00:01It's the night of January 18th, 2025.
00:05Off the southern coast of Spain, near the quiet town of Cartagena,
00:09two divers enter one of Europe's most infamous underwater cave systems,
00:13Cueva del Agua, the water cave.
00:16It's a place known for its beauty, but also its danger.
00:19A warm water labyrinth carved into limestone,
00:22with over four miles of submerged tunnels.
00:25Divers call it the Root of Terror.
00:27Not just for the name, but for what it's done.
00:31Over the past 35 years, five people have died inside.
00:35Lorena Garcia Martin, 37 years old, slips beneath the surface with her dive partner.
00:39She's a primary school teacher, trained in open water diving and free diving,
00:43and had even taken courses with GEAS instructors.
00:47But what she didn't have was a formal cave diving certification.
00:50Her partner, Ismael, wasn't just another diver.
00:54He was her boyfriend and a certified cave diving instructor.
00:57The two shared a passion for diving, but that night, it changed everything.
01:02They arrived at the cave around 8 p.m., just as darkness fully settled in.
01:06Then they descended, flashlights cutting through the thermal haze,
01:09the cave tightening around them with each turn.
01:11Sharp rock, loose silt, disorienting silence.
01:15This is a system where one mistake, one missed signal, one bad decision, is all it takes.
01:20At some point inside the cave, they became separated.
01:23The water was murky, the visibility collapsing.
01:26Maybe a silt out, maybe something worse.
01:29Ismael later told police he re-entered the cave alone to search for her,
01:32but eventually surfaced and called 112 at 11.04 p.m.,
01:36telling responders it was urgent and that she might still be alive.
01:40By then, it was already too late.
01:42Spain's elite underwater rescue team, GEAS, arrived on site, along with police, firefighters, and paramedics.
01:51They entered the same system with ropes, lights, and years of experience navigating deaths like this one.
01:57Around 1.45 a.m., they found Lorena's body, deep in the submerged tunnels of Cueva del Agua.
02:03But the story didn't end there.
02:05Shortly after, the Guardia Civil opened a formal investigation into Ismael, now accused of negligent homicide.
02:12Authorities questioned why a trained instructor led a diver without a cave certification
02:17into one of the most dangerous underwater systems in Europe,
02:20and whether he had fully planned or safely managed the dive.
02:24Sources close to the investigation compared it to
02:27putting someone on a racetrack with a superbike when they only know how to ride a scooter.
02:32Investigators are now inspecting everything, the guideline markers, anchor points,
02:36and especially Lorena's dive computer, which functions like a black box.
02:40It can reveal when she descended, how deep she went, how long she stayed,
02:44and possibly even when she became disoriented or tried to surface.
02:48Ismael has hired a defense attorney.
02:50Authorities are piecing together a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the dive,
02:55asking, did he act too late?
02:57Was the dive plan flawed from the start?
02:59And should she have ever been in that cave at all?
03:04It was a cold Friday in January, just outside Staffordsville, Virginia,
03:08a quiet patch of land near the West Virginia border,
03:11where forest gives way to rock and the ground hides more than it reveals.
03:16Somewhere along a ridgeline, Autumn Nicole Draper, 38, stepped into a cave.
03:21To those who knew her, Autumn, also called Nikki by family, was full of heart.
03:26A hiker, an adventurer, a single mom raising a young daughter in the nearby town of Fairlawn.
03:32She wasn't part of a formal expedition.
03:34The cave she entered wasn't developed or regulated.
03:37Just one of the hundreds tucked into the hills of Giles County.
03:40No handrails, no markers, no gear checks.
03:43We can only guess what made her step inside.
03:46Maybe curiosity.
03:47Maybe just the quiet pull of an unexplored place.
03:50She might have taken a few cautious steps in, flashlight in hand, just to see what was there.
03:55But at some point, she made the decision to go deeper.
03:58No helmet, no proper rappelling gear, nothing to protect her if things went wrong.
04:02And not long after that, they did.
04:04She fell, almost 100 feet down, into the pitch black.
04:08One of the people with her called 911 around 4.15 p.m.
04:12Emergency teams were dispatched quickly, but it took hours before technical cave rescue crews,
04:18including Blacksburg's specialist unit, could get to her.
04:21When they finally reached the bottom, there was nothing more to be done.
04:24Autumn had died from the fall.
04:26It wasn't until after 1 a.m. that her body was brought back to the surface.
04:30Her brother, Brandon Court, was there, waiting, watching.
04:34He later posted publicly, saying,
04:36My beautiful sister is now with God.
04:39I know that life was hard, and that you carried so much pain in your heart.
04:43Your little girl is going to be just fine.
04:46I promise you I will protect her, love her, and raise her the best I can.
04:50I'll be the daddy she needs, for as long as I'm here.
04:53The sheriff's office later confirmed she hadn't been wearing the proper safety gear.
04:58There was no foul play, no signs of equipment failure, just a devastating fall in a place
05:04where even one wrong step can mean the end.
05:07And this is the part that hurts most.
05:09It didn't have to happen.
05:11Caving without basic gear, even something as simple as a helmet,
05:15can turn a casual adventure into a deadly mistake.
05:18In Virginia alone, there are over 4,000 caves.
05:22Giles County has at least 250 of them, but only a dozen are considered safe for public use.
05:30It's September 29, 2025, early afternoon.
05:34Off the coast of Gozo, a small island just north of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea,
05:40the blue hole at Dwaydra glistens under a bright southern European sun.
05:44The water is flat, calm, perfect conditions, at least from above.
05:48A 54-year-old German woman stands near the edge, adjusting her gear.
05:52She clearly knows what she's doing.
05:54Calm, focused, moving through each step like she's done it a hundred times before.
05:59She steps into the water, dropping into what looks like a giant natural swimming pool carved straight out of rock.
06:05It's a vertical shaft, roughly 30 feet across, filled with sapphire blue water.
06:10She descends slowly along its sheer limestone walls, past bright coral sponges, delicate tube worms, and darting schools of wrasse.
06:18Around 30 feet down, a beam of light pierces through the gloom,
06:22revealing the massive underwater archway that leads from the blue hole into the open sea.
06:26She glides through it, entering a completely different world,
06:30one of enormous house-sized boulders scattered across the seabed,
06:33forming twisting corridors and echoing chambers of rock.
06:37Beyond that, maybe she explores the chimney, a narrow, vertical crack in the stone where divers can ascend through the
06:43rock itself,
06:44emerging at a shallower plateau.
06:47But at some point, deep in that quiet maze, something goes wrong.
06:51Maybe a sudden swell stirs up the sediment, the water clouds, visibility drops, her mask fogs slightly.
06:57She turns to orient herself, but the archway has disappeared behind suspended silt.
07:01She reaches for the line, nothing, nobody in sight, only bubbles and rock.
07:05She makes the decision to ascend, kicks hard.
07:08But in the disorientation, she may have chosen the wrong slope, moving laterally instead of upward.
07:15Her breathing gets heavier, the tank feels low, light above.
07:19But it's still too far.
07:21Then, finally she surfaces, limp, unresponsive, alone.
07:25That's how bystanders found her, floating near the edge of the blue hole.
07:29They pulled her from the water, performed CPR.
07:32Emergency services rushed to the scene.
07:35Medics, police, civil protection, even a rescue helicopter.
07:39But nothing worked.
07:40She died right there on the rocks.
07:42Authorities still haven't released a cause of death.
07:44Maybe it was a medical emergency.
07:46Maybe panic.
07:47Maybe just exhaustion.
07:48A formal inquiry is underway.
07:50But for now, what's left is silence and a warning.
07:54Alright, so this one happened in 1973, at a place in South Australia called The Shaft.
08:00And honestly, it's wild how something so deadly can look so harmless.
08:05From above, it's just this small hole in the middle of a field.
08:08You wouldn't give it a second look, but drop down through it.
08:11Like literally squeeze through a three-foot-wide opening, and you end up in this massive underwater cave the size
08:17of a football field.
08:18A beam of sunlight shines straight through the water and lights up the rock pile below.
08:23It looks magical, but it's seriously dangerous.
08:26That day, nine divers went in, and four never came back.
08:31Among them was Christine Millett, only 19, but already kind of a legend in the diving community.
08:38She'd been diving since she was a little kid.
08:41Her dad was a pro diver, and she was with her brother Stephen, her cousin John, and a guy named
08:45Gordon.
08:46They were all experienced, but this was next-level stuff.
08:49Their plan was to drop down past 200 feet into one of the side tunnels and hit 250 feet.
08:54But here's the thing, they were doing it in 1973, using just regular air tanks.
09:00No mixed gases, no modern computers.
09:03And the deeper you go, the more compressed the air gets.
09:06At that depth, every single breath burns through seven times more air than at the surface.
09:11So if you've got, say, 30 minutes of air on the surface, down there, it's more like four minutes, maybe
09:15five if you're super careful.
09:17So they drop in, no guidelines, no backup plans, and all four of them kick up a cloud of silt
09:23in this tight tunnel.
09:24Visibility goes to zero.
09:26Christine and Gordon get stuck in a false dome, like a ceiling pocket with no exit.
09:30They're swimming around, flashing their lights, hands on the rock, trying to find the way out.
09:35But they're trapped.
09:36John swims deeper, totally disoriented from nitrogen narcosis.
09:39And Stephen tries to shoot to the surface, but he gets caught on a ledge.
09:43All of them ran out of air before they had a chance to fix anything.
09:46The rest of the group waited, but only four divers came back up.
09:49It took 11 months to recover the others.
09:52And after that, everything changed.
09:54This was the wake-up call.
09:56The reason we have cave diving rules today, like proper training, gas planning, safety lines, buddy systems,
10:02is because of what went wrong that day at the shaft.
10:05it was the maple playing degree.
10:05I, I want to say it's Ikka.
10:11It has to be referred to as a
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