The Secret History of Twin Peaks

by Mark Frost

  2 The reader will recall Carl Rodd as one of the three children allegedly “abducted” in the incident witnessed by Doug Milford back in ’47.

  Doug Milford’s brother Dwayne—the pharmacist and former scoutmaster—was by this time serving his sixth term as mayor of Twin Peaks—TP

  3 I can verify that this letter is authentic. Confirmed that alleged SDI connection was intended as a misdirect. Since this directly involves one of my superior officers, I am seeking independent verification from elsewhere in the Bureau—TP

  4 This points more or less directly to then–Regional Director Gordon Cole—who, as I recently pointed out, is one of my superior officers—as the “FBI man” initially recommended to Doug Milford by none other than Tricky Dick himself. I have to admit I find this troubling, but then, Director Cole’s admonition to me was “follow the trail wherever it may lead.”

  As for the inclusion of “Special Agent Phillip Jeffries” on that letter, I can find only the following about him in official FBI files:

  He went through Bureau training at Quantico with Gordon Cole, where they graduated as the top two agents in their class of 1968. Twenty years into a distinguished career, Jeffries disappeared without a trace while on assignment in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1987. I also came across a vague reference, in a Bureau station log from that period, to Jeffries making a sudden reappearance in 1989—apparently in Philadelphia—followed by another disappearance which continues to this day. To dig deeper I need to requisition reports that are currently classified beyond my reach in the deputy director’s files.

  I’m beginning to wonder if I’m going to be able to show this to anyone without getting fired. The world of Doug Milford is like a hall of mirrors. Frankly, I could use a drink—TP

  *2* MARGARET LANTERMAN

  *** TWIN PEAKS POST OCTOBER 28, 1986

  1

  ARCHIVIST’S NOTE

  Three weeks after posting this column, Robert Jacoby passed away from complications of multiple sclerosis. His brother, Dr. Lawrence Jacoby, spoke at services he presided over at the Chapel-in-the-Woods, where over 200 people turned out, before scattering Robert’s ashes nearby on the steel blue surface of Pearl Lake. With the congregants assembled by the shore, Margaret Lanterman asked to say a few words of her own. As best as this correspondent can remember, this is what she said:2

  3

  1 The same location where Margaret experienced the strange overnight encounter witnessed by Doug Milford—TP

  2 So we know the Archivist was at the funeral that day. I’m attempting to locate the church’s guest register that may list all the attendees’ names—TP

  3 So I now have a sample, I believe, of the Archivist’s handwriting, and perhaps fingerprints as well—I’m checking the program—which up until now we’ve been unable to find on the dossier. I’m going to check names against the register and then track samples. I believe that discovery of the Archivist’s identity should soon follow—TP

  *3* LAURA PALMER

  The “dark age” Margaret mentioned arrived sooner than we imagined. The first seeds of this story broke the surface in 1988, one county to the west in the nearby community of Deer Meadow, Washington, with the murder of a young woman named Teresa Banks. A depressed, working-class town devastated by the decline of the logging industry, Deer Meadow was everything Twin Peaks was not; sullen, sinking and hostile. Two FBI agents were sent west by Gordon Cole--by this time chief of the Bureau office in Philadelphia--to investigate: Special Agent Chet Desmond and forensic specialist Sam Stanley. Why send FBI agents all the way from Philadelphia to investigate a murder in eastern Washington? You might well ask.1

  Despite the FBI presence, the Teresa Banks investigation yielded little. One of their only significant findings: The agents discovered that a distinctive jade green ring Teresa had been photographed wearing close to the time of her death was missing. They also found that, postmortem, a small printed letter “T” had been inserted under the ring finger of her right hand.

  Then, a calamity. One day during the course of his investigation in Deer Meadow, Special Agent Chet Desmond disappeared without a trace. Special Agent Dale Cooper was sent west to find him, but Desmond left no trail, the Banks case had gone cold and Cooper returned empty-handed. The Banks case remained listed as open. After returning to Philadelphia himself, forensic expert Sam Stanley suffered some sort of unspecified breakdown--perhaps related to alcoholism--and was placed on administrative leave. I find no record of him returning to active duty.2

  You will recall that, as previously mentioned, Special Agent Phillip Jeffries had gone missing in Buenos Aires under similarly inexplicable circumstances two years earlier. A double vanishing act that defied explanation. Shortly thereafter, Special Agent Windom Earle--a veteran, decorated agent who earlier in their careers had been Agent Cooper’s mentor and partner--suffered a catastrophic breakdown of his own; he murdered his wife, Caroline, shot Agent Cooper and was confined to a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.3

  One year after the Teresa Banks murder, a fully recovered Special Agent Dale Cooper returned to Washington to investigate the murder of another young woman, this time in Twin Peaks, the girl named Laura Palmer. At this point, all manner of hell broke loose.

  A review of the Palmer case, by the local mental health professional who knew and treated the family, sums it up this way:4

  LAURA PALMER, FINAL CASE NOTES

  DR. LAWRENCE JACOBY,

  PRINCEVILLE, KAUAI

  MARCH 19, 1989

  As an excruciatingly manipulative and staggeringly popular novel of the 1970s once began—I’m paraphrasing, the insufferable “heroine” in that story was a little older—What can you say about an eighteen-year-old girl who died?5

  I’m watching the combers roll in across Hanalei Bay on a cool, cloudy spring day. Isolated patches of blue. The trades are blowing. Dolphins feeding just off shore. My mother’s ashes were scattered not a hundred yards from the porch where I’m sitting. I brought along some of my brother Robert’s “cremains”—there’s a fun new hybrid word—as well and he’ll join her soon in the bay he dearly loved to surf, once I get my old longboard out after the breeze dies down.

  The facts say her father killed her. Leland Palmer, 45. Pride and only son of a wealthy Seattle family. Private schools. Summa cum laude, University of Washington, 1966, president of the Law Review. Outstanding professional career, culminating in an eight-year run as chief counsel to the Horne Corporation, which is what brought the Palmers to town. No drugs, no alcoholism, no criminal record or history of mental illness. Happily married twenty-one years to Sarah Novack Palmer, 44. Political science major. College sweethearts.6

  One child, Laura. Homecoming queen. The golden girl next door that the whole town adored. Myself included.

  Dead at eighteen.

  The facts say Leland then killed Laura’s first cousin, too; his niece, Madeleine Ferguson, from Missoula, Montana, on the mother’s side. There’s no question that Laura—in more than one way, for many reasons—danced with the devil and paid a terrible price. Madeleine was an innocent who came to help the family in the wake of Laura’s death. (Leland also smothered a villain named Jacques Renault who’d harmed his daughter, an act I inadvertently witnessed as a cardiac patient, sedated in a nearby bed.)7

  * Laura Palmer

  And then, after his arrest, while in custody, confronted with the enormity of the crimes he at first claimed not to remember, Leland took his own life.

  I had frankly lost interest in my practice prior to Laura entering my life. The years I’d spent among authentic native people had left me bored to death with the garden-variety neuroses of “modern Americans.” The maladaptations of disaffected housewives and hostile teenagers were symptomatic to me of a larger, collective societal disorder—all right, I’ll Cliff Note them for you: rising corporate greed, enabled by institutional corruption, fueled and distorted by dirty money, leading to generalized rampant materialism, militant ign
orance, military triumphalism and widespread loss of spiritual authenticity—that was eating away at the foundation of our culture.

  I’m not trying to excuse my own negligence: Nobody held a gun to my head, told me to hang up that shingle and then give up on my patients. That choice is on me entirely and by the end I was doing those poor people a disservice. Clearly, with the death of my brother Robert—my last living relative—my reason for being in Washington was gone. I knew that my time in my hometown was drawing to a close. Then she walked into my office.

  I treated Laura privately—and, at her request, without her parents’ knowledge—for six months prior to her murder. (She first came to see me the day after her 18th birthday—the point at which she’d be treated as an adult, with no legal obligation on my part to inform her parents; this was not a coincidence. Laura was brilliant.) What emerged did not immediately present as a case of parental sexual abuse, although that’s what the facts—and her explosive diary—tell us happened. I’m trained to recognize these signs. For the longest time, I didn’t see them. Because I should have, I hold myself responsible for all that followed. Emotionally, circumstantially, legally. Whether the Washington State Board of Review currently deliberating these facts, and others equally damning, agrees with me—and suspends my medical license—I’ll know soon enough.

  The outcome doesn’t matter. I know what I’ve done, what I should’ve done, what I didn’t do to help her. I barely survived the heart attack it already cost me. Whatever the Board’s ruling, living out my life with that knowledge will be, rest assured, punishment enough.

  I conducted an intake evaluation with the father, just after Laura’s death. A few bursts of mania were the only tangible symptoms, which I attributed to grief. That was it. The mother almost immediately began a slow, steady slide into alcoholism and prescription drug abuse. There may be some trauma in her background that created a vulnerability—just a theory—but aren’t the facts of what happened in her family alone enough to unspool her? Could you survive that torment? I wasn’t able to pump the brakes on the poor woman’s descent, or answer her burning question: Why? Why Laura? The question that will haunt the rest of her days, and mine.

  Nightmares like this don’t take root in native or aboriginal homes. Ever. In affluent, urban American families it’s, increasingly, a specialty of the house. Strange, isn’t it? All those “gifts” we think of as advantages, the ones we’re socially programmed to strive for, the “dream” no one questions because it looks so seductive on television or in the pages of glossy magazines. But my own prejudices and predispositions got in the way. I’d never seen an anomaly like Laura’s family up close before. I plain missed it. I’m still convinced I don’t know the real story.

  Why is harder to answer. Part of it’s baked into the culture. We’re so upright, so sure of ourselves, so invested in “progress,” “optimism,” “hope.” “Can-do” is part of our DNA, reflecting back what we want to see in every angle of the hall of mirrors we inhabit. (It’s also endemic to the medical profession.) When something this unspeakable happens we’re quick to condemn the individual, indict society, distance ourselves with “it couldn’t happen here.” It’s clear to me now that’s part of our problem. When tragedy strikes we need to sit still and rock in place, wailing, keening, or crawl on our hands and knees gnashing our teeth the way native people yield absolutely to their grief. Embrace it, take it into your soul until it breaks and remakes you. There are no words, no lasting comfort to be found in avoiding pain. It’s a primeval, painfully physical, animal process and you’d best get about it until it’s done with you. You’ll know when. At which point you have to say fuck analysis.

  And yet.

  Leland spoke of “possession.” Laura wrote in her diary about an entity she called “BOB,” all caps. A malevolent being she claimed to “see”—in her father’s stead—whenever he assaulted her. Leland had no memory of his dreadful acts till the very end. A masking memory, for both of them, our “professional training” would instruct me to label it, a way for their minds to protect themselves from the unendurable truth. Or, in other words, whistling through the graveyard.

  A medicine man in the Amazon would take them both at their word, believe the story at face value and treat it accordingly. Possession. An entity. Why is that any less plausible or relevant than the safe, sanitized, pre-packaged bullshit of an armchair diagnosis made solely from the neck up? What is that but a shield hoisted to protect us from the unholy terror of glimpsing ourselves as we truly are: creatures of unknown origin, trapped in time, pinned to a hostile rock whirling through indifferent and infinite space, clueless, inherently violent and condemned to death?

  There is more to Laura’s story than the facts. More than meets the eye or ear. A third rail lurks here in the shadows that’s deadly to the touch. There’s only one way to find it. The shamans I’ve worked with know how to pierce the veil and see beyond the membrane of our poorly perceived and shared “reality.” (They’d use the word “illusion.”) They’ve shown me, I’ve experienced these things with them, I’ve seen through the veil, and traveled the world in pursuit of that knowledge. Dedicated my life to this search, personally and professionally.

  But the truth is Laura’s death has broken me. My own belief system—the fantasy that I could hold these two worlds in balance—inner life, outer reality—and bring the truth of one closer to the other, like some free-thinking hippie Prometheus, is shattered. What a hapless fool I’ve been. Actions have consequences. Whatever happens from here, whatever the “squares” decide about my professional fate, if I can survive this ordeal, find the strength to dig my way out of it, I make this vow: No more lies. Only truth. Straight up. To everyone.

  But where to begin? “Medice, cura te ipsum.” Physician, cure thyself. I can’t heal the world unless I first heal myself. There are native practitioners I grew up with here on the islands who are elders now. I’ll be turning to them for help.

  We are creatures of darkness and light, capable of barbarism and limitless cruelty, and also love, and laughter and the creation of the most sublime beauty. We are both these things, clearly, but which are we more of? I don’t know the answer. Is “evil” a thing—independent, outside of us—or is it an essential part of who we are? I don’t know the answer.

  Life is but a dream from which we seem able to only rarely awaken. Whatever it means is beyond words. Words lose their meaning when you look at them too long. “God.” “Science.” “Meaning.” Everything melts into silence.

  The trades have eased. The whitecaps are gone and there’s sunlight on the water. I’m going to go bury my brother now.

  ARCHIVIST’S NOTE

  Less than a week later, Dr. Jacoby received his answer:

  8

  1 The names of these agents also appear on a short list from an erased document I recovered from a secure server in the FBI’s Philadelphia office. I ran a search for Desmond and Stanley and came up with this:

  Gordon Cole

  Phillip Jeffries

  Chet Desmond

  Sam Stanley

  Windom Earle

  Dale Cooper

  Albert Rosenfield

  I can’t determine whose computer this was on. Nothing else was on the page. Just those names. I have no idea what it means or implies. Checking this out now—TP

  2 Confirmed—TP

  3 Confirmed. We can safely conclude the aforementioned list is clearly not a very good one to be on. But what did it signify? If it’s a list of agents who’ve suffered terrible fates, Gordon Cole and forensic expert Albert Rosenfield remain notable exceptions; both are healthy and on the active duty roster. There has to be another link—TP

  4 The following is verified—TP

  5 Jacoby here is referencing the novel Love Story—TP

  6 Verified—TP

  7 Verified. Palmer was suspected of Renault’s murder, but never formally charged—TP

  8 Verified. Lawrence Jacoby, no longer a doctor, decided to
settle in Hawaii and begin work on his memoirs—TP

  *4* COLONEL DOUGLAS MILFORD

  Every man has his weakness. By the late 1980s, as members of their generation began exiting the planet in greater numbers, few citizens were left in town who remembered Doug Milford’s early troubled years or even his decades-long military career away from Twin Peaks.

  Most knew him now only as the friendly, avuncular and somewhat eccentric owner and publisher of their local newspaper. He was often spotted driving around town in a forest-green two-seat convertible Morgan, an antique British racing car, wearing scarf, goggles, racing cap and gloves. As he aged Doug lost his hair, wore a bad toupee for a time, then lost his vanity, ditched the rug and settled on a jaunty beret. His conservative politics, particularly during the Reagan years, had moved slowly closer to the middle, or rather should I say the middle had moved closer to him.1 His long, deep undercover career as a key figure throughout the shadowy history of Air Force intelligence and UFO investigation, or his even stranger later years as an independent operative supervising an undercover mission assigned to him by a disgraced former president, remained a secret he kept from every single soul he encountered.

  Except one. More on that in a moment.

  By all appearances, Doug Milford had money. He lived in a big house on a five-acre spread outside of town. He owned a small fleet of luxury automobiles--including the aforementioned Morgan--which he stored in a custom garage. An urbane, sophisticated figure, he wore fashionable bespoke clothes and left sizable tips at local restaurants. No one knew where his fortune came from--well beyond what one would expect for a retired colonel living on an Air Force pension--or, even more mysteriously, how he’d managed to hang on to it through four divorces. (As I said, every man has his weakness.) By the late 1980s, Douglas had become a pillar of the community, and the curiosity aroused by his apparent fortune subsided.