A fourth set of human remains has been found at Lake Mead, as the water levels at their lowest level in over 80 years continue to reveal long-hidden secrets.
News of the fourth set – found on Saturday at Swim Beach, and now being assessed by Clark County Coroner – came as a man living in Spain said he is increasingly confident the second set of remains is that of his father.
Todd Kolod was three years old when his father Daniel, aged 22, drowned in Callville Bay in 1958.
He was on a speed boat with a friend when they hit a wake, and both men were thrown from the boat – with only one surviving.
The body was never recovered.
A set of remains was found on May 7 at Callville Bay, and DNA samples were taken.
Todd Kolod, pictured here with his father Daniel, was born in 1956, two years before his father died in Callville Bay
According to NASA, water levels in Lake Mead are their lowest level since 1937. As of July 18, 2022, the lake was filled to 27 percent capacity
On Wednesday the coroner said the person is believed to have been aged between 23 and 38 years old at his or her time of death, leading Kolod to believe it is in all probability his father.
‘With each clue, I always expect in my mind that it’s going to put us farther away from our goal, but consistently each clue is putting us closer, and this is like a bullseye,’ he told 8 News Now.
Kolod had hoped to identify his father by his teeth.
Daniel was in a car crash a few years before he drowned and lost his front teeth, so wore dentures.
Todd Kolod thinks the second body may be that of his father Daniel Kolod, who fell from a speedboat that flipped when it struck by a wake during a fishing trip with a friend 64 years ago
A second body (pictured) was discovered in drought-hit Lake Mead reservoir a week after corpse was found in barrel exposed by lowest water levels
Teeth from a second body were discovered in drought-hit Lake Mead were discovered just a week after another body turned up in the reservoir
Journalists from 8 News Now took photos of the remains to Dr Deborah Staten, owner and dentist at Desert Hills Dental, who is certified in helping identify remains from dental records.
She said it is clear the skeleton is missing its front teeth, but she believes the person was missing other teeth before their death, suspecting some were recently removed.
Dental records have likely been destroyed in the intervening 60 years.
Kolod said he is keen to give a DNA sample as quickly as possible, to solve the mystery, but was frustrated at how long it was taking.
‘The pace of being contacted about a DNA sample – I’m starting to lose hope a little bit,’ he said.
‘Maybe this new finding lights something up.’
None of the four sets of remains have been identified yet.
The first emerged on May 1, when a man’s body was found in a rusted barrel in the Hemenway Harbor area.
The first body was discovered in a barrel (pictured). The coroner said her office was continuing work to identify the man whose body was found May 1 in a rusted barrel in the Hemenway Harbor area
The case is being investigated as a homicide after police said the man had been shot, and his clothing dated from the mid-1970s to early 1980s.
Lt. Ray Spencer, with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police homicide squad, said in May: ‘The lake has drained dramatically over the last 15 years.
‘It’s likely that we will find additional bodies that have been dumped in Lake Mead.’
Six days later, the second set – which Todd Kolod believes may be his father – was discovered.
A third set of human remains was found on July 26.
Little information has been made public about the discoveries. Investigators are scouring missing persons reports in an attempt to identify the corpses
This is the third set of human remains to have been discovered at Lake Mead, on July 26. No further details about the remains – including the gender of the person, and how long they were in the lake – have been disclosed
Around 300 people have drowned in Lake Mead since the 1930s but that does not include those whose bodies were never recovered, including Daniel Kolod.
Human remains, as well as sunken boats, including a World War II landing craft, and other items have been discovered at lake over the summer as the water level declines.
Officials from Clark County are shown creating a perimeter around where the latest gruesome discovery was made at Lake Mead
Intake towers stand exposed in Lake Mead as water continues to dry up in the lake on the Arizona side of the Hoover Dam
According to NASA, water levels in Lake Mead are their lowest level since 1937
Lake Mead’s water level is at the lowest it has been in over 85 years
A formerly sunken boat sits on cracked earth hundreds of feet from the shoreline of Lake Mead at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area on May 10, 2022
The Lake, including a marina in Boulder City, Nevada (pictured) is shrinking as water retreats
The discoveries have prompted speculation about long-unsolved missing person and murder cases dating back decades – to organized crime and the early days of Las Vegas, which is just a 30-minute drive from the lake.
The drop in the lake level comes while a vast majority of peer-reviewed science says the world is warming, mainly because of rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Scientists say the U.S. West, including the Colorado River basin, has become warmer and drier in the past 30 years.
About 40 million people rely on the Colorado River as their water supply, with Lake Mead and Lake Powell serving as the area’s primary reservoirs.
According to NASA, water levels in Lake Mead are their lowest level since 1937. As of July 18, 2022, the lake was filled to 27 percent capacity.
In June, Ann Willis of the Center for Watershed Science told the Washington Post: ‘In the last 1,200 years, we haven’t seen a period as dry as right now. We’re really hitting new lows in terms of how extreme the conditions are.’
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