• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Decades-old human remains being discovered as Lake Mead dries up

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
More human remains discovered at Lake Mead, days after body found in barrel (nbcnews.com)

With unprecedented decreases in the water level, grisly discoveries are being made of bodies believed dumped in the lake back in the 1970s or 80s.

New human remains were found at Lake Mead in Nevada over the weekend, days after a decomposed body was found in a metal barrel at the lake's shrinking shoreline.

A witness reported seeing human skeletal remains at Callville Bay within the Lake Mead National Recreation Area at 2 p.m local time on Saturday, the National Park Service said in a release.

Park rangers responded and set a perimeter to recover the remains. The Clark County Medical Examiner will determine the cause of death.

The investigation is ongoing.

The discovery comes nearly a week after remains were found in a barrel at Lake Mead on May 1, exposed by receding water levels.

That victim was believed to have been killed between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s based on clothing and footwear the victim was found with, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said in a statement at the time.

“We believe this is a homicide as a result of a gunshot wound,” Lt. Ray Spencer said.


That victim was also pending identification and cause of death information by the Clark County Medical Examiner.

Water levels at the Lake Mead — the nation’s largest reservoir — have hit historic lows and in April reached below an intake valve that first began supplying Nevada customers in 1971.

Lake Mead and Lake Powell upstream are the largest human-made reservoirs in the U.S., part of a system that provides water to more than 40 million people, tribes, agriculture and industry in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming and across the southern border in Mexico, according to The Associated Press.

Last month the lake's water intake valve started to become visible due to the diminishing water level.
 

Twilight Hue

Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
I wonder if anyone else who might have dumped bodies in Lake Mead is worried about any further grisly discoveries. I'm reminded of the movie Goodfellas where they buried Billy Batts and then had to dig him up six months later because the land was being sold for condominiums.

But if these bodies are from the 1970s, whoever might have been involved could be dead by now.
 

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
Vegas mob lore floats to the surface along with bodies at Lake Mead (yahoo.com)

This article has a bit more detailed information.

The skeletal remains found in a barrel at Lake Mead earlier this month have captivated and horrified two distinct groups that typically do not have much in common: mob historians and climate scientists.

Less than a week after the unidentified body was found in a barrel, paddleboarders found another set of skeletal remains at Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada. Authorities are not surprised that more bodies are seeing the light of day as Lake Mead writhes in a prolonged drought gripping the West.

The barrel found at Lake Mead on May 1 portends a great calamity on the horizon for the climate, but also tells a story about Las Vegas. Homicide investigators believe the victim was shot to death and placed in the barrel 40 to 45 years ago, based on the shoes found in the barrel. Lt. Ray Spencer with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department told The Times earlier this month that 40 years ago, the current shoreline would have been under 100 feet of water.

The person in the barrel would have been shot right around the time when mob organization was dying out in Sin City.

“The late ’70s, early ’80s, was sort of the start of the end really of the mobs in Las Vegas,” Geoff Schumacher, vice president of the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, said.

Schumacher recalls a few instances when barrels featured prominently in mob stories, including the killing of Johnny Roselli, who testified before Congress in 1976. Roselli went missing shortly after he testified to the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy and was found in a fuel drum floating in a bay near Miami.

But mob hits in Las Vegas typically ended with desert burials, Schumacher said. It's not impossible to think there will be more mob victims at the bottom of the lake. But it's just as likely that drowning victims and other remnants of the past will be revealed as the waters recede, Schumacher said.

"This is just as top of mind, for a lot of people here," Schumacher said. "It's really a story that has captured people's imagination about, you know, what else might be lurking in the depths of Lake Mead."

For climate scientists, the writing is on the wall as dead bodies surface at one of the nation's largest reservoirs that serves water to roughly 20 million people. The word drought does not capture the severity of what's happening across the region, said Brad Udall, water and climate scientist at Colorado State University.

"It's time to stop calling this a drought, because that obfuscates what's happening here. Droughts are temporary. What we're seeing is anything but temporary," Udall said.

A better way to describe this current decline of water in Nevada, California and other states is the aridification of the American West, Udall said, in which the region will become drier and more arid over the long term. That's already playing out in many parts of the region where wet winters do not translate to wet summers as the soil does not retain the same amount of water from the previous year.

The skeletal remains emerging from the earth are a byproduct of a system in decline.

"We're finding out horrifying things that we would have just as soon not found out," Udall said. "Unfortunately, I think we're gonna find a lot more horrifying things, including probably more bodies, but more concerning on some level, just that our human systems are not set up to deal with these kinds of water declines."

Water levels at Lake Mead for the month of April were at 1,054 feet above sea level, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Last year around the same time, it was 1,079 feet and in 2020 it was 1,096 feet. A pronounced ring has wrapped around Lake Mead, showing clearly where the previous water break reached and far above where the current water levels sit.

On Saturday, sisters Lynette and Lindsey Melvin were paddleboarding on Lake Mead when they happened upon a sandbar that just a week before was under water. The winds were whipping through the area and they docked their boards on the sandbar to admire the ancient rubbish, including an old Coca-Cola bottle, that stuck to the sand. Then they saw a peculiar object jutting out of the ground.

"At first we thought it was a rock," Lynette told The Times. The sisters started to dig and thought it could be a bighorn sheep skull, but then they saw a human jaw with teeth and what looked like a tooth that had a metal-like filling.

"We wanted to make sure that what we saw was a human skull before we contacted the park rangers," said Lindsey, who works as a registered nurse and was able to identify several other bones next to the skull.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department told the Associated Press that there was no immediate evidence of foul play and that they would open a homicide probe pending the coroner's report. The Clark County Medical Examiner will determine the cause of death, according to the National Park Service.

Lynette hopes if more bodies are found in the lake, that it brings some closure to families who thought their loved ones were lost forever.

Still, as a regular Lake Mead visitor, Lynette has watched the water levels drop over the years and is scared of a future without water.

"I'm more worried about the lake drying up than finding human remains," she said.
 

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
Bodies Pulled From Parched Lake Mead Stir Wise-Guy Ghosts of Las Vegas (msn.com)

LAS VEGAS — It’s the mob guy who went missing after skimming from the Stardust casino. No, it’s the lake resort manager hunted down by the Chicago Outfit. Could it be the work of a biker gang muscling in on Mafia turf? Or maybe someone just fell off a boat after one too many.

Ever since the bodies started turning up this month in Lake Mead — the first in a barrel, the next half-buried in sand, both exposed by plunging water levels — theories in Las Vegas are flourishing about who they are, how they wound up in the country’s largest man-made reservoir, and what might surface next.

Lake Mead was filled during the Depression, and it's now at it's lowest level since it was filled. Lake Powell is also drying up. Although as a result, archeologists are able to examine an ancient pueblo which had over 100 rooms.

The somber findings come amid the Southwest’s driest two decades in more than a thousand years, as drought-starved bodies of water yield one surprise after another.

At Elephant Butte Reservoir in New Mexico, a bachelor party stumbled across a fossilized mastodon skull that is millions of years old. In Utah last year, the receding waters of Lake Powell revealed a car that had plunged 600 feet off a cliff, killing the driver. And as Lake Powell dries up, archaeologists are getting a chance to study newly emerged Indigenous dwellings.

In Las Vegas, the obsession with the Lake Mead remains combines anxiety about the city’s dwindling water supply with the fascination over how mobsters shaped the Mojave Desert outpost into a glittering gambling haven, where pleasure-seekers float down lazy rivers and frolic in colossal pools amid the parched landscape.

Now just 30 percent full, Lake Mead has already fallen to its lowest level since it was filled during the Great Depression, raising fears in places such as Los Angeles, Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz., that also draw water from the reservoir below the Hoover Dam.

Federal authorities announced this month that they would delay releases from the Colorado River into Lake Mead, about 30 miles east of Las Vegas, dwindling it even more.

Jennifer Byrnes, a forensic anthropologist who consults with the coroner’s office in Clark County, which contains Las Vegas, said warming temperatures could reshape her profession. Long-term drought and other changes to the landscape make more grim discoveries possible, and require planning for mass casualty events like deadly heat waves, storms and wildfires.

AAXv3ch.img


None of that has stopped amateur sleuths from poring over clues in Las Vegas’s hottest new cold cases. So far, police investigators have said they do not expect foul play in connection with the body found by the paddle boarders.

But detectives with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said the victim in the barrel appeared to have died from a gunshot wound, likely in the mid-1970s or early 1980s based on clothing and footwear.

At the time, even as local authorities sought to downplay the influence of organized crime syndicates, mobsters from Midwest cities like Chicago, Milwaukee and Kansas City, Mo., wielded immense clout around Las Vegas. Today, the Mafia’s role in Las Vegas is considered insignificant, but nostalgia for the era of made men has emerged as a big moneymaker.

For a price of $119.95, visitors can take a “mob tour” that features sites where a car bombing and other underworld activities took place. At the Mob Museum downtown, tourists with beers in hand take in exhibitions describing the city’s blood-splattered past.

“This is the town that denied having any connections to the mob,” said John L. Smith, 62, a prominent author and columnist whose family has been in Nevada since the 1880s. “Now it’s a town that puts it on billboards.”

As the museum makes clear, barrels were not unheard-of among the Mafia’s body-disposal methods. In 1976, John Roselli, a crime figure with Las Vegas ties, was found floating dead in one in Biscayne Bay outside Miami. And Mr. Smith said in a column in The Nevada Independent that the discovery in Lake Mead also evoked memories of a cold case involving Johnny Pappas, a Chicagoan who went missing in Las Vegas in 1976.

Pappas, whose underworld associations were noted when he disappeared, managed a resort on Lake Mead backed by a Teamsters pension fund, and had been involved in Democratic politics. “Back then, Las Vegas was a much smaller town where half the people were connected, or wanted you to think they were connected” to the mob, Mr. Smith said.

Other theories about the bodies also abound. David Kohlmeier, a retired police officer who is now a podcaster and social media personality, is offering a $5,000 reward to divers who find other remains in Lake Mead. The areas where the two bodies were found, he said, could have been dumping grounds connected to other crimes. “I think this was gang-related in some way, but that could mean it was a motorcycle gang,” Mr. Kohlmeier said.

The lake also guards the wreckage of a B-29 Superfortress — one of the largest aircraft used in World War II — that crashed into its waters in 1948, as well as a stunning complex of Ancestral Puebloan ruins, including a structure with more than 100 rooms.

Hikers can already trek to St. Thomas, a once-submerged Mormon settlement that has resurfaced in Lake Mead in the form of sun-bleached ruins as the drought grinds on.

While Lake Mead has long seen mishaps and foul play, Michael Green, 57, a historian who grew up in Las Vegas, noted that mob figures often preferred to carry out execution-style killings away from the city, in efforts to shield the gambling industry from bad publicity.

In one notorious cold case, the influential president of the Riviera hotel, Gus Greenbaum, and his wife, Bess, were shot dead at their Phoenix home after suspicions surfaced that he had been stealing from fellow investors.

Mr. Green, whose father was a casino dealer with the distinction of being fired by Lefty Rosenthal, the inspiration for the gangster portrayed by Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 film, “Casino,” has his own theory about the body in the barrel.

It revolves around Jay Vandermark, a slot machine supervisor at the Stardust casino who was implicated in a scheme to skim proceeds from slot machines. Vandermark, also thought to have pocketed funds from his mob bosses, went missing in 1976.

“I don’t think they ever found the body,” Mr. Green said.

I guess everyone has their own theories as to who could be the person they found.

My guess is that it's the guy who was told to make sure to put an equal amount of blueberries in each muffin. He couldn't do it, and if you refuse the Mob, well that's that.

blueberries-blueberry.gif
 

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
World War II-era boat emerges from shrinking Lake Mead | AP News

I guess we'll never know what may pop up from Lake Mead next.

1000.jpeg


LAS VEGAS (AP) — A sunken boat dating back to World War II is the latest object to emerge from a shrinking reservoir that straddles Nevada and Arizona.

The Higgins landing craft that has long been 185 feet (56 meters) below the surface is now nearly halfway out of the water at Lake Mead.

The boat lies less than a mile from Lake Mead Marina and Hemingway Harbor.

It was used to survey the Colorado River decades ago, sold to the marina and then sunk, according to dive tours company Las Vegas Scuba.

Higgins Industries in New Orleans built several thousand landing craft between 1942 and 1945, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. Around 1,500 “Higgins boats” were deployed at Normandy on June 6, 1944, known as D-Day.

The boat is just the latest in a series of objects unearthed by declining water levels in Lake Mead, the largest human-made reservoir in the U.S., held back by the Hoover Dam. In May, two sets of human remains were found in the span of a week.

Experts say climate change and drought have led to the lake dropping to its lowest level since it was full about 20 years ago.

As water levels drop at both Lake Mead and Lake Powell upstream on the Arizona-Utah line, states in the U.S. West increasingly face deeper cuts to their supply from the Colorado River. The lower levels also impact hydropower produced at Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam, which holds back Lake Powell.

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton said last month that the agency would take action to protect the system if the seven states in the Colorado River basin don’t quickly come up with a way to cut the use of up to 4 million acre-feet of water — more than Arizona and Nevada’s share combined.

An acre-foot is about 325,850 gallons (about 1.23 million liters). An average household uses one-half to one acre-foot of water a year.

The two states, California and Mexico already have enacted voluntary and mandatory cuts. Water from some reservoirs in the upper basin — Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah — has been released to prop up Lake Powell.

Farmers use a majority of the river’s supply.
 

Estro Felino

Believer in free will
Premium Member
It took millennia for freshwater reserves to form.
Yes, humans are overexploiting all those at an unsustainable pace.
And human activities are messing up the climate.
 

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
More human remains discovered as drought dries Lake Mead | AP News

LAS VEGAS (AP) — More human remains have been found at drought-stricken Lake Mead National Recreation Area east of Las Vegas, authorities said Sunday.

It’s the fourth time since May that remains have been uncovered as Western drought forces the shoreline to retreat at the shrinking Colorado River reservoir behind the Hoover Dam.

National Park Service officials said rangers were called to the reservoir between Nevada and Arizona around 11 a.m. Saturday after skeletal remains were discovered at Swim Beach.

Rangers and a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police dive team went to retrieve the remains.

Park Service officials said the Clark County Medical Examiner’s Office will try to determine when and how the person died as investigators review records of missing people.

On May 1, a barrel containing human remains was found near Hemenway Harbor. Police believe the remains were that of a man who died from a gunshot wound and the body was likely dumped in the mid-1970s to early 1980s.

Less than a week later, authorities say human skeletal remains were found at Calville Bay.

More recently, partial human remains were found in the Boulder Beach area on July 25.

Police have speculated that more remains may be discovered as the water level at Lake Mead continues to recede.

The discoveries have prompted speculation about long-unsolved missing person and murder cases dating back decades — to organized crime and the early days of Las Vegas, which is just a 30-minute drive from the lake.

The lake surface has dropped more than 170 feet (52 meters) since the reservoir was full in 1983.

The drop in the lake level comes while a vast majority of peer-reviewed science says the world is warming, mainly because of rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Scientists say the U.S. West, including the Colorado River basin, has become warmer and drier in the past 30 years.
 

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
ONLY ON FOX5: New discoveries on first set of skeletal remains found at Lake Mead (kold.com)

LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) - FOX5 is uncovering new discoveries about the human remains found inside a barrel at Lake Mead. This comes less than 48 hours after yet another set of human remains were found.

A woman who believes that could be her brother spoke with FOX5 exclusively. She told us her brother, Bobbi Eugene Shaw, has been missing for about 45 years.

His sister Barbara Brock said she hasn’t stopped looking for him since.

“It has been devastating because if I see something that looks like him, you got to look and make sure it is not him,” said Brock.

Las Vegas police contacted her asking to collect DNA samples because they believe her brother matches the description of the body found inside that barrel.

“Bob went missing, I believe 1977 and of course all these years, we have wondered where he is at,” said Barbara Brock. “If he is alive or dead. I give up on him being alive quite a while ago.”

Brock said Metro contacted her and her family back in May when the body in the barrel was discovered.

“They called me for DNA, so I gave them the DNA samples and so did my nephew and they said they are testing it,” said Brock.

Police said the timeframe of when Bobbi went missing also matched the remains possible timeframe.

Brock said her brother was involved with the mafia, which may have had some connection to his disappearance.

Metro has told us in the past this death is a homicide and may be mob-related.

“When they found the first body in the barrel, I just knew it was him,” said Brock. “I still feel it is him.”

In the end, Brock just hopes for some concrete answers.

“We are praying that is Bob,” said Brock. “I know he is gone but a definite knowing would make me feel better.”
 

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
Another set of human remains found in Lake Mead amid drought - UPI.com

Aug. 17 (UPI) -- Another set of human remains has been discovered in Lake Mead, officials said, marking the fifth time since May that such a discovery has been made in the lake as it experiences historically low water levels.

The National Park Service said in a statement Tuesday that the human skeletal remains were located in the lake's Swim Beach area and reported to rangers at about 8 p.m. the night prior.

A perimeter has since been established to recover the remains with help from the dive team for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, it said.

No further information about the remains were made public, but the park service said the investigation into them is ongoing.

The announcement of the discovery of a fifth set of remains came as the Biden administration on Tuesday announced it was cutting water supplies from the Colorado River to six neighboring states, including Arizona and Nevada, in order to protect its long-term sustainability as it has dropped to record levels.

Lake Mead, a manmade reservoir on the Colorado River, has also been a victim of drought cycles over the past two decades that have seen it drop for near full capacity in 2000 to about a quarter full last month, according to NASA.

The Feds are reducing the water supply allotments from the Colorado River. The states which use the river couldn't reach an agreement.

U.S. cuts Colorado River water allocations to drought-stricken Southwest - UPI.com

"The worsening drought crisis impacting the Colorado River Basin is driven by the effects of climate change, including extreme heat and low precipitation," Interior deputy secretary Tommy Beaudreau said in a statement. "In turn, severe drought condition exacerbate wildfire risk and ecosystems disruption, increasing the stress on communities and our landscapes."

In June, the Interior Department gave the states 60 days to come up with a new and reduced water allocation plan before the government stepped in Tuesday.

"You had some parties bringing a good chunk of water to the table. Others didn't even want to be bothered with coming to the table with anything meaningful," Kyle Roerink, executive director at the Great Basin Water Network, told The Hill in an interview.

As of Tuesday, the states had not reached an agreement "as the nation's largest reservoirs rapidly deplete themselves."

While the Interior Department will give the states more time to negotiate a plan, it announced drastic cuts that will go into effect at the start of next year.

Looks like Arizona gets screwed again.

Arizona will lose the most with a 21% drop in water allocation from the Colorado River starting in January. Nevada will lose 8% of its supplies, while New Mexico will lose 7% of its allocation. California is not slated to lose any of its share at this time.

"It is unacceptable for Arizona to continue to carry a disproportionate burden of reductions for the benefit of others who have not contributed," Tom Buschatzke, director of Arizona's Department of Water Resources, said in a statement.

Water levels on Lake Mead near Las Vegas dropped to 1,050 feet below sea level for the first time ever, according to federal officials.

Low water levels Arizona's Lake Powell are also threatening hydro power production and electricity supplies in southern California and across the Southwest.

Farmers in California are also worried water restrictions could impact food consumers around the country.

"Hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland have been fallowed across California," Fresno County Farm Bureau CEO Ryan Jacobsen said. "Some farmers say even more fields could go dry and out of production by next year."

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which means billions of dollars for drought preparedness could start flowing soon. The tax and climate package includes $4 billion to buy or save water for the Colorado River basin.

"As dire as this situation is, there are reasons for encouragement," Beaudreau said. "We're bringing resources to the table in the form of infrastructure investments to help with water delivery, improvement so the system to support efficiency, and support for users, including irrigators, as everyone has to tighten their belts in this situation."
 

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member

Lake Mead water levels are at the highest point this year after Hurricane Hilary swept through the Southwest.

The lake stands 1,063.95 feet above mean sea level according to information collected by LakeLevels. This is over 20 feet higher than where the lake was on this day last year, almost four feet below where it was last year, and almost 20 feet under where the lake was in 2020.

A wet winter helped fill the reservoir on the Arizona and Nevada border on the Colorado River. At the beginning of the year, the lake was around 1044 feet above mean sea level, reaching 1050 feet in May. Prior to Hurricane Hilary making landfall, the lake measured 1063.49 feet above mean sea level.

Key reservoir filling doesn't solve water issues​

The Southwest has been experiencing a drought for 23 years, leading officials to cut a deal to promote water conservation in the region.

There have been concerns that the reservoirs are close to reaching "dead pool" status, where water levels are too low to continue the flow of water downstream.

"This buys a year," longtime Colorado River expert Brad Udall told USA Today about the winter snowpack and precipitation. "It doesn't remotely come close to solving the long-term problems."

There was an attempt to improve parts of the Colorado River ecosystem earlier this year.

What's the long-term outlook for the Colorado River?​

Udall, who studies the river at Colorado State University's Colorado Water Center, said this winter's snow is likely an aberration, and that long-term trends show the West is getting drier due to climate change. He said the only real solution is to use less water.

Big snow years are happening half as often as they used to, while dry years are happening 2.5 times as often, he said.

"There's two important components to get to a better place," Udall shared. "The first is wishing for high flow years and the other is cutting demand. And we only control one of them."
 
Top