A metal barrel containing the remains of a person killed in the 1980s was found Sunday on the shore of Nevada’s Lake Mead, a discovery that the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said was made possible by an ongoing drought. “It’s really odd in the sense that had the lake never receded, we would never have discovered the body,” Lt. Ray Spencer of the Police Department said by phone Monday. Spencer said the police were trying to learn the victim’s identity. He declined to share details abou
A metal barrel containing the remains of a person killed in the 1980s was found Sunday on the shore of Nevada’s Lake Mead, a discovery that the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said was made possible by an ongoing drought.
The drop in the lake’s water level could result in other bodies being found at the lake, Spencer said. Rangers with the National Park Service find one or two bodies at Lake Mead every year, he said, “so it’s not uncommon to work a homicide out at the lake.” They saw the corroded, rusted barrel embedded in mud, its beige exterior covered in barnacles, Spencer said. While the sun shined on nearby boaters floating in the water, they peeked their heads inside and discovered a skeleton.“We were docking our boat to go home and heard a woman scream,” Shawna Hollister, a witness to the discovery, told KLAS-TV in Las Vegas. “My husband walked over and found the body. His shirt and belt were the only thing we could see over his decomposing bones.
Investigators also plan to scan missing-person cases from the 1980s to search for clues, Spencer added.“In the 1980s, we did not have any of the DNA databases, so there was no DNA collection,” he said.
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