By Clair McFarland, Cowboy State Daily
A 22-year-old woman was found deceased in Morton lake in Fremont County on Friday evening. The fatality is at least the third discovered in the lake in the past decade.
Someone called the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office at about 6 p.m. Friday, saying they’d found a dead body in the lake and had pulled her to shore. The woman was “beyond resuscitation,” according to call reports.
The reporting party made arrangements to meet a sheriff’s deputy at the highway intersection near the lake, presumably to guide law enforcement agents to the site.
“The cause and manner of death are currently unknown, and under investigation by the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office and the Fremont County Coroner’s Office,” reads a press release dispatched Monday.
The woman is unidentified. Coroner’s deputy Tony Simmers declined to give further information, except to note that the woman’s body is being transported to Colorado on Tuesday for an autopsy.
The Third, At Least
The woman’s death is at least the third fatality that has occurred in the lake in the past 10 years. All three occurred in the month of July.
In 2012, Dawn Day was found deceased, floating in Morton lake. Investigators still have not found the cause of her death, and the case remains open today.
Dagon McWhorter, a 15-year-old boy found in the lake last July, died during a tubing accident with his peers. Law enforcement agents searched for McWhorter’s body for two days starting July 25, 2021. Fremont County Sheriff Ryan Lee pulled the deceased McWhorter from the lake while on a search boat July 27, 2021.
Scanner traffic on July 25, 2021, indicated that McWhorter had been a resident of the Riverton Group Home for Boys at the time of his death.
Though known to locals as Morton Lake, the site’s official name is Pilot-Butte Reservoir.
