Investigators Found Bodies Resurfacing at Lake Mead — They're Not Drowning Victims

In May 2022, a boater near Hemenway Harbor spotted a corroded metal barrel half-buried in the mud of Lake Mead's newly exposed shoreline. Inside was a man who had been shot once in the head — sealed in that barrel and dropped to the bottom of the lake somewhere between forty and fifty years earlier. His clothing dated to the mid-1970s. His identity still hasn't been confirmed. That barrel surfaced during one of the worst droughts in American history. As Lake Mead fell to its lowest recorded level — dropping more than 150 feet in just over two decades — it began revealing what it had been keeping. By October 2022, four separate sets of human remains had surfaced in a single season. Three were drowning victims: Thomas Erndt, who disappeared while boating in 2002; Donald P. Smith, who drowned in 1974; and Claude Russell Pensinger, a fisherman and Coast Guard veteran who vanished in 1998 when his boat was found running in circles with no one on board. But the man in the barrel was different. Detectives, the FBI, and investigators at Las Vegas's Mob Museum connected the method to organized crime — and to the city's most violent era, when the Chicago Outfit controlled the Strip. This is the full story of what Lake Mead gave back. #LakeMead #ColdCase #TrueCrime #LasVegasMob #ChicagoOutfit #LakeMeadBodies #FuneralReport #ForensicScience #DroughtDiscoveries #MobHistory #LasVegas #ColoradoRiver