As drought continues to dry out the reservoirs of the American southwest, receding Lake Mead water levels revealed a barrel. With a body in it. Vegas PD quickly confirmed it was probably a hit job. The man “died from a gunshot wound sometime between the mid-1970s or early 80s.”
Body from the late 70’s
According to Homicide Lt. Ray Spencer of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, the first thing they noticed was the victim’s shoes.
On Tuesday, May 3, he told reporters “the man’s body was wearing sneakers that were sold and manufactured by Kmart in the middle to late 70s.” The latest he went in the lake was early 1980’s.
The update was a death-by-gunshot announcement which follows up earlier reports that the Las Vegas authorities weren’t ruling out the “skeleton in the barrel was the victim of a mob related murder.”
One body after another is probably going to turn up as the lake evaporates. The Las Vegas strip was notoriously “dominated by mob-run casinos from the late ’40s through the ’80s.”
All Spencer had to say was they’re “going to look at that potential possibility.” The body was visibly noticeable through a corroded opening in the rusted metal barrel.
Thanks to the miracle of modern fabrics, the “victim’s shirt and belt were still clinging to their bones.” That means he was probably wearing cotton jeans with the ubiquitous polyester shirt of the times.
More discoveries likely
People strolling along the shore came across the barrel on Sunday afternoon “embedded in mud along Lake Mead’s receding shoreline.” As water levels dip ever lower, “it is likely that more bodies will be exposed.”
Spencer doesn’t usually have much positive to say about the drought but, he pragmatically muses that “it’s really odd in the sense that had the lake never receded, we would never have discovered the body.”
Spencer seems to think that someone carried the body in a barrel by boat, then dropped it over the side.
“The water level has dropped so much over the last 30 to 40 years that, where the person was located, if a person were to drop the barrel in the water and it sinks, you are never going to find it.” Well, almost never.
Investigators are already at work identifying the body, “and will be combing through missing persons cases from the 1970s and ’80s.” That, experts say, could take a long time. The process “could take years as they are starting ‘at square one.‘”
Back in the primitive 1980s, “we did not have any of the DNA databases, so there was no DNA collection,” Spencer explains. If they manage to extract any DNA from the bones “the genealogy work required to identify the victim will be extensive.“
