FREMONT COUNTY — A search and recovery team says a second object spotted in underwater footage during last week’s operation at Fremont Lake may contain the remains of Richard and Reagan Uden.
The team, Bill Dohse and Eric Butt of Organized Search and Rescue (O-SAR), identified what appeared to be a trash can while reviewing drone footage captured during the search tied to the 1980 triple homicide of Virginia, Richard and Reagan Uden.
Gerald Uden confessed to killing his wife Virginia and two sons in Sept. 1980 and later told investigators he dropped a 55-gallon barrel containing Virginia’s remains and a 35-gallon garbage can containing Richard and Reagan remains in Fremont Lake. O-SAR said the recovered barrel was found within the drop zone.
O-SAR was unable to retrieve the trash can during the three-day-operation due to bad weather and time constraints. Butt said the exact location has been difficult to pin down due to the surrounding debris and rock interfering with sonar readings.
The barrel O-SAR recovered was found to contain no human remains and only sediment from the bottom of the lake, according to the Fremont County Coroner’s Office.
Butt said the coroner’s finding did not change O-SAR’s plans and the group still considers the site worth further investigation.
“The fact that there wasn’t remains in there really doesn’t change anything for us, we still have work to do” Butts said. “However I will say that it is a little disheartening to pull of what we accomplished to find a barrel in the drop zone where Mr. Gerald told us he dropped the barrel. The odds of us coincidentally finding an empty barrel is just crazy, especially one that’s been down there about the same amount of time.”
O-SAR has not committed to a timeline for retrieving the apparent trash can, but said they hope to return to the lake before winter.
The Operation to Recover the Barrel
The Utah based non-profit was approached roughly three to four months ago by another nonprofit that had researched the Uden case but lacked the equipment and technical capability to pursue it any further. O-SAR said it conducted its own research, consulted with law enforcement and decided to move forward with the recovery operation.
The three-day operation combined resources from multiple organizations including law enforcement, underwater drone operators, along with a boat with a specially designed retrieval device. The device, designed by Dohse, was modeled on equipment used for dredging river and lakes and fabricated by David Sparks, a YouTuber known as “HeavyDSparks”. The device was lowered 400 feet, closed around the barrel and brought it to the surface where it was handed over to the coroner’s office.
Butt’s described the retrieval as a first-of-its-kind success, saying no one has recovered an object from 400 feet of water, much less in a mountain lake in stormy conditions.
O-SAR said the operation involved cooperation from several agencies, including the Sweetwater, Sublette and Fremont County Sheriff’s Offices, the FBI, Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation and the U.S. Forest Service.
“They [law enforcement] were absolutely out there with us, working on the boats, contributing in every fashion. Whether it was seeing security or whether it was boat operations or manning a tether, everybody was fully engaged,” Butts said. “You would have thought we all worked together several times, it was that organized. It was a beautiful thing that came together.”
