the geology of the lake. By the end, he had his ring binder full of notes.
The following year, he and two dive buddies spent the summer exploring the lake for any sign of the Warren car. They found nothing and gave up.
Caso put his notes away.
(read next post for the rest of the story)
