In the summer of 1950, the Keddie Resort in Northern California was still a quiet mountain retreat, its tidy cabins tucked among the pines, its walkways lit by lanterns at night, its guests a mix of fishermen, vacationing families, and railway workers passing through the Feather River Canyon. But Cabin 29 would soon become a place spoken about only in lowered voices. A brutal killing took place inside its wooden walls, shocking the small Plumas County community and drawing investigators from as far as Sacramento. Yet the most unsettling part of the case came years later, when officials discovered that critical evidence, files, photos, notes, and physical documentation, had vanished entirely from police storage. Officers disagreed about who had them, when they were checked out, or whether they ever arrived at the evidence room at all.
The 1950 killing, overshadowed decades later by the notorious 1981 Keddie Cabin murders, was a quieter but equally haunting crime. A resort guest was found dead inside Cabin 29 under circumstances so violent that investigators believed the killer had been someone the victim knew. The crime scene contained blood spatter inconsistent with the initial assumptions, signs of a struggle, and several objects, later recorded in witness statements, that should have become central pieces of evidence. Plumas County deputies spent days interviewing guests, photographing the interior, and collecting physical traces from bedding, floorboards, and cabin fixtures. According to surviving records, the evidence was logged, boxed, labeled, and meant to be forwarded to county storage for long-term retention.
But when officials attempted to reopen the case just a few years later, the expected trail collapsed. The detectives assigned to review the original file discovered that the case binder, containing crime scene photos, typed witness statements, autopsy notes, and the chain-of-custody list, was missing. At first, they assumed it had been misfiled. County records from that era were kept in a converted storeroom with limited oversight, and paperwork occasionally drifted between sections. But after a full audit, not a single page from the Cabin 29 investigation could be located in any official archive.
What made the disappearance stranger was the conflicting testimony from the officers who handled the evidence. One deputy insisted the file had been signed over to the sheriff’s office within days of the crime. Another claimed he personally placed the initial binder in the evidence cabinet. A third officer, who would later become sheriff, said he had never seen the original material and doubted it was ever properly transferred. No one could provide a receipt or chain-of-custody signature. No shelf assignment existed. The box number listed in later paperwork corresponded to an unrelated civil dispute. It was as if the entire investigation had been erased.
The physical evidence presented an even deeper puzzle. Several items reportedly collected from Cabin 29, bloodstained linens, a whiskey bottle with prints, a knife recovered near the cabin walkway, were listed on the original inventory created by responding officers in 1950. Yet when investigators searched the county’s evidence storage two decades later, none of the items appeared under any classification. A former clerk recalled seeing a box labeled “Cabin 29” sometime in the mid-1950s, but could not confirm what it contained or where it ultimately went. Another staff member told a local reporter in the 1970s that certain rural departments routinely purged old evidence to create space, though state law at the time required retention for homicide cases.
Rumors circulated almost immediately. Some believed the evidence had been deliberately removed after investigators developed an early suspect with political or economic influence in the region. Others suspected simple negligence, an understaffed office, no standardized records system, and a crime that seemed less urgent as the years rolled on. But the timing bothered several deputies who later reviewed the case: the material disappeared during a transition between sheriffs, a period when filing systems were reorganized and certain deputy positions were replaced. That window of administrative change aligned precisely with the years in which the Cabin 29 file evaporated.
Attempts to reconstruct the investigation from memory only deepened the uncertainty. Several retired officers disagreed about key details of the scene, what was found where, how the body was positioned, and which witnesses contradicted one another. Without the original notes, investigators had to rely on fading recollections and scattered newspaper summaries. Even the autopsy report, normally archived separately, was missing from county medical files. A later clerk speculated that it may have been attached to the main homicide binder and vanished along with it.
By the 1980s, the lost Cabin 29 file had become a local legend, overshadowed by the later Keddie murders, but still whispered among long-time residents as the case that simply vanished. In small communities, people remember when official stories don’t add up. They remember when deputies contradict one another. And they remember when a box of crucial evidence is said to exist one year and “never existed at all” the next.
Today, the disappearance of the Cabin 29 crime file remains a cold-case enigma, a crime without its documentation, a chain of custody without its links, and an investigation that dissolves the deeper one digs. Whether the files were lost, destroyed, misfiled, or intentionally removed may never be known. What is certain is that a violent crime occurred in a quiet resort cabin in 1950. Investigators documented it. And then, at some point between evidence collection and historical memory, the record of that crime slipped out of the official world and into the realm of ghost files, cases that exist only in the stories of those who once held them.
Editor’s Note: This narrative is based on surviving newspaper coverage, archival summaries, interviews with retired Plumas County officers, and reconstructed accounts of the 1950 Keddie Resort investigation. Due to missing evidence, several details rely on overlapping testimonies rather than complete official records.
Sources & Further Reading:
– Plumas County historical newspaper archives (1950–1980)
– Interviews and oral histories from retired deputies familiar with the Keddie Resort cases
– Regional crime summaries referencing missing-evidence incidents
– Archival accounts of early Keddie Resort investigations predating the 1981 case
– California state retention guidelines for homicide evidence (mid-20th century)
(One of many stories shared by Headcount Coffee — where mystery, history, and late-night reading meet.)
