When body parts started showing up on the shores of Harry Strunk Lake, the citizens of “McCook feared a deranged lunatic was loose in the community.” Nobody suspected that one of their neighbors could have done this-in fact, a man encouraged his wife to stay with the murderers during the scare because he had to be out of town.

Hewitt revisits evidence, newspaper articles and interviews many of the witnesses, including the murderer himself, who was in prison at the time. In Cold Storage by James Hewitt tells the story of a 1973 double murder in McCook, Nebraska. In Cold Storage takes readers through the evidence, including salacious details of sex and intrigue between the Hoyts and the Nokeses, and draws new conclusions about what really happened between the two families on that fateful September night. Most significant, Harold granted Hewitt his first and only interview, in which the convicted murderer changed several parts of his 1974 confession. Hewitt interviews law enforcement officers, members of the victims’ family, weapons experts, and forensic psychiatrists, and delves into newspaper reports and court documents from the time. Harold pleaded guilty to murder and Ena pleaded guilty to two counts of wrongful disposal of a dead body, but the full story of why and how he murdered the Hoyts has never been told. Hewitt returns to the scene and unearths new details about what happened.Īfter pieces of Edwin and Wilma Hoyt’s dismembered bodies were found floating on the surface of a nearby lake, authorities charged McCook resident Harold Nokes and his wife, Ena, with murder. More than forty years later, author James W. In 1973 the small southwest Nebraska railroad town of McCook became the unlikely scene of a grisly murder.

Cold storage novel