Water levels have dropped in Lake Mead
(Picture: AP)More human remains have been found in a receding reservoir just 30 minutes drive from the Las Vegas strip, just a week after the body of a suspected murder victim was found.
The latest remains were found on Saturday, less than a week after a body was found in a barrel stuck in the mud of Lake Mead’s shoreline on May 1.
Police have warned yet more bodies could be found in the reservoir, the US’s largest, which supplies drinking water to 20 million people.
“There’s no telling what we’ll find in Lake Mead,” former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said on Monday. “It’s not a bad place to dump a body.”
The surface of Lake Mead has dropped more than 170 feet since 1983 as a result of climate change, reducing it to about 30 per cent capacity.
As water levels have reduced, bodies have appeared.
Boaters first spotted the decomposed body of a man in a rusted barrel stuck in the mud of the newly-exposed shoreline in early May.
The corpse has not been identified, but Las Vegas police believe the victim had been shot, probably between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, according to the shoes found with him.
The death is being investigated as a murder.
On Saturday, two sisters from Nevada’s second largest city of Henderson, who were paddle boarding on the lake, noticed bones on a newly surfaced sand bar more than 9 miles from the barrels.
Lindsey Melvin, who took photos of their find, said they thought at first it was the skeleton of sheep native to the region.
But park rangers subsequently confirmed the bones were human. There was no immediate evidence of foul play, Las Vegas police said Monday, and they are not investigating.
However, a murder probe will be opened if the Clark County coroner finds the death was suspicious, the department said in a statement.
Speculation is now rife that more bodies could be discovered, and some may be the bodies of those targeted in a mob hit.
“I think a lot of these individuals will likely have been drowning victims," Geoff Schumacher, vice president of The Mob Museum in Las Vegas, said, referring to swimmers who have never been found.
“But a barrel has a signature of a mob hit. Stuffing a body in a barrel. Sometimes they would dump it in the water.”
He pointed to the death of John Roselli, a mid-1950s Las Vegas mobster who disappeared in 1976, only for his body to be found in a steel drum floating off the coast of Miami.
Lake Mead, which is on the Nevada-Arizona state border, was created as a result of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s.
