The Real Story Behind the Baltimore Deaths That Inspired ‘Lady in the Lake’

Meilan Solly

Associate Editor, History

In the late 1960s, Baltimore residents seeking an outlet for their everyday frustrations turned to Direct Line, an Evening Sun column that pledged to “aid its readers by getting hard-to-find answers, solving problems and cutting red tape.” Published queries ran the gamut from why parking at Penn Station was so scarce to where to obtain a new identification card. Submissions that didn’t make it into the paper might instead be routed to the relevant local authorities for their review.

One such request was a complaint about malfunctioning lights at the fountain in Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park. When a worker investigated on June 2, 1969, he made a startling discovery: the decomposed body of a Black woman soon identified as Shirley Lee Parker, a 35-year-old bartender and bookkeeper who’d gone missing weeks earlier. The circumstances of her death remain unknown to this day.

Parker’s case received a limited amount of attention in the Maryland city’s paper of record, now known as the Baltimore Sun. Comparatively, the murder of Esther Lebowitz, an 11-year-old white, Jewish girl who vanished while running an errand after school that September, was front–page news, generating both a steady stream of headlines and effusive letters to the editor.

Lady in the Lake – Official Trailer | Apple TV+

This discrepancy served as the inspiration for Laura Lippman’s best-selling 2019 novel, Lady in the Lake, which dramatizes the two unrelated disappearances from the perspective of a fictional woman journalist.

“I very much wanted to look at these two different deaths, and how [differently] they had been portrayed in [the] media,” Lippman tells NPR. “And I was like, well, what could possibly tie them together? I didn’t want to create some huge coincidence. So I thought, well, a woman, an investigator, someone who cared about both deaths, could be the thing that connected them.”

Five years after Lippman published Lady in the Lake, an adaptation of the same name is coming to the small screen. Starring Natalie Portman as reporter Maddie Schwartz and Moses Ingram as Cleo Johnson, a character based loosely on Parker, “Lady in the Lake” arrives on Apple TV+ on July 19. Here’s what you need to know about the real history behind the mini-series ahead of its two-episode premiere.

How the novel came to fruition

Lippman was 10 years old when Lebowitz went missing. The future writer was captivated by the case, which marked the first time she realized that children could be murder victims, too. But it wasn’t until the 1990s, when she was working at the Baltimore Sun, that she first heard the story of Parker’s death.

“Of course, part of the reason I never heard about it was that it received very little coverage in the daily newspapers,” Lippman tells the Washington Post. “And I thought, that is so interesting.” Later, when she decided to write a book inspired by the two cases, she stopped researching them, preferring to explore their “thematic possibility,” per NPR. “It’s like, this is the story I want to tell,” she says, “so I can’t be weighed down by what’s true.”

Her novel follows Maddie, a Jewish reporter, as she follows the deaths of two characters whose fates mirror those of Lebowitz and Parker. Maddie’s quest to identify the pair’s killers is interspersed with commentary from the ghost of Cleo (the Parker stand-in), a local newscaster and almost a dozen other side characters. Their perspectives complement Maddie’s, illuminating her flaws and strengths alike: for one, “heedless” ambition that “causes a lot of damage,” as Lippman says to the Baltimore Sun.

The parallels between Maddie and Lippman—a former journalist herself, who, though raised Presbyterian, has Jewish ancestry—are evident, though the author is quick to tell the Post that her protagonist is “the person I fear becoming—the person who’s only interested in the story she wants to tell and sometimes forgets about the humanity of the people around her, because she’s so focused on her life and herself.”

The real “lady in the lake”

An Evening Sun column may have prompted the discovery of Shirley Lee Parker’s body, but prior to that point, the only outlet reporting on her disappearance was the Baltimore Afro-American, a Black newspaper founded in 1892. According to the paper, Parker failed to return to the home she shared with her mother, Theresa Austin, and her 9-year-old son, David, on the evening of April 23, 1969. The next day, Austin reported her daughter missing, kick-starting an “around-the-clock investigation” spanning five divisions of the local police department.

Parker—a twice-divorced mother of two who’d held such varied positions as a secretary at the Urban League, a bartender and bookkeeper at the Sphinx Club, and a window model at a department store chain—was popular among Baltimore’s Black community. A police sergeant told the Afro that “scores of friends and relatives persisted in reporting to the police [that] ‘something’s wrong.’” Parker’s disappearance was marked by “missing links,” “inconsistencies in facts” and “possibilities beyond belief,” a lieutenant added.

A potential lead in the case surfaced on April 29, when Arno West, Parker’s then-boyfriend, told authorities that he’d watched her climb a fence surrounding the reservoir at Druid Hill Park and attempt to walk into the water on the night she went missing. He followed Parker over the fence, taking her “by the arm before she reached the water and [struggling] with her to come to her senses,” the Afro reported.

After handing Parker’s purse to her and successfully convincing her to return to his car, West said he drove his girlfriend home—a claim refuted by Austin, who maintained that her daughter never returned to the house. Later that week, West went back to the park, where he found Parker’s purse behind that same fence, near the lake’s edge. Tucked inside were personal papers, a lighter, cigarettes and a watch given to Parker by her mother as a Christmas gift.

Based on West’s testimony, the police conducted a search of the lake on May 13, using grappling hooks to scrape its bottom for potential obstructions. Nothing turned up, and the investigation faltered. Then, on June 2, a crew of electricians sent to fix the aforementioned fountain lights found Parker’s body in a depression at the top of the water fixture. Authorities couldn’t immediately identify the remains, but they reported that the woman was clad in brown slacks, a yellow blouse and a rust-colored coat—the same clothing Parker was wearing when she disappeared.

Because the body was badly decomposed, medical examiners couldn’t determine Parker’s cause of death. Her remains showed no signs of physical trauma, so the team was able to rule out strangling, stabbing, narcotics use and electrocution. If Parker had drowned, however, “we wouldn’t be able to tell,” an assistant medical examiner told the Afro.

The unusual circumstances of Parker’s death sparked intense speculation both then and now, with observers questioning how the 5-foot-3 woman could have hopped the tall fence surrounding the lake, swam the 380 feet from the edge of the reservoir to the fountain and climbed the 18-foot ladder to the top of the 35-foot fountain.

As Austin told authorities prior to the body’s discovery, “Shirley was an expert swimmer,” once working at a Druid Park pool as a lifeguard. “She loved life,” Austin added. “She would hardly choose suicide by drowning.” Parker’s boss at the Sphinx Club echoed these thoughts on Parker’s personality, saying, “It just isn’t like Shirley to go away and say nothing. … I have known her to work [at] two jobs. She said she was expecting to hear from a pretty good job offer most any day.”

On June 14, a week after Parker was laid to rest, the Afro reported that “the vast majority” of readers surveyed believed she’d been placed in the fountain by someone else. Joseph Patterson, one of the electricians who was present when Parker’s body was found, similarly refuted the idea that she swam out to the fountain of her own volition.

Parker’s boyfriend, West, came under suspicion as the last person known to see her alive. Later reporting by the Afro suggested the couple had fought on the night of Parker’s disappearance, clashing over West’s decision to use her paycheck to buy a pantsuit for his other girlfriend. Neighbors supposedly heard West delivering “an awful blow” to Parker. The pair took a drive to cool off and ended up at Druid Hill Park, where Parker requested some time to walk around. Though West failed a lie detector test about Parker’s death, he was never charged with a crime.

In 2017, Parker’s son David told the Afro that he didn’t believe West was involved in his mother’s death. “I feel like she swam out there to clear her mind after the argument with Arno and to think about me and my brother,” he said. When Parker stood up to leave, he theorized, “I think she hit her head and fell back and was unconscious and with the water coming down on her, she drowned.”

Fifty-five years later, Parker’s case remains unsolved. As police officer Roger Nolan told the Baltimore Sun in 2000, “It remains a questionable death but was never a murder. There was no force or trauma to the body, and she most likely died of hypothermia.”

The murder of Esther Lebowitz

In 1969, Baltimore’s flagship newspaper, the Sun, dedicated a scant few articles to Parker’s death, with most mentions of the case consigned to the back pages. Comparatively, Lebowitz, the 11-year-old Jewish girl who went missing five months after Parker, dominated the front page on multiple occasions, in addition to receiving steady coverage throughout the investigation into her murder.

According to the Evening Sun, Lebowitz’s school closed early on September 29 to mark a Jewish holiday. A rabbi who’d given her and two other students a ride dropped her off by a drugstore near her home so she could buy a clip for her notebook. As Lebowitz’s father told the Sun, she was an “alert fifth-grade student in good health [who] frequently walked alone to and from [the] shopping area.” But on this occasion, she failed to return home, prompting her mother to call the police. Neighbors searched the area late into the night, to no avail. Police dogs similarly failed to find Lebowitz.

On the morning of October 1, a patrolman working on an unrelated case stumbled onto Lebowitz’s body in a remote wooded area about half a mile from her home. An initial examination of the 11-year-old indicated she’d been sexually assaulted and brutally beaten with a blunt instrument. Based on the presence of fine gravel in some of Lebowitz’s wounds, medical examiner Richard Kornblum, who’d previously analyzed Parker’s remains, told reporters that the girl was likely “deposited” at the site where her body was found but “killed elsewhere.”

While Parker’s case stalled for more than a month, authorities moved quickly to catch Lebowitz’s killer, matching the sandy substance found on her body to the gravel used in fish tanks. Around 3 a.m. on October 2, the police arrested 23-year-old Wayne Stephen Young, the owner of an aquatic pet shop near the drugstore that Lebowitz had intended to visit. A hammer, a blood-stained handkerchief and other evidence recovered at the scene led investigators to conclude that Young had bludgeoned Lebowitz to death in his store’s basement.

Young pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. But the case divided experts brought in to testify at his trial the following year: “Some said Young experienced a schizoid break from reality and took out pent-up aggression on an innocent, defenseless passer-by; others said that Esther’s death was sheer, cold-blooded murder,” the Forward reported in 2014. “Young’s defense described his mother, with whom he reportedly had had a heated fight that morning, as overbearing and controlling. One psychiatrist contended that Young committed the murder ‘because he was trying to destroy his mother.’”

The jury was unconvinced by the defense’s argument, finding Young guilty after deliberating for just 26 minutes. The judge sentenced the killer to life imprisonment, telling him that “only a conflict in psychiatric testimony saved him from [the] death penalty,” as the Evening Sun wrote in November 1970. Young died in prison in December 2015, a month after a Maryland court granted him a new trial on a technicality, much to the chagrin of Baltimore’s Jewish community, who’d turned out en masse to protest his potential release.

“The community had been holding its breath on this because of what he did and how he did it,” Nachman Schachter, president of a local watch group, told Baltimore Jewish Life in the aftermath of Young’s death. “We are breathing a sigh of relief.”

Lebowitz’s family held her funeral on October 2, 1969, the same day Young was charged with her murder. More than 650 people packed into the room. As the Evening Sun reported, the service did not include a eulogy, in part because “Jewish law prohibits eulogies during the joyful Tabernacle holidays” but also “because, as Rabbi Rueven Savitz, executive director of the school Esther attended, said, ‘There is nothing to be said. Everyone is speechless.’”

What’s different in the television adaptation of Lady in the Lake

Lippman’s novel was a New York Times best seller, even earning a rave review from Stephen King. In 2021, Portman signed a deal to adapt Lady in the Lake for television through her production company. Lupita Nyong’o was originally set to star alongside Portman, but she left the series due to scheduling conflicts and was replaced by Ingram, who is a native of Baltimore herself.

The book and mini-series center on Maddie’s obsession with Cleo’s death. She pursues the mystery for less-than-altruistic reasons, even as few outside of the dead woman’s immediate family express an interest in uncovering the truth.

As Lippman explains to NPR, “I set out simply to write a novel about a woman who wanted to matter—who had these sort of restless, shapeless ambitions and needed to find a place to put them. … The world in the mid-1960s was filled with women who were thinking, ‘I’m not done. This can’t be it. I think I would like to do something more with my life.’”

The new television adaptation expands Cleo’s role in the narrative and gives her a husband who struggles to make a living as a comedian. “We gave her a much bigger canvas, and [we] really wanted to explore what it was like for a Black woman at the time to live in Baltimore and go through the hardships and the mystery of the murder,” showrunner Alma Har’el tells Vanity Fair.

Ultimately, notes Apple TV+ in its official description of the series, “Lady in the Lake” is “a feverish noir thriller and an unexpected tale of the price women pay for their dreams.”