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EnolaGaia Joined: 19 Jul 2004 Total posts: 1304 Location: USA Gender: Male |
 Posted: 19-09-2013 04:12 Post subject: |
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I've noticed a number of commenters (on news sites, etc.) have expressed incredulity that the authorities didn't drag the lake when the 3 teenagers went missing in 1970.
There's an explanation - at the time, no one thought they were going to the lake.
According to scattered statements in some of the news stories ... When the kids disappeared, they were allegedly heading to a football game or other event in another town. Later / additionally it was suggested there was reason to believe they may have decided to go hunting in an area a very few miles southeast of the lake.
Foss Lake appears to have been a third destination the kids never alleged nor anyone else suspected. |
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| EnolaGaia Joined: 19 Jul 2004 Total posts: 1304 Location: USA Gender: Male |
| Posted: 19-09-2013 04:47 Post subject: |
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The description of the cars' discovery at this site (p. 2):
http://newsok.com/investigators-work-to-identify-six-bodies-found-in-oklahomas-foss-lake/article/3884154/?page=2
... specifically states the cars were found when the personnel testing the sonar were asked to 'take pictures' of the lake bottom adjacent to the boat launch (i.e., the boat ramp), apparently in preparation for installing 'new tarmac'.
So ... It's even creepier to find the police sonar trainees wouldn't have ever found the cars unless someone asked them to survey the boat ramp area as a favor.
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| GerdaWordyer Grey Joined: 16 Apr 2012 Total posts: 1 Location: ForteanWorthTX Gender: Female |
| Posted: 22-09-2013 09:55 Post subject: |
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| creeply oklahoma-- will share this with ex-texies and ex okies. |
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| EnolaGaia Joined: 19 Jul 2004 Total posts: 1304 Location: USA Gender: Male |
| Posted: 22-09-2013 13:13 Post subject: |
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Just for the record ...
The two dark spots I noted earlier (on Google Maps; satellite view) are _not_ the vehicles.
According to this news story from the _Christian Science Monitor_ site:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0919/Cars-in-Foss-Lake-shed-light-on-Okla.-cold-cases
... the cars were discovered only about 50 feet from the end of the boat ramp.
Google Maps indicates the dark spots I mentioned earlier were located much more than 50 feet from the end of the boat ramp.
Still, this makes it all the creepier (IMHO). For 40+ years people have been launching and retrieving their watercraft with two missing vehicles and six missing bodies 50 feet away and only 12 feet 'down'. |
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| Cochise Great Old One Joined: 17 Jun 2011 Total posts: 1104 Location: Gwynedd, Wales Age: 58 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 23-09-2013 07:16 Post subject: |
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| It does make you wonder about the quality of water in this particular lake! I suppose the two things go together muddy water might put people off swimming, though it doesn't seem to stop most kids. (I don't swim). |
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| EnolaGaia Joined: 19 Jul 2004 Total posts: 1304 Location: USA Gender: Male |
| Posted: 25-09-2013 23:28 Post subject: |
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Here's an update ... Initial examination of the vehicles seems to suggest accidents. More specifically, there's evidence suggesting the 1970 event (3 teenagers) involved the car running into the lake at speed.
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Engine fan indicates crash for Camaro; older car may have rolled in Foss
After Oklahoma Highway Patrol Lake Patrol Division pulled two vehicles out of the waters of Foss Lake last week, troopers went to work to begin to investigate and answer the question of how the two vehicles landed in the water more than 40 years ago.
Trooper George Hoyle said factual evidence supports that both vehicles, a1969 Chevrolet Camaro and a1952 Chevrolet, came to rest at the lake bottom because of an accident and not because of foul play.
Both vehicles, which landed in the lake a year-and-a-half apart were due to unfortunate accidents, said Hoyle.
"We do know the vehicle was running when it hit the water," said Hoyle when asked about the Camaro, during an interview Tuesday at Foss Lake.
The two vehicles, brought to the shore on Sept. 17, were spotted during a training exercise with the OHP and a new piece of sonar equipment. The decades-old cars contained six sets of remains, which have since been taken to Tulsa for examination by the state's medical examiner for DNA analysis. Before the cars were taken away from the boat ramp, a mechanic was called in to examine each vehicle for a post impact report.
ENGINE DAMAGE CAMARO
The Camaro is believed to be owned by Jimmy Allen Williams, who went missing on Nov. 20, 1970 with two other teenagers. Evidence supports that the Camaro, a standard, was found in low gear.
"One of the very first inklings that we had evidence of a possible collision was from the arm of the fan," said Hoyle. "The fan looked like it had gotten into the radiator a little bit and also the bottom of the frame. The motor mount, the one on the passenger side, it was knocked off. It had broken the fuel pump."
Hoyle said the drive shaft was knocked out of the 1969 Camaro.
"One scenario is the driver didn't know where he was at," said Hoyle. "He was driving a little faster then he should have. He ended up striking the water, which was a pretty good impact to the undercarriage of the vehicle."
In October of 1962, the Foss Lake park opened its first recreational facilities, including the boat ramp, where the vehicles were found 50 feet away and in 12 feet deep water. It is believed the ramp had some lights but not to the level of what the boat ramp has today.
The water level was a foot-and-a-half lower then it is today, Hoyle said.
The lake was still in the process of being filled to conservation levels. Construction on the dam wasn't complete until February 1961.
U.S. Highway 73, the road just south of the lake which connects driver's to Marina Road, was a gravel road in 1970, Hoyle said.
Hoyle said he has looked into the weather the night of Nov. 20, 1970. The high temperature was recorded at 69 degrees with a low of 29. There was no record of rain, although some have said it rained the weekend before the three went missing.
"We are going to have to address how that vehicle ended up in the opposite direction," said Hoyle. "There are a lot of things we don't know, right now."
Stalactites, which are formed from water seeping from a ceiling and leaving tubes, were found in the Camaro, Hoyle said.
Stalactites can't grow underwater but must have open air.
17-YEAR-OLD VEHICLE, NO ENGINE DAMAGE
The 1952 Chevrolet, believed by law enforcement agencies to likely be the vehicle three friends were last seen on April 8, 1969. Nora Marie King Duncan, of Canute, John A. Porter, of Elk City, and Clayburn Hammock of Sayre are believed to have driven from Canute to Foss Lake and were never seen again.
Witnesses from 1969 have told officials that the 17-year-old vehicle had to be pushed to be started, said Hoyle.
The vehicle also had mechanical brakes.
"It most likely rolled into the water," said Hoyle. "It had no engine damage and no undercarriage damage at all. We did find a wheel well that was damage, but it was old damage."
SOURCE: http://www.thedailyelkcitian.com/local-news/crime/2810-engine-fan-indicates-crash-for-camaro-older-car-may-have-rolled-in-foss
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| Spookdaddy Cuckoo Joined: 24 May 2006 Total posts: 3923 Location: Midwich Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 05-10-2013 13:38 Post subject: |
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| EnolaGaia wrote: | | ...Still, this makes it all the creepier (IMHO). For 40+ years people have been launching and retrieving their watercraft with two missing vehicles and six missing bodies 50 feet away and only 12 feet 'down'. |
A guy I work with - many years ago, when going through a very bad period in his life - tried to kill himself by jumping off a cliff. He ended up unconscious and badly damaged, not on the rocks at the bottom, or washed away to sea, but on a ledge only around thirty feet below the brow of the cliffs. (My initial comment on his telling me this - 'What, you jumped off a cliff...and missed?' was fortunately received with good humour - sometimes I just can't help myself.) Had he not eventually regained consciousness he'd very possibly still be there.
This was around twenty years ago, in an area very popular with walkers and picnickers, close to a busy car park and not far from a main road - had things turned out differently there's a distinct possibility that over the intervening years tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of individual journeys would have passed within fifty feet of his body while it lay on that ledge.
The Foss Lake incident resonates with something I was thinking about in response to a couple of other discussions we've had about missing persons.
There seems to be a natural tendency to assume sinister goings on when considering any unexplained, non-voluntary missing persons case. But, isn't the idea that the missing just go missing by mistake (which I suspect is possibly much more common than we credit) just as scary as the idea that they've been abducted or made away with via some human agency?
In fact - is it not maybe the case that this scenario is somehow actually more frightening to us: that we are fragile bundles of organic tissue with an exaggerated belief in our insulation from harm and the whimsies of chance is actually more frightening than the idea that there are bad people out there ready to do us harm; after all, the former is a constant, the latter just a possibility.
I wonder if we create the sinister element because, paradoxically, it's easier for us to deal with.
The act of human intervention suggests there was some kind of conscious narrative, a drive, a motive involved the act of going missing - a point to it, if you like - and however unpalatable that is I wonder if there's something in human nature that finds it easier to deal with than the alternative. We don't like to think of sudden absence as the result of a random, pointless and unattended accident - we'd rather give that absence a point, however horrible that point may have been. |
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| EnolaGaia Joined: 19 Jul 2004 Total posts: 1304 Location: USA Gender: Male |
| Posted: 05-10-2013 14:54 Post subject: |
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I agree that it somehow seems less threatening to believe horrible things occur via deliberate actions of sinister others (whom we can labor to avoid) rather than our own ability to fatally f**k up on our own.
It seems to me there's another element in play here. There's a certain hubris in assuming some mystery or anomaly (e.g., a disappearance) simply _has_ to be the result of deliberate human agency, and it can't be reasonably ascribed to dumb luck, random weirdness, bad breaks, etc., etc. This seems to belie a presumption that only humans can make strange things happen - i.e., that humans are the dominant cause for anything and everything.
The older I get, the more I suspect this hubris underlies a lot of the conspiracy theories I once found interesting.
Anyway ... Either or both these factors help to explain why it seems easy to write off a disappearance as the result of the disappeared's own intentions. |
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| escargot1 Joined: 24 Aug 2001 Total posts: 17895 Location: Farkham Hall Age: 4 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 05-10-2013 18:19 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | I agree that it somehow seems less threatening to believe horrible things occur via deliberate actions of sinister others (whom we can labor to avoid) rather than our own ability to fatally f**k up on our own. |
Yes, I'm thinking again of the McCanns and of the family of little Ben Needham. Both children were out of their families' sights for a while and were able to wander off unnoticed. Whether they did wander off, or were abducted, or wandered off first and then were abducted is hotly disputed.
One wonders whether their families might feel less guilty about taking their eyes off the children if they believed that a dangerous criminal had taken them away, rather than that they'd come to harm after leaving under their own steam. |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 05-10-2013 18:47 Post subject: |
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| The McCanns didn't just take their eyes off their kids for a while. They went on the piss and abandoned the children in an unlocked apartment. Funny they've never been called to account for that. |
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| EnolaGaia Joined: 19 Jul 2004 Total posts: 1304 Location: USA Gender: Male |
| Posted: 05-10-2013 20:14 Post subject: |
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To further illustrate the way we presume sinister others ...
A similar case in South Dakota; news story from 25 September ...
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Car containing two teenagers found in South Dakota creek after 42 years
Two grisly finds in water in two weeks ... Crews work to excavate a 1960 Studebaker Lark from Brule Creek, near Vermillion, South Dakota. (AP Photo/Argus Leader, Joe Ahlquist)
ANOTHER car with skeletons inside has been found in water in South Dakota, just seven days after the discovery of six people missing for more than 40 years in a lake in Oklahoma.
A fisherman made the latest discovery when he spotted the car, a Studebaker Lark, with its wheels up in Brule Creek near Elk Point, east of Vermillion, South Dakota.
The US Justice Department’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System files reveal that the two skeletal remains found in the car are likely to be 17-year-olds Cheryl Miller and Pamella Jackson, of Vermillon, who were last seen driving a beige 1960 Studebaker Lark to a party on May 29. 1971.
The grisly find comes after a similar discovery in Oklahoma where police found the remains of six people in two cars which had been submerged in a lake for more than 40 years.
High spring water levels followed by a drought in the summer helped reveal the old car. Authorities recovered a Studebaker hubcap and a license plate matching the car once owned by Miller’s grandfather.
Miller’s family released a statement on Tuesday thanking the fisherman who found the car and law enforcement officials for their work on the case, the Charlotte Observer reported.
“We’re hoping this leads to our much desired and overdue closure,” it read.
Potential pieces of evidence were taken from the site and will be examined, South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley, Union County Sheriff Dan Limoges and Union County States Attorney Jerry Miller said in a news release. They said no other information will be released until an autopsy is complete and more testing is done on the items, and the families are told of the results.
Convicted rapist David Lykken, who was a classmate of the girls, was charged over their disappearance after clothing, bones, a purse and other items were found on his farm.
He was indicted on six counts of murder in 2007, but the charges were later dropped after prosecutors learned that another inmate had lied about Lykken confessing to the crimes.
SOURCE: http://www.news.com.au/world-news/north-america/car-containing-two-teenagers-found-in-south-dakota-creek-after-42-years/story-fnh81jut-1226726981655
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| escargot1 Joined: 24 Aug 2001 Total posts: 17895 Location: Farkham Hall Age: 4 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 05-10-2013 20:32 Post subject: |
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| ramonmercado wrote: | | The McCanns didn't just take their eyes off their kids for a while. They went on the piss and abandoned the children in an unlocked apartment. Funny they've never been called to account for that. |
I was trying to be tactful. 
Yup, they went out every night leaving the children alone, whereas Ben Needham's family let him play in an unfenced area outside the house unsupervised. |
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| EnolaGaia Joined: 19 Jul 2004 Total posts: 1304 Location: USA Gender: Male |
| Posted: 05-10-2013 20:52 Post subject: |
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This September 19 story illustrates (via comments from local sheriffs at the time and now ...) how frustrating it can be to solve a missing persons case with no clues.
(This is in reference to the 3 teens who disappeared in 1970 - the ones who never gave anyone any reason to believe they were going to Foss Lake.)
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The Beckham County Sheriff's Office began the investigation into the disappearance of Jimmy Allen Williams, 16, Thomas Michael Rios, 18 and Leah Gail Johnson, 18, on Nov. 20, 1970. That's the night the three never returned to their Sayre homes, said retired Sheriff Howard Sampier.
"After we received the report that they were missing, I put the tag number out that night," remembers Sampier. "The next day I put the vehicle description and the description of the teenagers out nationwide and also gave the information out to watch for border crossings. My whole crew and the Highway Patrol searched the surrounding area, but we never located anything."
Family of the teens told the sheriff's office the three were headed to Elk City to catch a football game. They left Sayre in Williams' blue 1969 Chevrolet Camaro.
Over the years, theories have been explored including that the teens may have decided to go hunting.
Sampier said that of all the leads received, not one was for Foss Lake.
"Never really had any good leads to speak of," said Sampier, who said it was the most troubling case in his law enforcement career. "We never had any sort of lead or idea about the Foss Lake area."
Current Beckham County Sheriff Scott Jay said his department has looked into the case several times.
"We have opened it up and looked at it three times," said Jay, who was elected sheriff in 2000. "We have revisited it and we just kept coming up with dead ends. We used modern technology. We used different databases on the Internet but with no success until Tuesday morning."
Jay said they never looked towards Foss Lake but did examine surrounding rivers and ponds in Beckham County.
"I even contacted the military and tried to see if we could do something that would have been like a sonar on land," said Jay. "It was way too costly. We were going to go through the areas that we had determined was the route they might have taken."
The OHP was also active in the investigation. As recent as 2009, the OHP used a sonar device to try and locate the car in Lake Hudson in Mayes County near an old Ferry. Nothing turned up.
Sampier said that the families and friends of the teens understandably kept wanting answers down through the years.
"We did, too," said Sampier, who served as sheriff from 1964 to 1973. "I tried to explain that we had done everything that law enforcement could possibly do. You just can't make evidence up if it's not there."
SOURCE: http://www.thedailyelkcitian.com/local-news/crime/2788-secrets-continue-to-surface-from-foss-lake
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You'll notice they'd previously used sonar to search for the missing car, but in a different lake a few miles away (and much closer to the area where the teens were ostensibly traveling that night). |
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| Cochise Great Old One Joined: 17 Jun 2011 Total posts: 1104 Location: Gwynedd, Wales Age: 58 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 06-10-2013 10:18 Post subject: |
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There is possibly a big difference here between the US and the UK - or at least England and Wales. There are very few unfrequented places over here - in the US there are huge empty areas where someone can disappear, even in relatively populous eastern states.
True, there are possibilities in the UK , gullies on the less frequented Welsh mountains, ledges on cliffs, a few deep woods, but not that many. Even mines and so on are - many of them - frequented by cavers and urbex types.
The US has , relative to Britain, huge amounts of 'missing' - but there are many more ways to go missing there. |
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| Spookdaddy Cuckoo Joined: 24 May 2006 Total posts: 3923 Location: Midwich Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 06-10-2013 13:37 Post subject: |
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| Cochise wrote: | | There is possibly a big difference here between the US and the UK - or at least England and Wales. There are very few unfrequented places over here - in the US there are huge empty areas where someone can disappear, even in relatively populous eastern states... |
That's very true - I was going to make a similar point.
In areas like Alaska the missing are a part of the psychological landscape - as reflected in the title of Sheila Nickerson's book, Disappearance: A Map. (A bit New Agey in parts, I seem to remember - but generally fascinating and well written; up for £0.01 on Amazon, if anyone's interested.) |
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