San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
RAISING THE DEAD
To recover bodies of loved ones in watery depths, families turn to man who sees what others can’t
The email about a man who drowned while boating on Lake Tahoe arrived in August, when Keith Cormican was in the Canadian Rockies searching for another drowning victim. A young man was missing somewhere in Alberta’s Lake Minnewanka, where the glacial water is so cold that swimmers wear wetsuits even in summer.
By now, Cormican is used to pleading messages from desperate strangers. Over the past seven years, he has become one of the nation’s top specialists in a gruesome yet critical task: locating and retrieving lost bodies in lakes or rivers.
A stout Midwesterner with a round face, gray mustache and glacier blue eyes, Cormican is not part of a government agency — no badge, no uniform. The 61yearold makes a living running a scuba diving shop in Wisconsin. But he has devoted much of the past 25 years to his macabre avocation, towing his customoutfitted search boat around the country and spending long days motoring across lakes in pursuit
of those no one can find. Since 2013 he has investigated more than 125 cases and located 32 bodies. He has searched for victims of murder and suicide, but most often for people who died in accidental drownings, which occur on popular lakes like Tahoe every year.
So he wasn’t surprised when he read Hayley Normoyle’s email on Aug. 12. Her brother Ryan had gone missing on Lake Tahoe two days earlier. “The Coast Guard has stopped their search,” she wrote. “If there’s anything you can do to help my brother, please contact me. … Anything would help me and my family.”
Normoyle learned about Cormican through a friend who had read about his success searching for drowning victims in alpine lakes across the Sierra Nevada. He had retrieved corpses that were lost for more than 10 years, including one that no one knew was there.
Cormican told Normoyle that if her family could persuade Lake Tahoe area authorities to lend him a boat, equipment and officers for a few days in September, he’d fly out and lead a new search.
Cormican harbors no heroic illusions about his work: He does not rescue survivors. Instead, he provides closure to distraught families of the missing, along with the proof needed to quickly settle a deceased person’s legal affairs.
“I just want to help families get that closure,” he says. “There’s just so many people who never get found.”
He finds it hard to turn down a despairing relative of a drowning victim. He has been one himself.
***
Twentytwo miles long and 12 miles wide, Lake Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America. Set in a granite basin high in the Sierra Nevada, it is spectacularly beautiful and famous for the crystalline clarity of its water. Fed by snowmelt from the surrounding mountains, it is also deceptively cold. Even in summer, the temperature just below the surface hovers at about 55 degrees, making it treacherous for an unsuspecting or careless visitor.
Millions of people visit the lake each year, and popular activities like wakeboarding, kayaking, scuba diving and Jet Skiing are supported by rental shops along the shore. Renting a boat is easy; if you are at least 18, all you need is a driver’s license and credit card.
Drownings occur yearround. Estimates put the official count at seven annually, but authorities believe the number to be higher. Some happen mercilessly fast. In October, a 30yearold woman out boating with her partner and six children fell into the lake and drowned within minutes. Her death was attributed to “cold water shock,” a physiological phenomenon that can cause erratic breathing and muscle failure and is often blamed for accidental drownings in Tahoe’s frigid waters. When a person goes missing on or near the lake, it can trigger search efforts by land, water and air. Authorities comb the surrounding landscape — sometimes for weeks. Police assign motorboat patrols. Sheriffs send out divers. The Coast Guard executes highlevel helicopter flyovers. Drone operators are called in to scan the area from just above the treetops. Cadaver dogs, trained to detect the scent of decomposing flesh — even underwater — sniff along shore and aboard boats.
The five counties abutting Lake Tahoe deploy marine units with special gear for underwater searches. Most have sonar devices that help illuminate the depths divers can’t reach. A few possess remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs — underwater drones outfitted with video cameras and mechanical claws used to identify and retrieve objects, including corpses.
Some Tahoe victims, like the woman who drowned in October, are quickly recovered on the lake’s surface. But those who sink can be difficult to find. Often there is little information to go on — where and when, how and why they vanished. Even with good leads on a drowning victim, surface currents can be hard to read. Tahoe also is the seconddeepest lake in the country. Its granite bed, sculpted during the last Ice Age, is covered with rocky rubble, as well as logs, rusted cars, stray tires, oil barrels and other refuse that complicate underwater searches.
The lake’s icy temperature is also a factor. When a person drowns, the lungs fill with water, which initially causes a body to sink. In warm water, the decomposing body will eventually bloat with gas and rise to the surface. But in frigid Tahoe, the putrefaction process is slowed. Sometimes, a corpse will remain submerged, effectively preserved, for years. Others, though, may emerge with congealed skin and ragged flesh, having been nibbled on by fish and other creatures.
In 2011, a group of divers found the body of a scuba diver wedged in a crevice 270 feet down. The 44yearold Reno man had drowned in 1994, but even after 17 years, the extreme cold had kept the diver’s body mostly intact — snug inside his neoprene wetsuit.
“We have a ton of people who have drowned here and never been recovered,” said Dave Hunt, a retired sergeant with the Placer County Sheriff ’s Office. This dark underside of Tahoe is well known among locals, some of whom are happy to indulge rumors about a sunken graveyard of pinstriped mafiosos allegedly dispatched from South Shore casinos in the 1950s. But precise statistics on drownings there are almost impossible to track, authorities say.
Searching Tahoe for a body, Hunt said, “is like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
***
Keith Cormican grew up the youngest of three children in an Air Force family that moved with his father’s career before settling in Merrill, a small town in central Wisconsin. Shortly after his father retired from the military, at age 39, he died in a car accident on a snowy morning. Cormican was just 16.
He bonded with his older brother, Bruce, a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician in the nearby town of Black River Falls. Cormican remembers hearing about drownings in the region’s myriad lakes. In some cases, the victims were never found. When bodies were recovered, it was often by means of a crude method: search boats dragging 5footlong grappling hooks across a lake bed.
“It’s kind of gruesome,” Cormican said. “That really bothered my brother. He thought, there’s got to be a better way.” With some buddies, the Cormicans formed an ad hoc scuba dive search team.
They recovered their first body in the early 1990s. Two young men drinking at a local pond one night decided to swim across. One didn’t make it. The next morning, the Cormican brothers set up on shore: Keith donned a wetsuit and oxygen tank and tethered himself by rope to Bruce onshore.
Water visibility was near zero. Keith remembers discovering the body in about 10 feet of water while feeling around in the muck with an outstretched hand. “Just grabbed him and hauled him up,” he said.
In 1995, Bruce joined an effort to find the body of a man who drowned in a local creek while canoeing with his children. During the search, he and two other firefighters performed a risky maneuver, walking in the swift current and feeling for the body with their feet. All three were pulled underwater. Bruce drowned.
“He was 40 years old,” Cormican said. “Made it one year longer than my dad did.”
Lost and racked with guilt about his brother’s death, Cormican says he “struggled for a while.”
A year later, though, he helped found the county’s first official diver search team and opened a dive shop in town, catering to tourists who travel there to explore the region’s sunken quarries. He viewed it as a hub for developing underwater search techniques. Through the dive team, he worked local drownings, one or two a year. Eventually he formalized the operation as a nonprofit: Bruce’s Legacy, a tribute to his brother.
His website launched in 2013, and inquiries poured in. “It didn’t take long at all,” Cormican said. In the seven years since, he has taken on more cases than he can remember — well over a hundred, he reckons, though he doesn’t keep count.
Cormican’s work provides solace for anguished families, and sometimes more.
Before he located the body of Randy Box, who drowned in a reservoir in Fresno County in 2017, Box’s family was on the brink of financial ruin, according to his widow.
Without a corpse, the state wouldn’t issue a death certificate, which Diana Box needed to claim her husband’s life insurance. Her only other option was to file a probate court petition requesting that he be declared “presumed dead.” It’s a common practice in missing person cases and natural disasters that cause mass deaths, when a person’s remains cannot be found or
identified. But in California, a family must wait five years before filing.
“I would have gone bankrupt,” Box said. By returning her husband’s body, Cormican “not only brought me peace of mind, he brought this financial peace to me as well.”
Apart from performing searches, Cormican trains county dive teams around the U.S. He has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in sonar equipment, an ROV and customizations to his boat, and has logged thousands of hours on the water. “My main goal was to get out and train these different agencies so no one would have to go through what we went through,” he said.
Most times when he decides to take a case, he loads his Chevy pickup truck with gear, hitches up his boat and hits the road. He’ll sometimes recruit a friend to help him on shortrun assignments. Often his longtime girlfriend accompanies him. Other times he goes alone.
“I never know where I’m gonna go next,” Cormican said. “I get tons of requests.”
***
Monday, Aug. 10, 2020, was a typically beautiful late summer day on Lake Tahoe, hot and sunny with a mild breeze. Ryan Normoyle, a 29yearold carpenter from New Jersey on a solo vacation in California, rented a boat at the south end of the lake and set out in the early afternoon, taking some video of the trip on his cell phone.
That night, his boat was found run aground on the lake’s eastern shore. His wallet and phone were aboard. A video on his phone made clear what had happened: he’d jumped into the chilly water for a dip but accidentally left the boat’s motor in gear. It pulled away from him at a steady clip, too fast for him to catch up.
GPS pings extracted from Ryan’s phone placed the incident in the middle of the massive lake, where the water is deepest: 1,645 feet. The lake’s bottom there is craggy and desolate, a pitchblack landscape where temperatures drop to near freezing — far too deep and treacherous for even the most experienced scuba divers.
Though equipped with the latest underwater search technology, Tahoe law enforcement agencies say they can’t promise the highest levels of proficiency in its use. With officers tasked with many other duties, rescue divers, sonar technicians and ROV pilots are lucky to train underwater once a month, they say.
“Some of our agencies have the tools but they don’t have the expertise on how to use them,” said Detective Damian Frisby of the El Dorado County Sheriff ’s Office. “How can you expect someone to know what to look for if they’ve never seen a dead body on the bottom of a large lake?”
These agencies also can’t carry on a search indefinitely — they taper off. That’s often the point, when the trail has gone completely cold, with all leads exhausted and authorities moving on, that Cormican arrives and gets to work.
By late August, the Normoyle family had become distressed. Their correspondence with Cormican became more urgent and emotional. Authorities typically pull patrol boats off the lake after Labor Day, when tourism dies down and weather worsens, so the window on the search for Ryan was closing.
“It was terrible waiting and knowing that the clock was ticking,” said Mary Normoyle, Ryan’s mother. “Either he’d never be recovered or we’d have to wait until next spring to get searchers out there again.”
In midSeptember, though, things began to fall into place.
Local law enforcement agreed to support Cormican with a boat and hightech search equipment. The Normoyles raised more than $40,000 via GoFundMe, part of which would help pay for Cormican’s airfare and lodging. Cormican carved out a brief window of time to conduct the search: four days in late September.
“It was coming down to the wire,” said Mary Normoyle. “We were looking at a nightmare.”
***
Cormican has worked in some of the country’s most notable waterways, including the Mississippi River and Lake Michigan. He has led searches beneath frozen lakes in Alaska and North Dakota and in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast. In 2016, he found the bodies of three drowned fishermen in Lake Superior after identifying their sunken boat on sonar at a depth of 400 feet.
But the cases that stick with him are the ones he has to leave unsolved. In November, he returned from a fruitless fourday search for a deer hunter on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Even knowing that each time out, he is more likely than not to fail, he takes tough cases yearround.
“I can deal with looking at decomposed bodies better than I can deal with not being successful at locating them,” Cormican said. “That’s the hardest part about my work, no doubt.
I get depressed about not finding them.”
Cormican has encountered corpses in all manner of decay. Once, while he inspected a body with his ROV, a crawfish crawled out of its skull. It wasn’t his first encounter with the creatures.
“They live in ’em but they don’t devour ’em,” Cormican said.
Occasionally he gets called abroad. In 2019, a case took him on a threeweek excursion to Nepal, where he orchestrated a search for two young Nepalese boys who drowned in a glacial lake not far from Mount Everest. He was able to recover one.
“That was not a vacation,” said Ken Gracey, a roboticist in Truckee who helped Cormican coordinate the trip to Nepal. He described the difficulties of bringing expensive sonar equipment through customs and how both men suffered altitude sickness on the mountainous trek to the lake’s 18,000foot elevation.
“Keith is highly determined,” Gracey said. “He just does not quit.”
Cormican is painstaking in his approach and particularly adept with his hightech tools. Once he establishes a search area, he drops down a torpedoshaped, sidescan sonar device and tows it beneath his boat in a grid pattern. The device bounces highfrequency signals off the underwater landscape and returns digital images to a computer screen aboard the boat, allowing Cormican to observe slices of the environment hundreds of feet below in minute, textured detail.
He is exceptionally skilled at deciphering these images. Where others may see clutter and static, Cormican sees a landscape of potential targets. He’s also deft at piloting an ROV, which can easily become stuck or entangled when driven by those with less training.
“Keith is, by far, the expert,” said Hunt, the former Placer sheriff ’s deputy.
There are few underwater search companies in the U.S., and most charge hefty upfront fees. Cormican says he feels awkward asking for payment. He doesn’t bill for his time or equipment. He asks those he agrees to help to cover his travel and lodging expenses, and to consider donating to Bruce’s Legacy.
Often, he finds ways to cut costs. On some of his searches in the Sierra, he has slept in a guest room at the home of Frisby, the El Dorado County detective. “He’d be there at the dinner table, looking at sonar images all night long,” Frisby said. “It just blew me away. … He tries to do the right thing on a minimal budget.” Cormican has made some of his most remarkable recoveries in the lakes dotting the Sierra Nevada. In the summer of 2017, he resolved six cold cases in the Tahoe area in just two months.
Two cases in particular had plagued authorities. In June 2016, a 20yearold college student from Reno named Marc Ma drowned in Tahoe while paddleboarding with friends off the lake’s West Shore. Then in June 2017, 41yearold San Leandro kayaker Dan Pham set out on a solo paddling trip in the same area and disappeared. In both instances, massive search efforts were mobilized but neither man was found.
In July 2017, Cormican was working nearby, recovering the body of an 11yearold boy who drowned in Stampede Reservoir near Truckee. He reached out to Hunt, the lead officer on the Ma case, asking if he could take a look in the area. Hunt was skeptical, but told Cormican to go ahead.
Three days later, Cormican called back. He had located Ma’s body in 240 feet of water. With the precise GPS coordinates, the county was able to recover it.
Hunt was astonished. “If we come into another situation like this, I know who to call,” he said at the time.
Soon after, the family of Dan Pham and officials in El Dorado County contacted Cormican. After five hours of searching, he located Pham’s body,
“Before Keith, I don’t remember any longterm recoveries” in the Tahoe area.