Underwater Graveyard
Underwater Graveyard is a location, discovered in Season Two, in the Showtime series DEXTER. It is several miles off the coast of Florida. It is not in Biscayne Bay which has a maximum depth of only 13 feet.
It was Dexter Morgan’s dumping spot for his victims until it was chanced upon by scuba divers. He then began to discard remains directly into the Gulf Stream, a powerful oceanic current.
Location[]
- Atlantic Ocean, near Miami, FL
Due to the killer’s moniker (Bay Harbor Butcher), the graveyard was likely a few miles off the coast of Bay Harbor Islands - a town separated from the mainland by Biscayne Bay. Since the average depth of Biscayne Bay is only 10 feet, Dexter would dump his victims into the Atlantic Ocean.
Description[]
Sonar shows a 65-feet-deep crevice on the sandy sea floor. It is several miles off the coast. It is not in Biscayne Bay which is a shallow, semi-enclosed lagoon with a maximum depth of 13.1 feet.
Background[]
Before Dexter dumped his victims at sea, he used other methods, such as burying them or leaving them for alligators in the Everglades. In the Early Cuts storyline, Dexter tried to incinerate Gene Marshall’s body parts, but it caused an explosion. He then looked for a better way to dispose of his victims and purchased a fishing boat from Marshall's psychiatrist, Dr. Greenstein. Dexter docked it at Coral Cove Marina, and used nearby rocks to weigh down the body bags so they wouldn’t float to the surface. Later, Dexter moved his boat to another marina to avoid suspicion.
Original Sin shows that Dexter initially used Alligator Alley to dispose of his first two victims, with their corpses being consumed by the alligators. However, his second victim was not fully consumed, with only an arm remaining and Miami Metro discovering the arm. Dexter found this out when he returned to the Alley to dispose of his third victim Levi Reed. Fortunately, Dexter was able to dispose of the remaining arm by staging that an alligator had come after him and eaten it. He would dispose of Reed's body in a dumpster where it would be taken to a landfill site and buried. All of this led to Dexter searching for a new dumping grounds. He came to the conclusion that the ocean would be ideal when he was returning to Miami from Bimini with his sister Debra. Later, when he had captured Aaron Spencer, he took Spencer out to sea, killing him directly on the boat before dismembering him and disposing of him in hefty garbage bags. Spencer would be the first victim to be welcomed to the Underwater Graveyard that Dexter would continue to use for years to come.
Discovery of Bodies[]
As treasure hunters search for a sunken galleon off the coast of Miami, their sonar shows an aberration on the sea floor. Hoping to find the ship and its gold, two scuba divers approach the site.
Their metal detector crackles and they search through the the sand, finding a cleaver. Nearby, they notice a black garbage bag and open it. They're shocked when body parts emerge, and they hastily swim back to the surface. Additional black bags, along with scattered human bones, are found in the area.
Dexter returns to his apartment to find Debra in a state of excitement. She pulls him into the bedroom where a newscaster on TV is talking about an underwater graveyard. The man reports that thirty bags have been found so far, but around-the-clock salvage efforts are underway, Dexter stares at the television with his heart pounding. Debra thinks it’s “amazing!”
That discovery sets into motion the main plotlines of the second season, as police realize there's a new serial killer (dubbed "The Bay Harbor Butcher"), and Lundy is called in to lead the investigation.
Related Pages[]
- Bay Harbor Butcher 18
- Bay Harbor Butcher Case
- Coral Cove Marina
- Field Morgue
- Gulf Stream (new location starting in Season 2)
- The Fortune (boat)
- Slice of Life (boat)
Trivia[]
- Dexter uses an average of six garbage bags for each dismembered victim.
- In Dexter: New Blood, Dexter says he would cut bodies into nine pieces.
- Dexter notes that the Ice Truck Killer dove 100 feet to retrieve Valerie Castillo's body. He then left her at the Auto Salvage Yard where Dexter killed Valerie and her husband. ("Return to Sender")
- In New Blood, Dexter tells his son Harrison about one of his victims, Wiggles the Clown. As Wiggles was revealed to have been killed before Season One, it is unknown if he was buried in the underwater graveyard or if Dexter used a different disposal method.
- Aaron Spencer is the first victim to be dumped in the Graveyard, though his body is not identified among those found during the Bay Harbor Butcher Case. This is primarily due to the fact that the character was created after the original show’s run and would not be present (though an in-universe explanation could be that he was an unidentified corpse considering he would have been the oldest there - if much remained of his body by this point there’s the likelihood that he would not be identifiable).
- According to Dexter’s Kill List (which documents every kill and victim name from the original show as well as Original Sin), Dexter killed 55 people between Aaron Spencer and Mike Donovan. Including Mike to Emmett Meredian Dexter would have dumped a total of 61 victims (excluding Valerie Castillo whom was recovered by Brian Moser) in or somewhere near the Underwater Graveyard. However when the scuba team discovers the graveyard ultimately only 18 bodies are recovered enough to provide ID while a handful more are also mentioned. None of the victims from Season One are mentioned regardless of the fact that the most recent, Meridian, would have only been a few months old in the water by this time.
- There is still a great deal of unaccounted corpses - some of which may have been disposed of other than the graveyard such as Gene Marshall or circumstances where a body was left to be discovered by the police (which occurs later in Dexter’s life plenty of times).
- It is possible that when deciding how many bodies would be found that the writers didn’t have a clear number of exactly how many people Dexter had killed by season two. 18 is a sizable number regardless of the fact that he had killed around 65 people by this time.
- It’s possible that some of the additional corpses could have been consumed by local aquatic life after they were dumped or the bodies may have been carried by a current similar to the Gulf Stream thus pulling them away from the main graveyard. It’s also possible they may have fallen into deeper crevices and possibly even buried.
Gallery[]
