Fremont Lake is no ordinary lake.

On the western flank of the Wind River Range, ancient glaciers clawed elongated, gnarly finger-shaped trenches and pushed gargantuan piles of boulders—called moraines—ahead of them. With moraines acting as natural dams, the glacial trenches soon filled with runoff from the rocky spine of North America, thousands of years before humans named it the Continental Divide.

Fremont Lake is one of those glacial lakes. It sits at roughly 7,400 feet. It is eleven miles long but only about a half mile wide. The bottom is flat, but its boulder-strewn sides plummet at forty-five-degree angles.

Locals call it “The Deep” because it is not just Wyoming's deepest body of water—it's the seventh-deepest lake in the continental United States.

At its deepest, Fremont Lake is just over six hundred feet. Two Statues of Liberty, one atop the other, would stand completely hidden beneath Fremont Lake's serene surface. Wyoming's tallest building—the two-hundred-foot White Hall dormitory at the University of Wyoming in Laramie—could comfortably fit three high into Fremont Lake.

In the summer, a thin layer of water on the surface can warm to the upper sixties, but the deepest 550 feet is rarely warmer than thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit at any time of year. The lake freezes in mid-January, and the ice breaks up in mid-May.

So there's good news and bad news for the people who have searched Fremont Lake extensively for Virginia and her boys.

With no measurable coliform bacteria and minimal oxygen, chemical and biochemical processes are markedly suppressed. There are no fish nor other obvious life—or light—below 250 feet.

In plain language, nothing on the bottom decays very quickly. If Gerald's barrels settled on the cold, anaerobic floor of Fremont Lake, decomposition would be imperceptibly slow. It is likely that even forty years later, the remains inside would be essentially unchanged from the moment they went down.

At the moment of death, a human body becomes food. Bacteria, insects, and animals begin to recycle dead muscle, fat, fluids, and other tissues into their own life-sustaining nourishment. They don't allow a proper interval for grief, meditation, or cooling. The bacteria are already inside, mostly in the intestines, and they don't die when their host dies. Outside, insects and wild animals might take a little longer to find a dead body left in the open, but usually not more than a few minutes.

In this case, Virginia and her boys’ already-decomposed soft tissue would soak off in the water, and some maggots might survive for a time, but not long.

The decay is stalled by frigid temperatures, immersion, and oxygen. Bacteria grow best at about one hundred degrees, poorly at fifty degrees…and barely at all at forty degrees. In deep, cold water, decomposition can be halted almost completely, like keeping a raw roast in a sealed, water-filled bag in a refrigerator.

That's the good news. The bad news is more troublesome.

Depth is one problem for searchers. Altitude is another. Even at sea level, a human diver can only go down about 130 feet; at Fremont Lake, even a skilled, well-outfitted diver would hit the danger zone less than 60 feet down—540 feet too shallow to search for Virginia and her boys.

The pressure is a killer. A diver would be crushed before ever getting close to the bottom of Fremont Lake. And out in the arid West where scuba diving isn't a big pastime, if a diver got into trouble with decompression sickness—“the bends”—there aren't a lot of emergency responders with the right knowledge to help. The nearest hyperbaric chamber is a two-hour plane flight away.

So the search must be conducted with very expensive, very technical equipment like side-scan sonar and Remote Operated Vehicles (ROV), keen-eyed tethered underwater robots. The equipment is scarce, and skilled operators are scarcer. Lines get tangled; gadgets break. And getting those sophisticated machines in place—and back to the surface—can consume valuable time.

Luckily, Fremont Lake is reasonably clear, with little silt. Glaciers deposited countless boulders on the bottom a hundred thousand years ago, but the silt layer on them is only a half inch thick. So any barrels dropped in 1980 would likely lie openly on the moonscape floor, easily identified, with little more than a dusting of sediment. But anything that settled in the rocky sides—even a hundred barrels—might be so well camouflaged as to be virtually invisible to even robotic eyes.

Rust never sleeps, even in dark, deep, fresh water. Even at anaerobic depths, metal dissolves or corrodes. The galvanized barrel would resist corrosion better, but depending on its coating, it still might have deteriorated completely—or not at all. Nobody really knows.

And finally, at that altitude in the Rockies, squalls can strike faster than a rattler on meth. Air temperatures are moderate in summer, beastly in winter. Hypothermia can happen in water as cold as seventy degrees—which is warmer than Fremont Lake ever gets. Water access and emergency care are limited. So search time is limited, and searching itself can be dangerous.

No matter how heart-wrenching the story is, no matter how badly the searchers want to find these innocent victims, it's not worth another death.

But here's the real kicker: It might be the wildest of wild-goose chases. Almost from the start, cops didn't believe Gerald's story about Fremont Lake.

He lied before, and there was no obvious reason to believe him now. In fact, there were logical reasons not to believe him.

If the Udens were committed to a water burial, they lived one mile—two minutes—from the larger (though far shallower) Ocean Lake and less than an hour from the huge Boysen Reservoir. Since these were much closer than Fremont Lake, three hours away, dumping the bodies in either would have exposed the Udens to much less risk of discovery in transit. Both lakes had also already played ominous roles in this bleak story: Boysen was where Gerald and Alice took the boys for a “swimming lesson”—maybe a miscarried murder attempt designed to look accidental—and Eliza remembered Gerald motoring off alone in his boat at Ocean Lake the day after the disappearance.

Maybe the lake was just another lie.

Maybe Gerald and Alice did something so literally unspeakable to the bodies that they didn't dare reveal it. Burned them piece by piece in a trash barrel? Chopped them up and fed them to their pigs?

Alice had unexpectedly divulged that she'd been butchering a sick calf in her bloody kitchen on the day of the disappearance. Might she have been chopping up humans instead?

And in a perverse conversation with his stepdaughter, Gerald suggested the best way to hide a body was to feed it to pigs—which he owned when he killed Virginia and his boys. Then he lied about dumping them in the Pacific Ocean and changed his story to Fremont Lake for sketchy reasons.

No, there were good reasons to think Gerald was lying about Fremont Lake too.

But the art and science of crime solving is mostly the elimination of possibilities. Most alleys are blind, but they must be explored. Investigators had to look in Fremont Lake, if only to rule it out.

After the ice thawed in the summer of 2014, the Sublette County sheriff's Tip Top Search and Rescue team made its first foray into “The Deep” for Virginia and the boys.

These weren't a couple guys with a boat and a fish finder. Employing side-scan sonar equipment that most auxiliaries could only dream of owning, the team identified several curious anomalies on the lake bottom and marked them for a closer look. But that would require bigger and badder equipment, maybe just this side of the military.

So Director Steve Woodson of Wyoming's Division of Criminal Investigation then hired Cross Marine Projects, a Utah-based company specializing in unusual underwater challenges around the world, to continue the search at the bottom of Fremont Lake.

Jim Cross had founded Cross Marine Projects in 1975. In the 1940s, his father was an early explorer of the Colorado River, collecting specimens for museums and helping map the river for the US government. As a teenager, Jim worked for his dad as a guide, taking tourists deep into the Grand Canyon and hiking parts of it that are now under Lake Powell. He soon became a paramedic and a diver for his hometown fire department before launching Cross Marine.

Cross Marine opened as a commercial diving and marine construction outfit that helped government and private companies with large-scale underwater work, from inspections, engineering, and surveying to salvage, dredging, pipelines, and dam repairs. At first, the notion of a diving company in the arid interior of the American West caused some consternation, but it quickly faded when news of the company's extraordinary successes started to circulate.

Cross had partnered with treasure hunter Mel Fisher in the mid-1980s to recover two famous Spanish galleons—the ill-fated Atocha and Santa Margarita—both of which sank off the Florida Keys in a 1622 hurricane. He was also hired to search for Korean Airlines Flight 007, shot down by Soviet fighters near Sakhalin Island in 1983. For almost forty years, Jim Cross's company had worked behind the scenes of many world headlines, from tragic US Air Force crashes in the ocean to the 1985 earthquake in Mexico that killed up to forty-five thousand people.

By 2014, Cross Marine had been hired by the Japanese government to help stanch the flow of about seventy-two thousand gallons of radioactive water from the tsunami-damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean every day. And it had just finished a research project for the US Navy with Johns Hopkins University.

But Cross Marine took on some of the world's biggest underwater jobs so it could afford to do more of the kind of humanitarian work that touched Jim Cross's heart: rescue and recovery of people few had ever heard about, from sunken fishing boats to missing swimmers. Once, Cross even dispatched one of his divers to find a distraught new bride's missing ring in a Utah lake—and the diver did, within minutes.

Cross did all those jobs for little or no money because he felt a debt to the universe, or something. He was single-minded like that. He had a right to be: he had never failed to find what he was looking for.

Now he would launch his flagship, an insanely customized pontoon he had christened the Charity Eden, onto the treacherous Fremont Lake to hunt for three more people the world never heard of: Virginia, Richard, and Reagan Uden.

Cross and his seasoned crew, with all their sophisticated electronics and support equipment, planned to spend up to a week searching, for little more than their expenses. In truth, though, Cross didn't think it would take that long, and this particular story moved him.

He was a father too.

On September 3, 2014, Jim Cross started his search with a briefing by the local search team. They had briefly interviewed Gerald Uden and had already done a cursory sonar survey of the lake surrounding the spot where Gerald guessed he rolled the barrels overboard in 1980. Many “blips” cropped up.

Cross was confident that the barrels containing Virginia and her boys were within his primary search zone, shore to shore inside a mile-long box centered on Gerald's presumptive dump site.

With “targets of interest” identified by the local searchers, the Charity Eden set out.

Fremont Lake's bottom is littered with the rubble of eons, both natural and unnatural: columnlike boulders rolled smooth by advancing glaciers, the intact carcasses of unlucky bull elk and deer that fell through the ice, 1950s beer cans (the kind that required a church key to puncture the top)—somebody even told a story about how the Pinedale city hall might have dumped its old rotary phones there. The lake's flat floor is a strange kind of history museum where humanity's paltry contributions to the primeval landscape are preserved.

It worked like this: While the Charity Eden motored slowly in a methodical pattern, its sonar—high-powered sound pulses—scanned the terrain below, picking up contours and shapes in surprising detail. When Cross's team saw anything of interest, the boat's underwater robot could be deployed by the magic of GPS to inspect any peculiar artifacts up close, sending high-resolution video back to the surface.

On sonar, everything stands out. Any cylindrical or circular shapes, such as those ancient stone pillars or five-gallon bait buckets, got special attention, but nothing was overlooked.

Much of what tickled the sonar was plain old rocks. Occasionally, can-shaped rocks that sometimes featured highly reflective quartzlike bands quickened the hearts of sonar searchers—but they were still just rocks.

As the ROV crept just off the bottom, it spied round underwater springs and vents that spewed subterranean water and gas into the lake. During one pass, the ROV actually captured a faultlike fissure unzipping across the lake bottom. Unbeknownst to the team at the moment, a moderate earthquake had just shaken western Wyoming.

The bottom was mostly firm and unsilty. Somebody described it as looking like a driveway. But sometimes the searchers deliberately tested the surface to find scattered, soft pockets that were three or four feet deep. They were widely dispersed, but theoretically, they might hide a drum that landed just right.

Just south of the spot where Gerald Uden estimated he'd dropped his sounding rope and jettisoned his grim barrels, Charity Eden found a rope or cable tangled on the bottom. It didn't appear to have any kind of weight on it, and it probably wasn't as long as he described, but there was no way to know if it might be Gerald's depth-finding line or simply a lost water ski or towrope.

Beverage cans of all kinds were numerous, a testament to high-country litterbugs. Here were a couple fishing poles and bait boxes, there a beer bottle. Here, a dead trophy trout, there some enormous elk antlers still attached to the skull. On one pass, the ROV even spotted a cell phone that somebody dropped (or maybe threw, since cell service at Fremont Lake is spotty at best).

They also found remnants of a seaplane that crashed in 1994 in a reasonably shallow margin of the lake—a mere 120 feet deep, just fifty yards from shore. A young pilot and his instructor were killed, but their bodies were recovered shortly after the crash, along with most of the wrecked fuselage and wings. Some debris, enough to send Cross Marine's sonar wild, was left behind, never to be recovered.

But no barrels and no bodies.

By Jim Cross's calculations, the chances were slim that they were merely overlooked. If those barrels went overboard where Gerald said, they would stand out.

For the first time in his career, Jim Cross hadn't found what he came for, and it bothered him. He left the Charity Eden tied up at Fremont Lake for several weeks after he left, just in case. He even started to think, privately, about another expedition, just him and his team without a paying client.

It's still a possibility.

In his final report to DCI, Jim Cross summarized his unsuccessful hunt. He offered only three explanations:

As unlikely as it seemed, the barrels could still be someplace else in the lake, beyond his big search area.

Against the odds, they might have settled into the lake's few “soft spots” and sunk out of view.

Or Gerald's story is wrong, maybe even a lie.

The next summer, local searchers led another sweeping exploration at Fremont Lake, using two sonar rigs and ROVs. Again, they found discarded cans, lost boating items, big rocks, and…nothing else. The team leaders concluded that the likelihood of there being two metal barrels containing Virginia, Richard, and Reagan Uden on the barren bottom anywhere near Gerald's estimated drop zone was small, and only slightly more possible in the rocky sides.

At any rate, the personal risks and the cost of looking further outweighed the chances of finding them. Without any new information, the local searchers were done.

Life—and death—are filled with unanswered questions. Sometimes the answers are there, but nobody sees them. But sometimes answers simply aren't there.