Dead in the water | Delayed Gratification

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Dead in the water

In August 2022 a fifth body was uncovered by receding waters at Lake Mead in Nevada. Harriet Salem tells the story of a grisly series of discoveries and what they reveal about Las Vegas, the mafia and the fight to stop climate change making life impossible for millions of Americans

Dead fish lie on a section of dry lakebed in drought-stricken Lake Mead on 9th May 2022. As water levels receded further over the summer human remains were revealed. Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Harriet Salem<br>15th August 2022 (Taken from: #48)

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On a sunny May morning at Hemenway Harbor on Lake Mead in Nevada, the dock staff were preparing for the afternoon voyage of the Desert Princess. The steam paddler, painted bright white with a yellow and black trimmed hull, bobbed in the water with the stars and stripes fluttering at her helm. Beneath the wooden dock, whiskered catfish swam in lazy circles hoping the soon-to-arrive tourists would throw them some bread crusts. The Desert Princess would follow the same route she had for the past 40 years. A leisurely cruise to the lake’s southernmost point and then a sharp turn to starboard between two towering cliff faces. On her upper and lower decks tourists would gather, cameras in hand, ready for the grand reveal: a lakeside view of the Hoover Dam. It was a normal day. That is until the dock staff were interrupted from their preparations by a bloodcurdling scream from the nearby beach.

“It was a terrible noise. A real holler. It sounded like someone had died, and, well they had, but not recently,” recalls Jamie*, a bartender in the Desert Princess’ saloon. Along with the other staff working that day she rushed over to see what was causing the commotion. By the time she arrived, a small crowd was peering into an old oil barrel sticking out of the sand. It was half rusted away and covered in clusters of quagga mussels, an invasive species of freshwater mollusc that clings on to anything that spends time at the bottom of the lake. “I looked inside it, and I thought: ‘Oh my!’ You could see it was a person stuffed in there, or what was left of them which wasn’t much, just teeth and bones, just a skeleton really and a few scraps of what I guess were once clothes,” Jamie tells me. “It was awful, like a Halloween decoration but real. What a terrible way to go, shoved into a barrel and tossed in a lake. I never saw anything like it and, well, I hope I never do again.” But the discovery on 1st May 2022, of the ‘Hemenway Harbor Doe’, as the barrel skeleton was dubbed by the local press, was just the first of the grim finds to be made at the lake that summer.

Less than a week later, on 7th May, sisters Lynette and Lindsey Melvin were out paddleboarding when they spotted a jawbone protruding from the water. At first, they thought it was the remnants of one of the leghorn sheep that scramble up and down the sheer rock faces around the lake’s edge. And then they spotted a glint of silver sparkling in its teeth, a filling that clearly marked the remains as human. The third grisly find came on 25th July and the fourth on 6th August – both have been described as ‘partial’ and their location indicates they could belong to the same person. Body number five was dredged up by police divers on 15th August. “You’d think people would be put off visiting, but they’re coming here looking for more – who knows, maybe you’ll find one!” Jamie tells me, half in jest. “People love a good murder mystery.”

By the time I arrive at Lake Mead National Park it’s mid-September, just a month after the fifth body was discovered, and it’s still blazingly hot. It’s been a long summer and locals are looking forward to the respite of autumn, which in this desert region means the temperature dipping below 100° F (38°C). As I approach the entrance to the park, a desert rat scuttles in front of the car. A roadside sign has its dial tilted to ‘extreme’, indicating the fire risk in the area today. The landscape is stunning: red mountainous rock dotted with almost luminous green creosote bushes and flat-leaved, fleshy-stemmed prickly pear cacti adorned with bright pink blooms, some of the only plants hardy enough to survive in this arid landscape. As I round the corner, Lake Mead itself comes into view.

The United States’ largest reservoir is formed by the Hoover Dam, fed by the 1,440-mile-long Colorado River it provides water to 40 million people in America’s southwestern states – Nevada,...