What the Dog Knows (10 page)

Andy introduced himself and asked Jim how he trained the dogs. Jim refused to tell him. It was still classified information. Andy didn't take the refusal personally; he knew Jim was working with a military research group. It simply stoked his determination. “Goddammit,” Andy said, “I was going to have a body dog.”

So Andy went his own way. He talked to a pathologist at the Connecticut Department of Health, who suggested that he start with the noxious chemical compounds of cadaverine and putrescine. Redolently available when animal tissue decays, they had been identified and isolated for over a century, having first been described by German physician Ludwig Brieger in 1885. Neither is the exact equivalent of human decay, since some stinky cheeses and even bad breath contain those compounds, but these were the early days of cadaver-dog training and human decomposition science.

In the mid-1970s, just as Andy was working out the scent of human death with the Connecticut pathologists, a cognitive psychologist at Tel Aviv University, Robert E. Lubow, was honing in on a question about the Lancashire Constabulary's program and the U.S. military program: “We must return again to the problem of stimulus generalization,” Lubow wrote in his fascinating book
The War Animals
, published in 1977. “The British trained a pig detector, the Americans a
monkey detector. What evidence is there that these dogs, each trained to a very specific odor, will be able to generalize to the real world human body odor task?”

That basic question would plague all sniffer-dog work—not just cadaver detection—for decades to come. Early in his training, Andy had speculated that decomposing animals and people smelled pretty much the same. Soon he, like Jim Suffolk before him, realized there were significant differences. Training dogs on the real thing was ideal, and law enforcement didn't have quite the same constraints about using human remains as the military did. After crime or suicide scenes were processed, something always remained that could be harvested to help train the dogs.

Rufus, Andy's stocky, dark German shepherd patrol dog, had started out as a potential guide dog for the blind at the Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation in Bloomfield, Connecticut. Rufus had flunked out of the program because he wasn't suited to calmly and gently guide anyone. He was a fine patrol dog, but Andy also started training him on a combination of cadaverine and putrescine but also with the dirt harvested underneath bodies that contained fluids and adipocere (the waxy fat that persists in some environments). That was in 1977, the same year Andy's other dog, Clem, a bloodhound, won the award for being the best man-trailer in the nation. As long as people were alive, Clem was happy to find them. If they were assumed to be dead? Rufus took over. It was a sweet deal for both dogs.

By 1980, Andy was starting to use Rufus and his nose for increasingly challenging work. Clandestine burials are the worst cases to work. They involve shovels and bulldozers and sometimes jackhammers. If you are off by more than thirty feet, a body might as well be a mile away. No one likes to dig to find bodies. Especially without a lot of corroborating evidence.

Everything looked perfect and orderly at the neat, raised-level, shingle-sided ranch house in Monroe, Connecticut. It had a manicured
lawn, a round swimming pool in the backyard, and a new patio next to the pool. Robin Oppel, twenty-eight, had disappeared. Her husband, Kent Oppel, a twenty-nine-year-old self-employed businessman, had given the police permission to search the premises without a warrant.

Robin's car had been found abandoned twenty-five miles away nearly a month after she disappeared. Inside the car was a broken-off portion of an owl key ring but no sign of Robin. She was seen last on September 19, 1980. At first Andy thought he might start one of his bloodhounds to see if the dog, even after all that time, could pick up a trail and give them a direction of travel. That was a stretch, and he knew it. By then, detectives working the case had a hypothesis.

Rufus had been working as a body dog for three years when he and Andy arrived at the Monroe house to search. While Kent Oppel watched, Andy started Rufus on the front lawn, then down the side of the house and to the rear of the lawn. Rufus walked along the fence toward the swimming pool, stuck his nose in the dirt next to the newly laid concrete patio, and started digging. That was it. Andy walked him away and shrugged casually. He could hear Oppel telling bystanders that the dog obviously hadn't found a thing.

For long terrifying minutes, Andy thought perhaps Rufus had screwed up. Investigators jackhammered the concrete next to where Rufus had indicated, dug down a foot, and ran into electrical wires. Andy brought the dog's nose back in. Rufus, Andy recalled, started “digging to China.” Investigators kept shoveling. Just a little farther down, they saw a small object in the hole: the other half of the plastic owl key ring found in Robin's abandoned car. They kept going. Robin was four and a half feet down, under the concrete, beneath a layer of lime powder.

Because the body dog represented a new and fascinating canine career, sometimes journalists got the terminology wrong. Rufus, one newspaper reporter noted with great sincerity and inaccuracy, was “one of eight ‘dead dogs' in the country; the only one in New England.” Such reports of Rufus's death were premature. He recovered twenty-six bodies in his career.

Andy Rebmann and Jim Suffolk's relationship didn't end at that cop conference. A picture of the two men in a 1986 Vermont newspaper shows them using their body dogs on a homicide search. Jim looks spit-shined in his pressed khakis, facing straight into the camera with a nice smile. Andy looks informal if not disreputable, in jeans, T-shirt, baseball cap, grinning broadly, sideways to the camera. Jim Suffolk's shepherd was a big male called Argus. Rufus's successor sat next to Andy: She was a delicate, light-boned German shepherd he had named Dupa—Polish for “ass” or “hot chick.” After a missing persons search in a Polish neighborhood, the Connecticut State Police made Andy rename her, and after that, he called her Lady.

Like Rufus, Lady ended up earning her kibble and taught Andy more about dogs' ability to find the dead. In mid-January 1987, it wasn't a buried body but a body spread far and wide—a case that involved forensic scientist Henry Lee (who later became famous as a defense expert in O. J. Simpson's trial). The case became the inspiration for the darkly comic Coen brothers' movie
Fargo
. Helle Crafts, a flight attendant, was missing after beginning divorce proceedings against her philandering husband, Richard Crafts, an airline pilot. Crafts had used his credit card to rent a wood chipper and to buy a freezer and a chain saw. A snowplow driver reported seeing a man using a wood chipper along the bank of Connecticut's Housatonic River in the middle of the night during a snowstorm.

Lady was put to the tedious task of sniffing piles and piles of frozen wood chips hauled in from the riverbank. One pile was particularly interesting: Lady alerted. It's here. What she had found, although tiny, was human. Ultimately, because of Lady's alert, police recovered sixty tiny chips of bone. A bit of blood. Strands of blond hair. A tooth with a gold crown. And a fingernail whose color exactly matched a bottle of polish in Helle Crafts's bathroom cabinet. It was the first time in Connecticut history that a murder conviction was secured without a body. Richard Crafts was sentenced to fifty years in prison in 1990. The earliest he can be released is August 2021, when he'll be eighty-four years old.

•  •  •

Another object [of this invention] is to provide a method of building construction in which the dangers attendant upon working at elevated levels will be reduced to a minimum.

—United States Patent Office No. 2,715,013, August 9, 1955

It was just three months after the Helle Crafts case, in late April 1987, when Andy used cadaver dogs for the purpose that the U.S. Army and the Southwest Research Institute originally envisioned: a major disaster, the worst in modern Connecticut history.

Twin sixteen-floor concrete buildings under construction in Bridgeport collapsed. L'Ambiance Plaza fell in seconds. Within hours, Andy and Lady, along with four other Connecticut state troopers and their dogs, were on the scene, facing a mountain of broken concrete slabs, twisted steel, and iron rebar. Dogs and men inched across the pitched slabs of concrete. The troopers and workers carried spray paint and flags. The German shepherds would alert, giving the general location of body after body, sometimes on open holes, sometimes at the edge of the pancaked slabs, where scent could escape.

Though it was early on, construction workers and their families were becoming aware that the scene was less a rescue operation than a recovery operation. Twenty-two workers were injured, some badly, but they were the fortunate ones: blown off the edges of the slabs by the force of the collapse as the floors pancaked down. The dogs alerted time after time after time, inhaling concrete dust. Then the cold spring rain started, tamping down the dust and making footing even more treacherous, intensifying the cold glare of the floodlights on the massive rubble pile.

The dogs helped find all twenty-eight victims. Italian-American, African-American, Irish-American workers, their bodies so broken that Andy said he had never seen so much damage on human bodies, before
or since. And Andy has seen almost everything that humans, or nature, can do. “It still haunts me,” he said.

L'Ambiance Plaza still angers him. Quick, cheap—and dangerous. It still angers me. In a minor twist of fate, Andy and I realized nearly a quarter century later, when we met face-to-face, that we had probably passed each other on that site. Andy was managing the dog searches for days, until the last body was removed. I was there only one night as a newspaper reporter for the
Hartford Courant
. All disasters, by nature, are terrible, but it was the worst disaster I had ever covered. I played only a brief role one freezing day and night, tasked with standing by in case more injured victims, or bodies, were recovered. Reporters and investigators came to understand that something had gone disastrously wrong with a construction system hailed as an efficient, economical way to raise a building. After the accident, lift-slab construction was temporarily banned. The ban is no longer in place; nonetheless, lift-slab construction is rarely if ever used in the United States.

That Andy and I didn't meet during those terrible days in Bridgeport probably didn't change the course of my life. I doubt I would have decided, at that point in my newspaper career, to start training dogs to do search work. That would wait until I was solidly middle-aged.

The odd connections didn't end there. As I was finalizing my research on SwRI and its role in dog research, I discovered an unrelated invention of its founder. Tom Slick Jr. filed a patent for “Apparatus for Erecting a Building” in 1948. As the old pen-and-ink drawings filled my computer screen, I saw the original outline of a construction system I had grown to know by heart in the aftermath of L'Ambiance Plaza: its pulleys and jacks and pumps and concrete slabs. Slick had invented lift-slab construction.

Andy said it best: “What a coincidence! He funded the type of dogs that would work to locate victims of a disaster caused by the failure of his invention.”

•  •  •

Andy, to no working-dog person's surprise, ended up writing (along with Edward David and forensic anthropologist Marcella Sorg) what is considered the bible of cadaver-dog trainers and handlers:
Cadaver Dog Handbook
, published in 2000.

“Remember I warned you about being too brain-oriented. The Andy Rebmann book is good, though—he's the guru,” Nancy Hook told me in an e-mail.

Andy's wife, Marcia Koenig, a famous volunteer handler and trainer in her own right, helped write and edit and provide illustrations for
Cadaver Dog Handbook
. She had been doing search-dog work since 1972. Andy introduced her to cadaver-dog work. Marcia became very good at it. She and her German shepherds have deployed to look for missing homicide victims, suicides, lost hikers, dementia patients, and victims of tornadoes and hurricanes. She's worked in wilderness, in snow, and on water. She and her sable German shepherd, Coyote, spent four days in August 1997 crawling through mud on the island of Guam after Korean Air Flight 801 crashed and tore a ragged hole in the side of the mountain.

“That area was so saturated with the smell of decomposition and jet fuel that none of the dogs could alert on anything specific,” Marcia recalled. “Each one looked up at the handler in frustration and basically said, ‘It's everywhere.' ” She and Coyote, as well as the other dog teams, were knee-deep in wet clay during the entire search. Despite the challenges, stubborn Coyote helped find bone, tissue, and a femur. Toward the end, when the mud was too deep and Marcia exhausted, Coyote, a wild and crazy dog gone good, laid an object at her feet.

“She was so gentle,” Marcia said. It was a child's foot, nearly the last thing found on the search. Retrieving wasn't standard operating procedure for Coyote, but that little foot gave the searchers and the family great comfort.

Across the country dozens of handlers and trainers have trained
with Andy, then followed in his footsteps, training their own dogs, and also training other handlers. In law enforcement in the United States, Jim Suffolk started the legacy of body-recovery dogs. Andy kept it going and developed the training system considered the gold standard today.

Andy is in his seventies now, still traveling worldwide with Marcia: to train dogs and handlers, to create better training protocols, to testify in legal cases. He still goes out on both live searches and cadaver searches. He can't tell me how many searches he has done over his career. I know that before his retirement from the Connecticut State Police in 1990, he used to do at least a hundred searches a year. He doesn't keep count anymore. What would be the point?