Location where authorities believe the canoe entered onto Mill Lake; the ice extending out from shore and was 1-3 inches thick.
When a group of college-age friends realized four people were missing from their Wisconsin lake house party Jan. 3 they did not assume the worst. They searched the home, looked around the property, and figured their friends would show up later.
“I remember thinking that they are probably on a stupid drunk adventure,” one man told investigators.
It wasn’t until the next morning, when an overturned canoe was seen on a channel of the partially frozen lake that the seriousness of the situation was clear. The celebration of 13 friends, many from the North Shore, had turned into a horrible tragedy.
A report released this week by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources outlines a chronology of the weekend’s events as explained by each of the remaining friends – seven men and two women in their early 20s – in written statements provided to investigators of the East Troy Police Department and Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Each shared a consistent narrative that began with their arrival between 4 and 7 p.m. on Jan. 2 at the lake house belonging to the parents of one member of the group on a part of Lake Beulah called Mill Pond and Mill Lake in East Troy.
The evening began with the drinking games beer pong and “hockey.” The group also played billiards, watched basketball on TV and prepared hot dogs and brats for dinner. Around 11:30 p.m. they decided to go to a local bar called Lindy’s, which one of the witnesses described as a 10- or 15-minute walk from the house. At Lindy’s the friends talked, drank beer and played darts, billiards and arcade basketball until they walked back to the house between 1:30 and 2 a.m. When they returned, some of the friends went to sleep while others ate leftovers and watched basketball on TV or went to another room to play billiards.
It was a cold night with a light wind — the air was 17 degrees and the water 33 degrees, according to the police report.
Around 3 a.m., four of the men went outside to smoke cigarettes — Christopher McQuillen, 21; Patrick Wetzel, 21; and Lanny Patrick Sack, 20, all three from Winnetka, and Mori Weinstein, 21, from Wilmette.
“I remember Lanny standing in the kitchen putting on his coat while I talked to him briefly about a friend from school,” one of the friends told police.
“I believed they just went out front to smoke a cigarette,” another witness stated.
It was was the last time anyone saw the four alive.
At about 4 a.m. as three members of the group prepared to go to bed, they noticed some of the beds were empty and jackets and boots were missing.
“We looked through the rooms and found the four were not in the house,” one of the group wrote in a police witness statement. “We walked out the back porch and checked a tree house thing, then walked around to the front. We then walked down the street with our phone lights on looking. We then returned to the house and started waking people up. Then we went to the water and found the boat house door open and their wallets were in there. We then walked along the shore as far as we could. When we didn’t find anything we returned to the house and didn’t know what to do.”
Another stated: “We looked around and didn’t see their shoes or jackets so we went outside to see if we could see them and found out the ice was broken and tracks in the snow leading to the water. … This was approximately 4 a.m. we kept looking, we knew the phones were inside, wallets were on an inner tube in the garage. I then went inside to talk about how to proceed. We decided to wait some time cause we didn’t know. …”
“We debated calling the police for hours but we weren’t sure we should if they could come back soon,” one of the guests told investigators.
Said another: “Nobody knew where they went. I thought they were walking around or something so we went back to sleep.”
At about 9 a.m. the next morning, waking up to find the four were still missing, several members of the group resumed the search.
The police report stated that at about 10 a.m. the homeowner’s son noticed a canoe was missing from the boathouse, and at about 11 a.m. he saw the canoe overturned on a channel connecting Mill Pond to the main lake and called 911.
The police report pointed out that it was dark when the group first saw the boathouse door was open, and that it wasn’t until daylight that one of the friends realized a canoe was missing.
Department of Natural Resource Conservation Warden Juan J. Gomez in his report described the scene when he first arrived at the lake house. “There were a total of 9 individuals sitting around the dining room table. The individuals around the table were in tears some with their heads down, others providing blank stares.”
The DNR and police began searching for the young men immediately, and the bodies of McQuillen and Sack were found in just over an hour. But the search took longer for the other two victims. Divers found the remains of Weinstein on Jan. 4 and Wetzel’s body wasn’t recovered until Jan. 8.
The police report stated the canoe was designed for three passengers, that the men were wearing winter clothing but no flotation devices, that alcohol was a factor, and that the cause of death was drowning.
The report did not reveal any foul play, rather a New Year’s weekend that was supposed to be fun resulting in a tragic accident.