3rd Body Pulled From Bottom of Reservoir

An organized crime investigation continued to yield grisly discoveries Monday as authorities recovered a third slaying victim from the frigid depths of a Sierra foothills reservoir.

The three bodies were pulled from the water below a pair of bridges that cross broad fingers of New Melones Reservoir east of Sonora.

Nick Rossi, a spokesman for the FBI’s Sacramento field office, said Monday that one victim appeared to be a man and seemed to have been weighted down, but could offer no other details on the identities, causes of death or potential motives for the slayings.

Autopsies are scheduled today by the Tuolumne County coroner’s office.

On Sunday, two of the bodies were pulled from 300 feet beneath the lake’s surface at the midpoint of the sprawling California 49 bridge. The third was removed shortly before 5 p.m. Monday from below Parrots Ferry Bridge, about three miles to the northeast.

“All we know is we’ve recovered another human body,” Rossi said.

Authorities are trying to determine if there is a link between the three victims and a man whose body was discovered in October in the water near the Parrots Ferry Bridge. His wrists were lashed and a plastic bag covered his head.

The search started a week ago, based on a tip from another FBI office conducting an organized crime investigation. Divers focused initially on Lake Don Pedro, a Tuolumne County reservoir about 40 miles east of Modesto.

When nothing turned up, the hunt switched over the weekend to nearby New Melones Reservoir. Sonar scans of the lake bottom revealed silhouettes that appeared to be human bodies in deep water out of the reach of divers, authorities said.

A small, remote-controlled submersible shipped in from the FBI’s New York field office managed to locate the bodies, then raise them to about 30 feet from the surface. Divers put them into body bags and loaded the corpses onto a boat.

Divers from the FBI and the Tuolumne and Calaveras county sheriff’s offices struggled with low visibility and 40-degree water that limited how long they could conduct their search.