On June 12, 2016, Cody Bowen (17) and Lily Morgan (16) set off on a familiar hiking trail near Willow Creek Lake in rural Oregon. Both were experienced hikers, responsible teens, and loved in their small community. They promised to return by 6:00 p.m. That call home never came.
Their bikes were found locked at the trailhead. No footprints. No dropped gear. No signs of a struggle. Search teams scoured the woods for weeks—helicopters, dogs, divers—but the forest offered nothing. By mid-July, the official search was suspended. Hope began to fade.
Four months later, on a cold October morning, everything changed.
An anonymous male caller phoned the local sheriff’s office. Nervous, quiet. “Check the lake,” he said, then hung up. The next morning, divers entered the icy water near the eastern shore. Within 30 minutes, they surfaced screaming.
Two bodies lay underwater, carefully positioned between submerged logs. Cody and Lily. Their limbs were tied with stones, their arms folded neatly. But what shocked investigators most were their eyes—crudely sewn shut with thick black thread.
Autopsies confirmed both had died from strangulation roughly 24 hours after disappearing. There was no sexual assault. Under Lily’s nails, forensic teams found dark hairs and green fleece fibers. The thread was homemade—something often crafted by people living alone in rural areas.
Investigators began focusing on locals living within a 10-mile radius. One name immediately stood out: Greg Walker, 42. A loner with a criminal record for assaulting a minor, Walker lived three miles from the lake. A search warrant revealed damning evidence—green fleece matching the fibers, a spool of identical thread, and a hidden box filled with candid photographs of local teenagers, including Cody and Lily.
Walker was arrested without incident. At first, he stayed silent. Four days into interrogation, he confessed.
His story was chilling. As a child, Walker was locked for hours in a dark basement by his abusive stepfather. Over time, that trauma warped into a need to control what others saw—and eventually, to silence their gaze entirely. He’d been watching Cody and Lily for weeks. On June 12, he ambushed them during their return hike, knocking Cody unconscious and choking Lily until she passed out. He tied them up, brought them to an old fishing shack, and killed them the next day.
The stitches were symbolic. To Walker, sewing their eyes shut meant finally controlling “the eyes that watched.” Afterward, he weighted their bodies with stones and submerged them in the lake. Months later, overwhelmed by guilt, he made the anonymous call.
In 2018, Greg Walker was convicted on all charges and sentenced to life in prison without parole, plus 25 years for kidnapping. Psychological evaluations diagnosed PTSD and antisocial personality disorder, but he was declared fully competent.
Cody and Lily’s families turned their grief into action, founding a trail safety initiative to install emergency beacons and cameras in Oregon’s rural parks. Willow Creek Lake is safer today, but the memory of the case still lingers—a reminder that monsters sometimes hide in plain sight.
What began as a simple summer hike ended as one of Oregon’s darkest crimes.
