Corpse Hunters: How we took down Soviet-born mob serial killers dumping victims in a watery mass grave... and why, now in our 70s, we'll never stop the search for the drowned dead

Gene and Sandy Ralston of Boise, Idaho never intended to become corpse hunters.

Today, no one does it better.

In their 70s, the Ralstons have recovered more than 130 bodies from the murky depths of North America's deepest lakes.

Now, they travel the U.S. and Canada providing their services to grieving families desperate to find lost loved ones and law enforcement agencies chasing violent killers.

Gene and Sandy don't only have a very unusual hobby – they're unusually good at it.

Adapted excerpt from, Back from the Deep: How Gene and Sandy Ralston Serve the Living by Finding the Dead

There was a handwritten note taped to the windshield of the Ralston’s truck.

Call Lieutenant Lunney as soon as you get back to town. It’s urgent.

Gene and Sandy had just spent a long day on the Beardsley Reservoir, outside of Sonora, California searching for the body of Scott Glover.

He’d been missing for three and a half years after he fell off his boat while fishing.

But the Ralstons found him. Divers recovered the body that afternoon.

This is what the Ralstons do - corpse hunting. They came by it through happenstance.

In 2000, the Ralstons invested in technology known as ‘side-scan sonar,’ which was developed by the military in the 1950s and became widely available in the 1980s. 

Gene and Sandy thought the equipment would be handy in mapping the bottoms of lakes and rivers for their environmental consultancy work. But within weeks of getting it up and running, they imaged the body of a 23-year-old on the floor of Bear Lake, Utah.

Word spread fast about a couple from Idaho with a mysterious machine that could reveal the secrets of the deep.

Soon, the Ralstons were fielding phone calls from all over the United States and Canada from bereaved family members desperate for answers.

It didn't take long for law enforcement to take notice of the couple's remarkable skill. And sure enough, that's why Lieutenant Lunney, with the Tuolumne County Sheriff's Office, came calling.

There was a handwritten note taped to the windshield of the Ralston's truck. Call Lieutenant Lunney as soon as you get back to town. It's urgent. Gene and Sandy (above) had just spent a long day on the Beardsley Reservoir, outside of Sonora, California searching for the body of Scott Glover.

In 2000, the Ralstons invested in technology known as 'side-scan sonar,' which was developed by the military in the 1950s and became widely available in the 1980s. (Above) High-resolution image captured by side-scan sonar

In 2000, the Ralstons invested in technology known as 'side-scan sonar,' which was developed by the military in the 1950s and became widely available in the 1980s. (Above) High-resolution image captured by side-scan sonor

He had been working with the FBI on a string of kidnappings in the area between late 2001 and early 2002 – and they'd just caught a decisive break.

A suspect in the case had agreed to flip on his associates.

Ainar Altmanis, a forty-two-year-old from Latvia told investigators that the abductions were part of a murder-for-money plot.

Altmanis alleged that Soviet Union-born mobsters, Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas, who were living in the U.S., were holding wealthy people hostage to extort their families for cash – and they'd amassed $1 million in ransoms.

What was worse, the informant confessed, all five people abducted by the group had been already killed.

The body of one victim had been recovered but four others were still missing - and Altmanis said they'd been tossed off Parrotts Ferry Bridge into New Melones Reservoir, not far from Sonora.

But the reservoir was 12,500 acres wide and more than three hundred feet deep. Finding the victims would be nearly impossible - and without the additional bodies as evidence, it would be a difficult case to bring to trial.

They needed Gene and Sandy's help.

The next morning, the Ralstons were briefed by agents from the FBI - and told that they were under no obligation to assist in the investigation as doing so meant possible retaliation by a criminal group, potentially connected to the Russian mafia.

Gene and Sandy weighed the risk - and decided to go forward.

The FBI arranged for a dive team in New York to ship a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) to California to help them.

One morning early on during the search of the reservoir, FBI agent James Davidson, walked down to the dock to find that the Ralstons were already on the water.

'Gene and Sandy . . . got up early and went out on their own,' Davidson told me. 'That's how determined they were.'

It was a difficult job. In accidental drownings, almost every corpse is found in the same position: back on the bottom, knees slightly bent, arms to the sides, forearms and hands raised up in the water creating a telltale W-shaped shadow on the sonar. But in homicides, you don't see the typical image of arms and legs out.

The next morning, the Ralstons were briefed by agents from the FBI - and told that they were under no obligation to assist in the investigation as doing so meant possible retaliation by a criminal group, potentially connected to the Russian mafia. (Above) Gene Ralston and Sandy are shown with their boat on Monday, Sept. 10, 2012

Victims of Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas: Nick Kharabadze (left) and George Safiev (right)

Victims of Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas: Alexander Umansky (left), Rita Pekler (center), Meyer Muscatel (right)

Murder victims often are 'packaged'- meaning they are tied up and weighted down.

Plus, the lake floor was littered with all sorts of refuse that people had dumped off the bridge. It was tricky businesses sorting through sonar images of refrigerators and washing machines and human remains.

Incredibly, the Ralstons found one of the four bodies in New Melones while trawling the lake on their own – dragging their sonar behind the boat.

When Gene and Sandy managed to identify something else that looked like a body, the FBI's ROV operator dismissed it as a rock after viewing it on the submersible's underwater camera.

One of the FBI agents told the ROV operator to nudge it gently. 'It was like bumping into a beehive. All kinds of little bugs took off,' Gene told me later.

It was likely a swarm of aquatic insects feeding on the corpse.

'There was just enough stuff on her remains, which is typical of someone that's been in the water a long time, that it kind of looked like a rock from a distance. It was a gelatinous mass,' he said.

Over two weeks, the Ralstons successfully pinpointed all four bodies on the bottom of the New Melones Reservoir.

The corpses revealed hard evidence that directly linked the victims to the perpetrators. The killer had used zip ties to bind the bodies to the weights. And the same brand of restraints was found at one of the suspect's homes. The FBI also found receipts for the weights. But links to the Russian mob were never established.

Six people were sentenced for their participation in the plot and Mikhel and Kadamovas were given the death penalty. They're currently in a federal high-security pentientiary in Terre Haute, Indiana awaiting execution. Four others sentenced in the case recieved sentences ranging from 11 years to life behind bars.

The case helped convince the FBI to expand its dive program with new underwater search teams established in Los Angeles, Washington, and Miami. The agency also acquired sonar equipment based on the same setup.

Today Gene and Sandy work almost full time and on a voluntary basis. They only charge for expenses, basically gas money to get to the lake. And they are still among the best underwater search-and-recovery specialists in the world.

Often police and volunteer organizations are limited in terms of resources and expertise when it comes to deep water. If the initial search fails, families are left to fund any additional efforts. They can hire a commercial outfit, which can cost over $ 4,000 a day on average.

Or they can call Gene and Sandy.

They serve the living by finding the dead.

Back from the Deep: How Gene and Sandy Ralston Serve the Living by Finding the Dead by Doug Horner is published by Steerforth on March 12