On the night of December 21–22, 1937, Hallie Illingworth, a 36-year-old waitress in Port Angeles, Washington, was seen for the last time. Her husband, Montgomery “Monty” Illingworth, told everyone she had run off to California with another man — and for two and a half years, with no body and no evidence, his story was the only one there was. Hallie had repeatedly come to work with bruises and black eyes; police had once broken up a pre-dawn fight between the couple. Nobody could prove she hadn’t simply left.
On July 6, 1940, two fishermen found a woman’s body floating on Lake Crescent, wrapped in blankets and bound with heavy rope. The lake’s cold, mineral-rich water had saponified and preserved her — and she was identified by her distinctive upper dental plate, recognized by the South Dakota dentist who had made it. The rope that bound her was fiber-matched to remnants at a lake store — the store from which Monty Illingworth had borrowed fifty feet of rope and never returned it.
The legal record, stated precisely: Montgomery Illingworth was arrested in Long Beach, California, on October 26, 1941, and charged with murder. He was tried in Clallam County Superior Court beginning February 24, 1942, and on March 5, 1942, the jury convicted him of second-degree murder — not first-degree. He was sentenced to life imprisonment at Walla Walla, served nine years, and was paroled in 1951. He died in Los Alamitos, California, on November 5, 1974. Rumors that he had an accomplice were never charged against anyone, and are reported in this episode as rumors only.
The victim: Hallie Latham Illingworth (d. December 1937, age 36), remembered first — a waitress, a wife whose bruises her co-workers saw, and a woman whose name the lake gave back. In later years her case drifted into folklore as “the Lady of the Lake.” This episode tells it as the record reads, not as a ghost story.
CREDITS:
Written, produced, and narrated for Midnight Stories. Narration: AI voice (“Boomy Mountain”). No photograph of any real person appears in this episode: no verified free-use photograph of Hallie or Montgomery Illingworth is available to this channel (surviving images are contemporary news photographs, which this channel does not use). All visuals: AI-generated B-roll.
SOURCES:
– HistoryLink.org, File 8599 (Hallie Illingworth / “Lady of the Lake” case history; read in full, 2026-10-21) — https://www.historylink.org/File/8599
TAGS:
Hallie Illingworth, Lady of the Lake, Lake Crescent, Port Angeles Washington, Clallam County true crime, Montgomery Illingworth, Olympic Peninsula, 1937 missing person, dental plate identification, Washington true crime, Midnight Stories, Pacific Northwest true crime
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FACEBOOK TEASER — PASTE-READY CAPTION (post the YouTube link in the pinned first comment, NOT in this caption):
She vanished in December 1937. Her husband said she’d run off to California. Two and a half years later, Lake Crescent gave her back — preserved, and identifiable by a single dental plate. Hallie Illingworth, the woman they called the Lady of the Lake. The full episode is on YouTube — link in the pinned comment. #TrueCrime #LakeCrescent #PacificNorthwest #MidnightStories
PINNED FIRST COMMENT (replace the placeholder with the live YouTube URL after upload):
Full episode: [YOUTUBE URL] — Hallie Illingworth — the Lady of the Lake, Lake Crescent 1937. Researched from the record, victim first.
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