As Lake Mead dries up, bodies of homicide victims are likely to be found

With Lake Mead at its lowest level since it was first filled in the 1930s, all sorts of things have the potential to poke out of the water -- including murder victims.

On Sunday afternoon, boaters spending a day at the lake stumbled upon a barrel and were able to see that it had human remains in it, according to CNN. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Homicide Lieutenant Ray Spencer dated the victim to the 1980s, noting that items found inside the barrel suggest that is when the body was dumped.

"It's really odd in the sense that had the lake never receded, we would never have discovered the body," Spencer told The New York Times.

In this Oct. 14, 2015, file photo, a riverboat glides through Lake Mead on the Colorado River at Hoover Dam near Boulder City, Nevada. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

Photos of the barrel obtained by KLAS-TV show the rusty-looking container half embedded in the mud on what is now the side of the lake. In the 1980s, the spot where the barrel was located would have been dozens of feet underwater.

"We heard a woman scream from the side of the beach and then my husband went over to obviously see what was wrong," Shawna Hollister, who was at Lake Mead at the time the body was discovered, told KLAS-TV. "And then he realized there was a body there in a barrel."

On Tuesday morning, Las Vegas Police provided more details about the body that had been discovered. Spencer told the Las Vegas Review-Journal the victim was a man who had died from a gunshot wound. Spencer also said that shoes found on the victim were manufactured sometime in the 1970s and sold at Kmart.

"We're going to expand our time frame of the murder to the middle to late 1970s to early '80s," Spencer said on Tuesday morning.

Spencer added that it is likely that more long-lost bodies will be discovered as Lake Mead plunges to even lower levels.

"I would say there is a very good chance as the water level drops that we are going to find additional human remains," Spencer told KLAS-TV on Monday.

Lake Mead has fallen to just over 1,054 feet above sea level, which is about 160 feet below being full and well below the highest recorded level of over 1,225 feet in July 1983, according to The Associated Press. Never in the lake's history has the water level been lower, and rocks and bodies aren't the only things the low water level is exposing.

This photo taken Monday, April 25, 2022, by the Southern Nevada Water Authority shows the top of Lake Mead drinking water Intake No. 1 above the surface level of the Colorado River reservoir behind Hoover Dam. The intake is the uppermost of three in the deep, drought-stricken lake that provides Las Vegas with 90% of its drinking water supply. (Southern Nevada Water Authority via AP)

Last week, one of Lake Mead's intake valves appeared above the water line for the first time, according to the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which manages the water supply for the Las Vegas area. That valve had been operational since 1971, but now that it is above the waterline it can no longer siphon water.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority has constructed a new pumping station that will ensure water can be collected as long as Lake Mead doesn't fall to less than 875 feet above sea level.

Lake Mead, along with much of the American West, is in the midst of what some experts are calling a mega-drought. Unusual discoveries have been taking place in bodies of water throughout the region since 2021 when water levels began to decline substantially.

In California's Folsom Lake, about 500 miles to the north and west of Lake Mead, a small airplane that officials believe crashed in 1986 was found last June. And in Utah's Lake Powell, about 250 miles east of Lake Mead, a family on a fishing trip discovered a shipwrecked boat that had been exposed by the receding waters in April 2021.

The western United States and parts of northern Mexico are experiencing their driest period in at least 1,200 years, according to a recent peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Some of the drought is attributable to human causes, with the study authors finding that roughly 19% of the "exceptional drought severity" in 2021 could be attributed to human-caused climate trends.

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