It’s that mobster who disappeared after robbing the Stardust Casino. No, he’s the manager of a lakeside resort that was hunted by the Chicago mob. Or was it the work of a biker gang? Maybe someone even fell off a boat after drinking too much.
Since the bodies began to surface in Lake Mead this month — the first in a barrel, the second half-buried in the sand, both exposed due to falling water levels — theories abound in Las Vegas about who the people were. , how they ended up in the largest artificial reservoir in the country and what the next discovery will be.
Lynette Malvin, 30, found the second body with her sister when she was paddle boarding. At first they thought they had found the bone of a sheep. “It was only when I saw the jaw with a silver filling that I said ‘hey, that’s human’, and I started to get scared,” she says.
The discovery of human remains is always a source of tragedy and potential suffering for loved ones of the person who died, especially when the body reveals that the death was violent. But in Las Vegas, where criminal history is something that attracts visitors, the discovery at the Mead sparked macabre fascination and prompted amateur sleuths to spring into action.
The ominous finds come amid the driest two decades in more than a thousand years in the southwestern United States, with drought-baked rivers and lakes offering one surprise after another.
At Elephant Butte Reservoir in New Mexico, people attending a bachelor party stumbled upon a fossilized mastodon skull from millions of years ago. In Utah last year, the retreating waters of Lake Powell revealed a car that had fallen off a 200-meter cliff, killing the driver. And now archaeologists have the opportunity to study indigenous dwellings that have emerged.
In Las Vegas, the obsession over the remains in Lake Mead adds anxiety about the local water supply, which is shrinking, to fascination with how mobsters have turned the city into a glittering gambling paradise — where hunters of pleasure float down lazy rivers and play in colossal pools amidst the landscape of the Mojave Desert.
Mead is only at 30% capacity, the lowest level since it was filled during the Great Depression. This scares places like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Tucson, which also receive water from the reservoir. This month federal officials announced that they will delay releasing water from the Colorado River into the lake, which will cause the level to drop further.
Jennifer Byrnes is a forensic anthropologist who consults with the Clark County Medical Examiner’s Office. She says rising temperatures could reshape her profession. Prolonged droughts and other changes to the landscape make more dark discoveries possible and require planning to deal with events that can cause large numbers of casualties, such as heat waves, storms and fires.
“Climate change will affect our playing field directly in the coming years.”
In some cases, this means helping to solve ancient mysteries. In 2014, when a pickup truck containing a dead body was found in a Texas lake whose water level had dropped, coroners used dental records to identify a woman who had been missing since 1979.
Still, according to Byrnes, the remains in Lake Mead can be especially difficult to identify. The reservoir is so large that its currents can rip a corpse apart or cause it to drift away from the point where the person drowned or was thrown. And scavengers such as aquatic insects, crabs, fish and birds can complicate these identification efforts.
None of this is causing amateur detectives to give up studying leads in the cold cases that are now generating more interest in Los Angeles. So far, police investigators have said they do not expect to detect signs of crime on the body found by the rowers.
But sources with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said the victim in the barrel appears to have died from a gunshot wound, likely in the mid-1970s or early 1980s, judging by his clothing.
At that time, while the local authorities sought to minimize the influence of organized criminal groups, mafiosi from cities in the Midwest had enormous influence in the region. Today the role of the mafia in Las Vegas is considered insignificant, but nostalgia is emerging as a moneymaker.
For US$119.95 (R$576), visitors can take a “mafia tour” that takes in locations where a car was blown up and other underworld activities. At the Mob Museum, beer-in-hand tourists wander through exhibits depicting the city’s bloodied past.
As the museum makes clear, it was not uncommon for the Mafia to use barrels as a method of disposing of dead bodies. In a column in The Nevada Independent, author John L. Smith wrote that the Lake Mead discovery also evokes memories of a cold case involving Johnny Papas, a Chicago resident who disappeared in 1976.
Pappas, whose ties to the underworld were mentioned when he disappeared, was a manager of a lakeside resort that received help from a pension fund from the Truckers Union and had become involved in Democratic politics. “At the time, Las Vegas was a much smaller city where half the people had mob ties or wanted you to think they did,” Smith said.
There are several other theories. Retired police officer David Kohlmeier, now a podcaster, has offered a $5,000 reward to whoever finds the most remains in Lake Mead. He said the areas may have been “body dumps” linked to other gang crimes.
It’s not new that Lake Mead is linked to accidents and crime, but historian Michael Green, 57, who grew up in Las Vegas, notes that mobsters often preferred to commit execution-style murders far from the city, to try to protect the casinos. of negative publicity.
He has his own theory about the body found in the barrel. It involves Jay Vandermark, a slot machine supervisor at Stardust Casino who has been involved in a scheme to steal profits from the machines. Vandermark, who also allegedly stole from his mob bosses, disappeared in 1976. “I don’t think they ever found his body.”
