The Many Veils of Pinto Lake

The history of Watsonville's Pinto Lake — from Portola Expedition’s “discovery” & naming of redwood trees to a mysterious image of the Virgin Mary — while reporting on a floating corpse

I am standing behind a dense veil of Tule reeds on the western shore of Pinto Lake in Watsonville.

The body of a 34-year-old woman named Elizabeth Todis is floating like an apparition in the water on the other side of the reeds—just a few feet away. Detectives have gathered on a nearby private dock beneath a grove of redwoods. Eventually they will determine her corpse has been in the lake for a week.

A fisherman spotted the body this morning and called it in. As a crime reporter for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, I was listening to the scanner when dispatch mentioned a “floater” in Pinto Lake. I got lucky. Reporting crime is funny that way—“lucky” often means “really sad and horrifying.”

I’d always assumed Pinto Lake was just a dumpy little urban reservoir. It is not. It’s one of the more interesting bodies of water in Santa Cruz County.

“Trees of a red color unknown to us”

In college I took a course called “Prehistoric Technology” with California archaeologist Jon Erlandson. Among other things,…