Like a scene out of a Hollywood thriller, scuba divers cruising through the depths of Lake Tahoe came upon a macabre scene recently. These divers weren’t looking for an underwater hotel, but they did find a grisly surprise. Swimming along at 270 feet below the surface, a group, in what was described as a “needle in a haystack” moment, discovered the body of a diver who disappeared beneath the lake’s surface nearly two decades ago. It must be the summer of recovering long-lost bodies after a potential robber was found 27 years later in a bank chimney in Louisiana.
The frigid waters of the mountain lake preserved the body of Donald Christopher Widecker, who was last seen by a fellow diver going under water, apparently in distress, without his respirator in his mouth in 1994. The body was nearly recovered in 2001 when another diver spotted it and tied a rope with a buoy attached to it. However, the rope snapped and the wet-suit-clad corpse remained submerged another decade.
