CSI: Hill Country

It looks like this week's discovery of human remains at Lake Buchanan has taken on a decidedly gruesome twist: initial reports only indicated that the body was happened upon somewhere along the shoreline, but it now turns out that the remains were embedded in concrete and hidden in a 55-gallon barrel.

From KXAN:

"They were encased in a 55-gallon barrel along with some concrete inside the barrel," investigator Denton Wills said. An out-of-town person on a Jet Ski had alerted investigators after seen the barrel, which was exposed by low lake levels. The metal barrel was rusted enough that investigators could see that there were bones inside.

For the time being, no one seems to have any idea how long the poor fellow's been dead. The Statesman reports that authorities are "working to extract the skeleton from the concrete" in order to ascertain a likely cause of death. Evidently, the remains are decayed past the point where they can be visually identified as having been a man or a woman, but investigators seem convinced that it was an adult, judging from the size of the bones.

Photo by fatal Cleopatra from flickr