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A brand new sport and a 30-year-old mystery combined to give Lake Placid its biggest news story of the week. Skin divers on Sunday found the body of a woman in Lake Placid believed to be that of Mrs. Mabel Smith Douglass, who disappeared in the lake on Sept. 21, 1933.

The mystery surrounding the case was heightened by the report from the divers that a rope attached to some kind of weight was wound around the woman’s neck when they discovered the body. When they tried to move it, the rope disintegrated and the weight was obscured by the silt that covered the bottom.

State Police Lt. Supervisor W. B. Surdam said there is no evidence to date of any criminal violence.

The Wreck Raiders returned yesterday to continue searching for the weight and any other evidence. At 1:15 p.m., after about an hour of diving, they located the jawbone with teeth intact about 50 feet from where they had found the body. They reasoned that it had dropped off as they moved the body.

The woman’s forearm was lying next to the perfect outline of the body, where it had lain on the bottom. As they tried to pick it up, it also disintegrated.

State Police early this week concentrated their efforts on trying to establish the identity of the woman. Surdam and Essex County District Attorney Daniel T. Manning said the body may be buried today in the North Elba Cemetery.

The story began about noon last Sunday, when members of the Wreck Raiders gathered at the George and Bliss boat landing for a diving excursion. Their president, Frank Pabst of Plattsburgh, reports that they explore a different area each week and chose Lake Placid because of its exceptionally clear water.

They selected the Pulpit Rock area, about three-quarters of a mile up the East lake shore from the landing because they thought it would offer some interesting rock formations, and possibly caves or other phenomena.

Sgt. Dick Niffenegger of Plattsburgh Air Base and James Rogers of Rouses Point, a senior at Champlain Central School spotted the body on their first dive. Their first reaction, they said, was that this was a joke someone was trying to play on them because the body looked like a department store mannequin.

As soon as they trued to move the body, the extremities and much of the face and skull “just disappeared — like a cloud of dust.”

They brought the body to the surface with a struggle. It was heavy, even for the two men.

State Police received help in identifying the body from Dr. John A. Geiss, an Albany physician who was in Lake Placid visiting friends over the weekend. He had been a coroner’s physician in the area in 1933 and had taken part in the nine-day search for Mrs. Douglass’ body. He recalled that her boat was found near Pulpit Rock.

Mrs. Douglass owned Camp Onondaga, near Whiteface Inn, and had been vacationing there when she disappeared in 1933. In 1918, she began a college of Rutgers University in New Brunswick called the New Jersey College for Women, and she was made its first dean. The college was renamed Douglass College in 1955 in her honor.