What you’re about to see has never been done before.
Today’s video is going to take you into one of the most difficult, shocking, and darkest cold case recoveries that I have ever been a part of.
See, back in 1980, Virginia and her two very young sons went missing in Wyoming and have never been seen again.
Decades later, their killer has confessed and drew a map to where he hid the bodies.
115.
They were murdered execution style, stuffed in the barrels, and then dumped into one of the nation’s most deepest lakes.
We have a confirmed target, multiple targets, nearly 400 feet deep, right where the killer said they would be.
And we’re faced with one of the most difficult challenges we’ve ever had.
[music] We’re going down 400 ft deep in a mountain lake to recover three bodies.
So, there’s a lot that can [music] go wrong.
Holy [ __ ] This is complicated.
[music] All right.
Hey guys, the claw needs to come up 30 ft.
Copy that.
[music] Essentially, we’re playing the world’s most difficult claw game.
[music] Virginia’s mother spent her entire life fighting to find answers.
[music] There aren’t a lot of words that really can express this particular [music] moment.
[music] See a barrel.
Very rusty old barrel.
And it’s pretty well intact still.
46 years ago, a mother and her two little boys went bird hunting and never came home.
Their names were Virginia, [music] Richard, and Reagan.
The man they went to go meet was Gerald Uden.
He was Virginia’s ex-husband.
He had adopted those boys and he was their father for 33 years.
Gerald said that they never showed up that day.
[music] We don’t we don’t know how it’s going to react coming up through the atmospheres as it’s been down there for 46 years.
If I do have to get in the water, we can get in the water about 150 ft.
Watch it as it’s coming up to maybe I don’t know.
In 1974, [music] Virginia was a 26-year-old single mom raising two little boys.
Richard and Reagan [music] in Riverton, Wyoming.
Her family had come from Pennsylvania, and her mother, Claire, was here in Wyoming, too.
Claire was deeply involved [music] in their lives and fiercely protective of her daughter and her grandson.
That spring, Virginia wanted to find out what an [music] old rifle was worth.
It was a Winchester 22 that had belonged to her grandfather.
Someone she knew recommended a local man who knew guns.
His name was Gerald Uden.
Gerald was in his early 30s and a Navy veteran who worked at a nearby mine.
He had already been married twice, but he didn’t have children.
He wanted a family, and when Virginia brought him that rifle, the two of them hit it off immediately.
Things moved quickly.
Within about three [music] months, they were married.
Richard was five, Reagan was four.
Gerald eventually adopted them both, and taking on the responsibility of being their father, but [music] the marriage began to unravel.
Within roughly 2 years, Virginia and Gerald had split up.
Virginia and the boys remained part of his life.
And then Gerald met Alice.
Obviously, we’ve got Forest Service, got law enforcement, and then we have two uh big underwater drones that are searching right now.
Those buoys are basically marking the the spot, the area where the the barrel was found.
We’re going to just have these drop straight down to the bottom.
Yep.
We’ll have you lift up a little bit.
He’ll be able to see the cage and the drone or the barrel, and then we’ll start moving moving you into place.
Does that make sense?
Yep, it does.
In a nutshell, we built that uh clamshell bucket that is going to be lowered down off the front of my boat with the winch.
It’s a big metal cage that’s basically going to straddle the barrel.
The barrel is laying on its side down at 400, right?
380.
380.
Um, and it’s just kind of in a silty bottom, right?
No rocks really.
So, it’s kind of a muddy, silty [music] lake bottom.
This is literally a needle in a hay stack.
Luckily, we have the underwater drones and they are down there giving us a picture.
Uh they give us a live feed back up to the boat so we can see kind of where we’re at.
Once we get the basket down [music] about what 10 feet above the barrel, we’ll slow everything down, make sure that we’re pretty much right above it as much as possible.
Once it’s over the barrel and we feel good about it, we’re going to lower it down.
It’s basically going to sit on top of it like a box.
And then we have a second line that we pull.
And as we pull that, it closes the clamshell and it basically just goes down and puts it scoopers underneath the barrel.
It’s going to lift it up out of the silt.
And then once we are sure that it’s already all the way in, we pull that line tight and we have some latches on there that are going to automatically lock.
Once those lock, it’s good to go.
And we’re going to reposition.
Um, we’re going to use the same winch line that we just used to close the clam shell and we’re going to run that through the winch and we’re going to spool it up and slowly bring it up to the top.
[music] Stacy with Wofine took it upon herself to be a [music] voice and fight to find out where Virginia, Richard, and Reagan were.
So she started to write Gerald [music] in prison.
She kept writing.
She sent him maps and he marked where he dropped them.
She took that information to build those with OSAR, organized search and recovery, [music] and he listened to her.
Underwater ROVs soon found a barrel 388 ft down.
[music] Next to it, a smaller object, the same size of the container Gerald described for the boys.
So Dave Sparks and his team built a 400 lb steel [music] claw for one job.
Its job was to get around that barrel, lock on, and hold it for nearly 400 ft.
We have three days, one target, and [music] one question.
Is Virginia and the boys inside those barrels?
All right, so right now we made it out.
We’re staged at about 400 ft deep.
The drone is down.
And the drone is going to be coming up which is going to give us an exact location where Dave is going to drop the most badass claw that has ever been made for anything like this.
You’ve never seen anything like this whatsoever, let alone a cold case recovery.
Once the claw goes down, we’re then going to use the drones to guide it down onto the barrel and the other object, the trash can that we’re looking for as well.
So, it’s going to be a pretty intricate process.
Right now, the drone is coming up at 350 ft.
Once it surfaces, uh, we’ll have pinpoint precision where to drop the claw.
And then, yeah, it’s a big game of depth adjustments topside.
The wind’s cooperating right now.
So, that’s a really big deal.
Wind is really the enemy in this scenario.
And if anybody knows this area where we’re at right now, Fre uh Fremont Lake, 700 7,100 ft of elevation, um it’s not easy to do something like this anywhere, let alone at 7,100 ft elevation.
One of the deepest lakes in America.
[bell] [music] Stand by.
Alice Pruny was 37 with five children and three previous marriages of her own.
She and Gerald married in 1976 [music] and settled into a life together in Wyoming.
But Gerald’s responsibilities to Virginia and the boys came with him.
Money and visitation became sources [music] of tension between the two households.
Gerald was building a new marriage while still connected to the family he had left.
Then came a plan for the boys to spend some time with Gerald.
They were supposed to go [music] bird hunting and Virginia would come along.
[singing] drone is at 100 ft.
40 ft.
Thank you.
20 ft.
There she is.
I’m pulling the drone in and changing the battery.
So, right now on using the sonar to do sweeping scans cuz it’s a fixed scan.
And so, as I go back and forth, it shows me objects with shadows.
Having seen where this location is on the right hand side is a bunch of rocks right there.
Like a bunch of debris, a bunch of things popping up that’s not flat with the bottom of the the surface.
Over here on the lower left is like a a little blip and that’s probably a a boulder.
I don’t know, twoman boulder or something like that.
There’s a big rock in a barrel is the left one.
Nice.
So, right now we have the base case set up.
There’s a wireless transmitter that’s connected to the base case, which is giving us a live feed of the ROV, the underwater drone.
What this is going to allow is for Dave to have this in his view, the claw in his view, and be able to control and maneuver the boat in order for at, you know, as much accuracy as possible.
Doing this at 400 ft, 430 ft is really challenging.
So, making sure that we have all of this right here synced together.
Hopefully going to allow it to be a flawless process.
Just about to the bottom.
Oh, there’s the bottom right there.
Oh, careful.
So, now this drone is going to attach to the claw soon as he can find me.
And then that means he is my eyes on the prize.
On September 12th, Virginia borrowed her mother’s Ford station wagon.
She gathered up Richard and Reagan and they [music] headed out to meet Gerald.
They brought the 22 caliber rifle with them.
Virginia was 32, Richard was 11, [music] and Reagan was 10.
That was the last time Clare would see any of them.
When they didn’t come home, Clare raised [music] the alarm.
The obvious place to start was Gerald.
His answer was simple.
They never showed up, and for weeks, there was no sign of them.
I need [music] to reposition the crane.
The game plan is take the attachment down.
Once we have it in the water secured, we are going to have the tension on the winch to reposition this arm because this arm needs to be um on the straight out position.
Yeah.
When did you first hear about this case?
2001 when I started with the coroner’s office.
But before that, I remember being a child and having these children on milk cartons.
Really?
So, I was 3 years old when when these guys went missing.
I’m down.
I’m down.
Got to run.
I’m safe.
I’m safe.
I’m safe.
Down a little bit.
Okay.
Pretty good.
On October 4th, someone found a car near Trout Creek Canyon off the side of a cliff.
It was Claire’s Ford.
Someone had tried to push it into the canyon, but it had caught on the rocks.
Pine branches had been placed over it as though whoever left [music] it there was trying to keep something from being seen.
Inside, investigators found Virginia’s blood.
[music] Claire eventually bought burial plots in Glendo for Virginia and the boys.
On April 4th, 2013, Cla died.
She was 92 years old.
She had spent more than three decades waiting for answers, and she never got them.
She was buried beside the spaces she had set aside for her daughter and grandsons.
Just months after her death, the case would finally break open.
Got the cage, the grapple down in the water.
Um, and now it’s just a matter of this is the part where we play the claw game.
We have two drones down.
One drone is going to sit on the barrel and then the other drone is going to watch the grappler and also the other drone guide us into where the barrel is.
Drone one has found the claw.
Now he’s uh you’ll see here in a second he’s going to be hooking up to it.
And once he’s hooked onto it, then all we got to do is have drone one go over and find drone two.
Drone two is sitting on the barrel.
Be a business, baby.
So, here’s our winch line.
Old boy’s got to descend a little bit.
He’s going to find us.
So, he has a terrain follow feature that basically allows him to cruise within like 5 6 10 ft or whatever of the uh lake bed so he doesn’t crash into it.
There’s our claw sitting kind of funny.
Coming up about 5.
Uh, we got a line tangled.
Hey, hold the drone right there for me, please.
On that on that shot, please.
Hold there.
Come here.
So, it looks like we’ve got the cage basically dropped right next to the buoy line, which means there’s potential that it’s tangled up.
We’re going to lift it up a little bit.
Let’s see what that does and uh see if we can get her free.
Okay, bring her up 10 ft.
This is one, be advised, we have the barrel in the same screen as a cage.
Go ahead and just uh keep uh the best shot you can uh on this for me right now because we need to get that cage up as it comes up.
We’re hoping it’s going to free.
Here it goes.
Just try to keep that in your frame and keep it there.
Keep it there.
Keep it there.
Perfect.
It’s coming.
That’s going to free up, right?
Get a little closer if you can.
So, we’re tangled up on our buoy line.
We’re closed.
Yeah, we got to come.
Hey, uh, Sparks, looks like our grapple is closed.
So, we’re going to be coming up for a fresh start.
You guys want to come up and use a battery?
This right here, this line is the buoy line that you’re seeing right there.
That green buoy in the water.
It looks like it just got slightly tangled around our the frame of our um claw.
Drone wand, please keep an eye on that buoy on the bottom.
I want to make sure we don’t move that as we uh raise our bucket.
We’re going to have to kind of maneuver here a little bit.
All right.
Uh looks like our claw is clear.
So, we’re going to bring the uh claw to the top and uh open it back up and then we will get back on that mark and head back down.
This is what you’re seeing right here.
But look what’s happening in real life over there.
Look.
Pan over there.
That’s our drone boat, right?
Drone boat number one, that’s this view that we’re seeing right here.
Drone boat number two is them right there.
Those guys have a continuous power drone, which means it uh doesn’t run out of batteries.
It’s just got a tether and it’s got continuous power.
Alice had been married before Gerald.
One of those husbands was a man named Ronald Holtz, a Vietnam veteran she met while [music] working as a nurse at a VA hospital.
They married in 1974.
After Christmas that year, [music] Ronald disappeared.
So before Gerald ever met Alice, she already had a husband who had vanished.
Years later, one of Allison’s [music] sons told investigators something he could not forget.
[music] His mother had admitted shooting Ronald while he slept, putting his body in a large cardboard [music] barrel and dumping it into an abandoned mine.
[music] You can’t come up a foot.
We’re on the bottom right now, so whatever you got to do, we got to come up.
That information didn’t [music] lead straight to an arrest.
And investigators searched the mine more than once without finding him.
For years, they had this terrible account of what might have happened to Ronald, but they still needed to find Ronald.
We’re tracking straight south of the target.
[music] In August of 2013, another excavation finally [music] reached human remains, a skull with a gunshot wound.
Ronald Holtz had been found.
30 ft straight south.
So, the claw needs to go 30 ft straight south.
Hey, investigators had what they needed to move against her.
They went to Missouri and on September [music] 26th of 2013, Alice was arrested for Ronald’s murder.
Sparks, too.
Are [music] you guys on the target?
We can see the barrel.
We just cannot [music] hold still over it.
Every drift moves the claw.
Every correction is offset.
And until this boat is steady, [music] nothing else matters.
So, we’re going to go back to uh the dock, reset, sit down, talk through everything.
For some reason, we were losing communication.
We weren’t having good comms with the drone, the visibility.
If I can’t see on this screen in front of me where the uh drone is, then I certainly can’t find the barrel, and I can’t just if they call out instructions and say, “Okay, 10 to the left.”
Well, I go to 10 to the left, and I got 380 or 400 ft of lag time on this giant pendulum of a crane or a grapple arm behind below me.
So when I move the the grapple’s going to move like 10 12 seconds later.
So not only that, but I can’t make super precise movements up here just because I’m in a 40ft boat that’s weighed down super heavy and I’m running thrusters or I’m running jet pumps for control.
So if I had thrusters and stuff, I’d be a little bit more precise.
We know where it’s at.
We’ve got it marked here um now on the uh charts.
So we’ve been within 5 10 ft of it pretty much for the last hour.
We’re just blind.
Can’t can’t see anything.
Gerald believed Alice was being implicated in [music] what had happened to Virginia and the boys.
He wanted to make clear that she wasn’t responsible for their murder.
And in trying to clear Alice, he admitted that he was.
For 33 years, Gerald had kept investigators from the answer.
Now, his wife has been arrested for [music] killing a completely different person.
And he is confessing to killing his former wife and both of his adopted sons.
Two people who had spent decades [music] living as husband and wife were now in custody in separate murder cases.
In court, he described what happened the day Virginia and the boys disappeared.
They had met him just as planned.
Gerald took them to a spot near an irrigation canal.
The boys wanted to shoot.
Virginia took [music] the rifle out of the car and Gerald tested it and then he turned it on her.
He shot Virginia in the back of the head.
He shot Richard near the station wagon in [music] the back of the head and Reagan saw what was happening and ran, but he fell into a ditch.
Gerald walked over and shot him too in the back of the head.
The rifle he used was the same family [music] rifle Virginia had brought him when they very first met.
We ended up accidentally dragging the buoy with the grappler off site.
So we had to pull both the buoy up and the grappler to put some extra springs in it.
We’ve done that.
We have the buoy up here.
We’re going to reposition it and then we’re going to get to work.
It shouldn’t take much longer to have this coordinated because before this little mishap happened, um it was working really well.
Uh we could see well, uh the drones were in great coordination with one another.
So, we’re working the f we’re fine-tuning the kinks and it’s pretty much streamlined from here on out.
Or we’re off from the bottom, I think.
Got it.
Get on that line.
[music] Right there.
That’s that reflective tape.
345.
Come up and use our sonar to track the drop.
[music] Put a bunch more lights on it.
So, we’re within like 10 15 ft of that damn barrel.
We’ve got some good way [music] points marked here on the Garmin.
No, roughly where I need to be.
It’s kind of drizzling.
The weather’s like not sure what it wants to do, but fortunately, it’s not terrible.
We got another hour of searching before we lose all our life.
[music] We are guiding our friends who are unable to go full speed in this type of uh storm.
It’s raining really hard.
So, we’re just trying to take our time safely to get them back to the to the uh dock and we’ll regroup there and do it all again tomorrow.
[music] Overall, I think today was a huge success.
We learned that we were capable of getting the claw down there successfully guiding it with the drones.
Now it’s just fine-tuning uh positioning lights as well as a few other parameters, but huge success because we know it’s going to work.
[music] So, we got nailed by a storm and we said, “All right, we’re out of power.
You guys got to get back safely.”
So, we had to tie up our ropes cuz we left the basket jaws down at 400 ft deep in the middle of the lake about within 100 ft of the barrel because it doesn’t make sense to bring it all the way back here because it’s a to move around.
So, we dropped it.
Took us a few minutes to tie up the lines.
Got them tidied up.
Put a buoy on them.
They’re floating out there.
Tied up nice and safe.
So, you know, if a fisherman comes out bright and early, if he sees like a orange, you know, buoy, he’s going to avoid it and he’ll avoid our line.
We also have two other buoys out there that are basically kind of like one is on the north end, one is on the south end.
We know that our target is right in the middle.
10 hours on the water today searching.
We We went through probably 10 to 12 different batteries on the ROVs, the underwater drones.
Try to get as much sleep as we can and reset for tomorrow.
Let’s go.
[music] Great people doing great things together to better the community.
And that’s what it’s all about.
Doing things that are going to enhance the world around you, making an impact.
We’re trying to get an earlier start today.
Yesterday we had a little bit later start just because we had to get all set up and everything.
So [music] Gerald described hiding the bodies and abandoned mines near Lewon.
The station wagon was dumped at Trout [music] Creek Canyon, but weeks later he said he went back to Virginia and the boys.
He put Virginia in a 55gallon [music] drum.
He put Richard and Reagan together in a smaller roughly 35gallon aluminum container.
He sealed them, put holes in them so that they would fill with water, and then he took them deep out on the Fremont Lake.
Then he dropped them overboard in what he believed was about 450 ft of water.
[music] He was sentenced to life in prison in 2014.
Alice was also convicted of seconddegree murder for killing her ex-husband, Ronald Holes, and was also sentenced to life.
Are you good?
All right.
So, after yesterday, today we’re going to do some reinforcements.
Bigger, better, more efficient.
We’re going to use my dive lights that I would normally use when I’m diving.
So, we have the Dive Right CX3s that we’re going to put onto the Jaws itself.
They’re rated for 330 ft.
We’re trying to get down near 400 ft.
So, we’re going to see what these lights are made of.
We’re also using the solar light that I would usually have on my wrist.
It’s also rated for 100 m, 330 ft.
We also bought some Neos that we’ve reinforced.
We don’t know if these are going to work, but it’s going to be pretty cool to see if they do work.
We’ve reinforced them with uh silicone tape, Gorilla tape, and some silicone gel in the seals.
So, we’ll see if it works.
This should give us a lot better clarity down there, visibility as far as being able to identify the barrel, the jaws, coordinate everything together.
So, more light’s going to allow us to be more efficient.
Why don’t you think we had any success yesterday?
It was successful.
Every time you learn something, John, that’s true.
It’s successful.
[music] And that is where Stacy comes into the story.
[music] Stacy founded Wildife, an organization that helps search for missing people and supports the families left waiting.
Her husband, Bobby, works right alongside her in searches and logistics.
This is something that they have chosen to dedicate their life to.
And Stacy understands what those unanswered questions can do to you.
She has spent decades without knowing what happened to a missing loved one in her own life.
[music] So when she looks at a case like this, she understands that the passing years don’t make the need for answers disappear.
Stacy and Bobby helped keep this [music] family’s name in front of people.
Their commitment is a huge part of why this recovery attempt is even possible.
In 2026, [music] Stacy sat down and wrote Gerald in prison.
She wanted him to help bring Virginia and the boys home for a proper burial.
At first, he denied killing them, even after his guilty [music] plea, even after all those years in prison.
But Stacy kept asking.
She kept fighting.
Eventually, he returned to his confession and again said the bodies were in Fremont Lake.
She pressed him to be more specific.
She even sent him maps.
He marked them, identifying exactly where he had launched his boat from and where he dropped the containers into the lake.
Take the end of Brian’s rope and put it on that cleat.
Build a homemade anchor system here.
That’s going to be interesting.
Drag it then cuz that’s the second one right there.
If we go try to find other anchors and stuff, we’ll probably be done with it for today.
So, kind of seems like we might as well just take advantage of the rest of the time we’ve got before weather comes in right now and do what we can.
Anchors are frustrating.
Roger.
I’m going to uh nose into the wind uh today, obviously, rather than what we tried yesterday.
So, I’m about 200 ft away from my targets.
Copy that.
It’ll take us to over there.
The wind is picking up today.
We need something to hold us stationary.
So anchors are necessary.
But the problem is just anchoring at this depth is so difficult.
[music] Cut the lines.
I’m done with these anchors.
They’re not going to work.
This is the you’re tired of playing around and shit’s about to happen.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, it’s been a little bit of a frustrating day so far just because this is a very complicated recovery.
I mean, bottom line, uh the weather’s not been ideal.
We got pretty sporty a second ago and now it looks like as soon as we got back to the marina, it’s clearing up.
We got what we needed.
It’s literally exactly kind of what we were looking for.
All right, we got these blocks loaded up.
Running them right back to the boat ramp.
Load them up one by one.
Drop them with anchor lines.
Like I told you earlier, he was a little chill about the process that was about to take place [music] where there’s a problem, there’s a solution.
Those are solutions you see sitting right there big time.
[music] There we go.
Hit the bottom.
We’re on bottom.
So, we need to put a buoy right here.
Crabbing in Alaska is so deadly from all the rope going down to the ocean floor.
This causes a lot of deaths this process right here.
One misstep, one wrong one wrong foot, you’re going straight to the bottom with it.
All right, we’re on the bottom.
We’ve got our uh,000lb concrete blocks down.
Uh, this one went down about 400 350 ft.
That one over there went down forever.
Not 100% sure what [clears throat] happened with that one.
It It took a whole spool of 400t rope plus another 100.
So anyways, we got our anchors down.
We got some rope ran to them 30 40 feet away from the barrel right now and I can just kind of swing the front of the boat over there and the anchors are going to hold us from pull pushing too far forward.
So So my two main dive CX3s, they’ll be pointed straight down through the jaws that will be open.
So it’ll give us a beam across the floor [music] straight down.
Drop bucket 5 ft down.
We are just about there.
You can see here on our screen we’ve got jaws essentially directly over the barrel.
Anchors are holding perfectly.
Now we’re just making small fine-tune adjustments and getting ready to drop down.
Oh, we are like right over it.
This is one drop.
5 ft.
Five down.
Five down.
Dropping 5 ft.
So close.
Oh, we are right on top of it, dude.
Copy that.
Literally inches away from returning somebody’s loved one that’s been missing for a half a century.
This crazy in one of the deepest lakes in America, nothing like this has [music] ever been done.
This is what all of those letters, all of that planning, and all of this equipment has led us to.
Every small movement on that screen matters to the crew above.
We need to know where the barrel is, where the claw is, and whether we’re actually in position to make this work.
This is a big moment.
It’s uh I actually can’t believe my eyes right now.
The our bucket is directly over the barrel like perfect orientation.
It doesn’t need to be twisted.
It’s like literally just sitting there poised.
Should be coming up here in a minute.
A mission like this takes an enormous amount of work before a boat ever leaves the dock.
Somebody has to keep making the [music] calls, connect people who can solve different parts of the problem, and stay with it when the answers are expensive and [music] very complicated.
Bill took that on with Eric and the rest of the team, working right alongside him.
Bill leads OSAR, [music] short for organized search and rescue.
He’s a former Wyoming Highway Patrol trooper, and alongside him is his OSAR partner, Eric But who also leads Black Flag Response.
Bill and Eric helped turn Stacy’s information into an operation.
They brought together people with different skills, worked with law enforcement, and assembled the equipment and support needed to get a search underway.
Sparks the one confirm all the way down.
Affirm all the way down.
All right, go.
Uh, we are on the ground straddling the barrel with jaws.
And now we’re just going to get the drone feed back up.
So, we got live view here.
We’re going to close the clam shell and bring the bucket in.
If we’re at a weird angle or anything’s like p [music] p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p poking out funny, we could just like just tear that barrel right open, which we don’t want to do.
We’re trying to just gently basically scoop underneath it.
And that’s the way we designed the clam shell to be able to do so.
This is one advise when you guys have feedback.
This is the moment Dave and [music] his team built Jaws for.
The barrel is right there.
All right, all stations, are we ready to close the clamshell?
Keep pulling on there.
All right, boys.
Let’s do it.
All right, let’s close it up.
[music] We are beginning to close the jaws right now.
Clamshell is closing.
Moving.
It’s going.
Keep coming.
Keep coming.
Keep coming.
Keep coming.
Keep coming.
Keep coming.
Good grab.
Keep going.
Keep coming.
Let’s go.
Go up.
Up.
Up.
Up.
Up.
Yeah.
Jaws closed.
I believe we have the barrel.
Keep going.
Hold there real quick so we can uh confirm.
We’re going to hold the position of the jaws.
It’s off the bottom now.
It has nearly 400 ft to travel [music] and everybody up here is watching that grip.
Nobody is breathing until it is secured to the surface.
We’re good.
Go up.
Got it.
We are no loss from here.
I keep thinking about what this moment means for Stacy and Bobby.
Their [music] work helped get us here and now we’re close enough to see a possible answer.
Everybody wants this to be the recovery that finally brings this family home.
We got the barrel.
Now let’s just hope she’s in there.
When it bit down, we closed the clam shell.
It’s basically picked up a bunch of dirt and sediment around the barrel.
So, it exposed that in there with the barrel.
So, as we go up, you’ll see it’s going to wash out this trail of debris.
As that happens, the clam shell is just going to close tighter and tighter and tighter because all of the lifting force of our mechanism right now is pulling on the closing mechanism of the clam shell.
So, [music] we’re no longer lifting.
This is one interative.
Are we readying a swimmer in the water to secure the bucket?
That’s a negative.
No swimmers in the water.
It’s really [snorts] special stuff.
You know, she’s been missing for almost a half a century.
She’s got no family left.
A lot of people had to come together, a lot of resources, personnel, organizations, assets drawn to get to this moment.
10 ft.
There’s the drone right there.
5 4 3 Okay, see a barrel.
Very rusty old barrel.
And it’s pretty well intact still.
All right, let’s get a couple safety tethers on here.
[music] [music] [music] [music] There aren’t a lot of words that really can express this particular moment.
There’s a lot of things that had to take place as you guys saw.
A lot of mitigation, a lot of people, organizations, assets, resources, all to come together to get to this moment.
Right now, this is one down, one more to go.
[music] Went down, right?
We can lift it.
We can set it like this and then we can manually move it.
Yeah, keep it on all corners.
Fantastic work.
Everybody, all of you spent time together.
Really grateful for the team and all the wonderful support that we’ve had in this time to [music] came here hoping [music] we could finally bring Virginia and the boys home.
When the barrel was examined, it contained only lake sediment, no human remains.
[music] That was a hard answer to hear.
There is still the smaller object that appears to be a trash can.
It was not recovered during this operation.
And until it is recovered and examined, [music] we don’t know whether it’s connected to Virginia and or the boys.
Stacy, and Bobby kept working for this family, kept fighting [music] for answers.
Bill, Eric, and the people they brought together made this mission possible.
Pilots, the engineers, the volunteers, and the investigators got a barrel out of a place [music] we can barely reach.
I’m grateful to every one of them.
The result hurts, but the reason we came here is still the same.
Virginia, Richard and Reagan still deserve to be found, and their family still deserves answers.
[music]
