When the email about a man who had drowned while boating on Lake Tahoe arrived last August, 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 getting 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 the lost bodies of people who have drowned in lakes or rivers.

A stout Midwesterner with a round face, gray mustache and glacier-blue eyes, Cormican is not associated with any government agency — no badge, no uniform. The 61-year-old makes a living running a scuba-diving shop in Wisconsin. But he has devoted much of the last 25 years to his macabre avocation, towing his custom-outfitted searchboat around the country and spending long days motoring across lakes in pursuit of those no one else 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 had 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 been able to retrieve corpses that had been 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, some 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 also finds it hard to turn down a despairing relative of a drowning victim. He has been one himself.

***

Twenty-two 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 Fahrenheit, making it treacherous for an unsuspecting or careless visitor.

About 20 million 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 year-round. Estimates put the official count at seven annually, but authorities believe the number to be higher. Some happen mercilessly fast. In October, a 30-year-old 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 on land, water and air. Authorities comb the surrounding landscape — sometimes for weeks. Police assign motorboat patrols. Sheriffs send out divers. The Coast Guard executes high-level 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 second-deepest 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 44-year-old 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 pin-striped 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: searchboats dragging five-foot-long grappling hooks across a lakebed.

“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 who had been 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’d 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.

Almost immediately after he launched his website in 2013, inquiries started pouring 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, a man who’d 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 short-run 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, was a typically beautiful late summer day on Lake Tahoe, hot and sunny with a mild breeze. Ryan Normoyle, a 29-year-old 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 to it.

GPS pings extracted from Ryan’s phone placed the incident in the middle of the massive lake, where the water extends to its deepest point: 1,645 feet. The bottom of the lakebed there is craggy and desolate, a pitch-black 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, and eventually will taper off. That’s often the point, when the trail has gone completely cold, with all leads exhausted and authorities having moved 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 their patrol boats off the lake after Labor Day, when tourism dies down and weather conditions worsen, 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 mid-September, though, things began to fall into place. Local law enforcement agreed to support Cormican with a boat and the high-tech 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 four-day 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 year-round.

“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 three-week excursion to Nepal, where he orchestrated a search for two young Nepalese boys who had drowned in a glacial lake not far from Mt. Everest. He was able to recover one of them.

“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 18,000-foot elevation.

“Keith is highly determined,” Gracey said. “He just does not quit.”

Cormican is painstaking in his approach and particularly adept with his high-tech tools. Once he establishes a search area, he drops down a torpedo-shaped side-scan sonar device and tows it beneath his boat in a grid pattern. The device bounces high-frequency 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 a small number of underwater search companies in the U.S. 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.”

Corimcan 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 been plaguing authorities. In June 2016, a 20-year-old college student from Reno named Marc Ma drowned in Tahoe while paddleboarding with friends off the lake’s West Shore. Then in June 2017, 41-year-old 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 11-year-old boy who had 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 where he had drowned. 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, 250 feet down, near Rubicon Point.

The grateful Pham family donated about $6,000 to Bruce’s Legacy. “It’s not enough,” said Riate Pham, Dan Pham’s sister-in-law, who lives in Union City. “What he did was priceless. His work is a gift from God.”

Drowning victims who aren’t found within a few days of death are rarely found at all, said Frisby. But somehow, he marvels, Cormican does it.

“Before Keith, I don’t remember any long-term recoveries“ in the Tahoe area, Frisby said. “There’s no one like him.”

***

On Sept. 23, after agreeing to search for Ryan Normoyle, Cormican flew to Reno, rented an SUV and drove to South Lake Tahoe. By then, the New Jersey man had been missing for 44 days.

With his own gear at home in Wisconsin, Cormican would use a boat and equipment, as well as manpower and support, from several local agencies. He had packed just clothes, wireless radio communication headsets and some miscellaneous straps and pulleys he thought might come in handy.

The Washoe County Marine Unit had sent him details of its search for Ryan, as well as some sonar images it had gathered. Cormican, though, hadn’t reviewed any of it. “I don’t like to be influenced by somebody else’s work,” he said. “I like to do my own homework.”

He settled on a search area west of where authorities had been looking. Ken Gracey, who had set up the Nepal search with Cormican, drove over from his home in Truckee to lend a hand.

The first day on the lake was cold and windy. Sonar scans didn’t produce any promising targets. The second day, sonar lit up an object that appeared to be a tall man lying face up, protruding from a flat, silty area 1,540 feet below the lake’s surface.

“It was clear when we hit it,” Cormican said.

Locating a body is often the toughest and most technical part of Cormican’s work. But retrieving this body would prove to be exceptionally challenging. It lay deeper than any other Cormican had ever encountered.

“When you’re talking about those extreme depths, you’re talking about a ton of strain and stress on all the equipment,” Cormican said.

He decided to deploy an ROV to inspect the body and then, using its gripper, hoist it off the lakebed and tow it to the surface. The ROV is powered via a thick electric cable. To reach the lake bottom, Cormican’s crew had to link two of them together, creating a power cord a third of a mile long. But the extended cable began leaching power, and the ROV’s propulsion system constantly cut out.

Eventually, using the cable as a drag line, the boat crew towed the ROV — bumping along the lake bottom as it went — to the site of the body. The ROV’s camera confirmed: it was Ryan Normoyle. Cormican then clamped the ROV’s gripper around his wrist, and the boat’s crew started hauling up the 1,700 feet of cable, hand over hand.

Just 10 feet off the bottom, the body slipped out of the gripper. Cormican tried securing an ankle. Another slip. This had never happened before; whenever had locked onto an appendage, the gripper had always held. But the water pressure and power failures were impeding the effort.

“Everything was so heavy,” Cormican said. The extended cable weighed about 300 pounds; the ROV another 60. Normoyle’s body was an additional 200.

As the sun set behind the mountains over Tahoe that night, the crew left the body where it lay and returned to shore.

On the fourth day of the search, after tweaking the gripper and swapping in a new power cable, the crew returned to the middle of the lake. Wind gusts and a three-foot swell caused the boat to rock and bob. Cormican, seated in the cabin twisting a joystick controller on his lap, again locked onto Normoyle’s wrist and signalled for the crew to start hauling in the cable.

After nearly an hour of laboring they had raised Normoyle’s body to within 580 feet of the surface. But again it slipped away, sinking to an even deeper spot in the pitch-black lake, 1,565 feet down.

“It was really disheartening,” Gracey said.

Cormican was frustrated. The three crew members were baffled. The gripper, they decided, was no longer reliable. Instead, the crew rigged a small lasso from a length of half-inch nylon webbing and affixed it to the ROV. Cormican would have to loop it over Normoyle’s wrist and cinch it tight.

He piloted the ROV to the bottom one more time, guided the lasso around Normoyle’s hand and pulled it taut at his elbow.

It took two hours to bring Normoyle’s body to the surface. Washoe County authorities and local firefighters took turns on the heavy cable. When the body finally emerged, divers dropped into the water. They maneuvered Normoyle’s body into a mesh bag and brought it aboard a county boat.

That evening, Cormican met Mary Normoyle at the Holiday Inn Express in South Lake Tahoe. Power to the area had been shut off due to fire danger, so the two sat on a bench outside in the dark.

Cormican’s body was cramped from hunkering in the boat for hours. As he laid out the details of the day, “He was standing up, punching the charley horses out of his legs,” Mary recalled. “He tells me, ‘I always like a challenge.’ That was the understatement of the year.”

Before she knew for certain that her son had died, she had struggled to reconcile his disappearance. “In the beginning, you have these fantasies of him coming running out of the shoreline,” she said. Now, with his body returned, the family was able to begin healing, she said. Ryan would be cremated, his remains sent home to New Jersey.

“Him forever being in that cold water just was not something I could have imagined,” Normoyle said. “Now, we can go forward. We can remember his life, and not be tied to where he left.”

Of Cormican, she says: “This man walks on water as far as I’m concerned.”

***

In 2018, Cormican had a heart attack, followed by surgery to install a pair of stents. He attributes his ailing health to his punishing lifestyle: constant travel in between long days sitting cramped in small boats, munching on gas station food.

“I’m paying the price for all that,” he says. “You spend 12 hours on the boat, don’t eat supper ’til 9, 10 o’clock at night. It’s been rough.”

He recently bought a used motorhome — a place where he can sleep and prepare meals while on assignment. “I’m trying to stick around a little longer, so I should probably change my ways,” Cormican says.

He’ll take a break, he says, when the phone stops ringing. But it never does. There are always more missing people, more bodies unaccounted for, more distressed families desperate for answers.

“I’m unsure where this is all gonna go,” he says. Officers he’s worked with in Tahoe have suggested he expand Bruce’s Legacy with a satellite operation at the lake, but he’s uneasy about turning over the keys to a search operation.

“I’m not a good backseat driver,” he says. “If the roads are slippery and it’s dangerous work, I’d rather be driving.”

In the past two years, though, he has trained groups of sheriff's deputies on Tahoe, which has made a positive impact; local agencies recovered several bodies during that time. “If I can come out here and train these people and make a living doing it, maybe that’s enough,” Cormican says.

Still, it’s hard for him to imagine stopping altogether. He feels honorbound to people grieving the way he grieved for his brother. And, he admits, he can’t resist a cold case. Or give up on recovering someone he has been asked to find.

When Hayley Normoyle first contacted Cormican, he had been searching for a young man who had drowned while canoeing in Alberta the year before. For 17 days, he motored back and forth across Lake Minnewanka in an exacting grid pattern, blasting sonar into its every crack and crevice. But nothing he saw on the lakebed looked like a human body, and he had to stop searching.

“It’s extremely difficult for me to leave a job unfinished like that,” he said.

At a small alpine lake adjacent to Tahoe called Fallen Leaf, Cormican has run three separate searches over the years for the body of David Ward, a young man who drowned in a canoeing accident in 1996. Fallen Leaf covers just three square miles, and he has traversed it hundreds of times.

During one search in 2017, he found the body of Michael Whalen, a Florida man who had gone missing 13 years earlier. On a subsequent search, he recovered another body, that of Ward’s mother, Cynthia Ellis. In 2001, five years after her son’s death, Ellis had gone to Fallen Leaf and drowned in an apparent suicide.

Cormican sometimes imagines Ellis “beating on his bedpost” at night, haranguing him to finish the job.

“The note in her car said she took this swim to be with her son,” he said. “But now she’s not. That bothers me. We need to find him and get them back together.”