What the Dog Knows (14 page)

The prosecutor, however, wanted to believe the dog. He contacted Lars Oesterhelweg, a forensic pathologist then at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Hamburg, and asked him to set up a study—not replicating the entire yacht, but providing more definitive proof that dogs can scent death without the presence of specific forensic evidence, like blood, tissue, or bone.

For his study, Oesterhelweg and his colleagues used two recently deceased men, A and B, sixty and sixty-three years old. They had collapsed and died on the streets of Hamburg. Sometime before, they had agreed to donate their bodies to medical science. A and B could not have known how delightfully and noninvasively their bodies would be used. Each freshly dead man was whisked into the local hospital's inner courtyard, wrapped in a cotton blanket, and laid, for just two minutes and ten minutes each, on top of brand-new carpet squares that sat on new tables in the open-air courtyard. Oesterhelweg didn't want a hint of hospital contamination. The carpet squares received nothing but that indirect exposure to two-hours-old bodies: no tissue, no fluid, no blood, no rafting cells, no DNA. My romantic, noninterventionist side likes to imagine that was the beginning and end of A's and B's sacrifice to medical science: this gentle wrapping, this brief application of their bodies to carpet squares. But that's neither the reality of good cadaver use nor good recycling.

For the next two months, three Hamburg police cadaver dogs were asked to show their handlers which carpet square, among a group of uncontaminated carpet squares, contained cadaver scent. The most mysterious fragrance on earth was no mystery to the dogs. Two of the dogs, B and L, were almost 100 percent accurate. K scored 90 percent. That's the reality of working dogs. A few are excellent, while some are very good. (Others are horrid. The last category wasn't represented in the study.) The small study's results: Well-trained cadaver dogs can smell the faint remnants of the odor of death, impregnated on a carpet swatch, for months following the brief presence of a newly dead person.

The study showed, Oesterhelweg wrote in what amounted to scientific effusion, that well-trained cadaver dogs are “an outstanding tool for law enforcement.” I tried to find out, to no avail, if the prosecutor had pursued the case. Never before had I wanted so much to be able to communicate in German.

Every study has its limitations. This one didn't answer the question: What exactly were the dogs smelling in those carpet squares? They could alert reliably, according to the study, but what was in that fresh perfume of death?

Arpad wistfully asked me if the German forensic scientists had done a headspace study on that early perfume. Did they measure what volatiles were in the airspace in the containers that held the carpet? I doubted it, but I could see why Arpad wanted the information. By the time donated bodies get shipped to the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility, their decomposition is much further advanced. In the seconds and minutes after death, Arpad thinks it's possible that compounds such as ammonia, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane escape from the body. Such compounds don't weigh much at all.

They are lighter than air.

•  •  •

People are spending more time worrying about the possible nuances of training than going out and training their damn dog. Our dogs are very forgiving, so you want to try working on some source. See what your dog does. It's not a big frigging mystery.

—Andy Rebmann, 2012

Every training aid for every working dog has its drawbacks. If you are training a bed-bug dog, you must find a way to keep your bed bugs fed and happy (and contained). If you are training a bomb dog, you have to be comfortable carrying nitroglycerin and gunpowder around in your trunk.

If you have a cadaver dog, you run into a different kind of supply
and storage problem. Having diverse materials to train on is crucial, and “decomp,” as it's called, comes in all varieties: from recent blood on a surgical swab, to lovingly harvested dirt from a Civil War burial ground, to six-hundred-year-old bones from the Mississippi Delta.

Happily for Solo, North Carolina has reasonable laws about cadaver-dog training material. The wisdom tooth of Nancy's ex-husband was only the beginning. Solo would need a variety of materials to train on, from fresh to older to ancient. Material that would, albeit at a scaled-back level, mimic what he might find out in the woods, buried, or in an abandoned building. So in the midst of answering student e-mails in my university office, I'd find myself distracted, mail-ordering a search-and-rescue dog package from the Bone Room in Berkeley, California—although I called someone at the state medical examiner's office first to make sure it was legal. It was. I was delighted when the order arrived in the mail: a small box with an ivory tibia and some toe bones in a plastic bag. The foot bones looked remarkably like the Styrofoam peanuts they came nestled in.

Less than a year later, evidence started mounting that some of the plastinated bodies displayed in the popular museum show
Bodies: The Exhibition
came from prisons in China. Curious, I started researching the possible source of my specimens from the Bone Room. The results were inconclusive, but I realized that I needed to find other sources. So, obviously, did the Bone Room, which posted on its website: “We regret to inform you that our stock of damaged and discolored bones, set aside as Search & Rescue Dog training packages, has finally been totally decimated, and we will not be able to offer them for a while. Unfortunately there are absolutely no human bones coming into the country at this time, and while we are currently trying to find a source that would hopefully include more of the ‘dog quality' specimens, we do not yet have a line on a possible exporter.”

When having my teeth cleaned, I talked with my dentist about how to get hold of a couple of molars for training. He was happy to provide a few, and kind enough to lend me, briefly, the jawbone from
an anatomical teaching skull that had been in his office for decades, to see how Solo would behave. Solo reacted, though he was clearly surprised when he put his nose next to it. He was underwhelmed by the source: That's it? I reacted to that bit of scent? I, on the other hand, was thrilled and reported the outcome to the dentist when I returned the jawbone.

A K9 officer from a nearby city provided me with carpet from a processed suicide scene. One warm summer evening found me with a friendly death investigator who had handled cadaver dogs. We were in the parking lot of the police K9 unit's headquarters, cutting up material for training aids: an old sheet that had lain for days underneath an undiscovered body in an apartment. It was malodorous but not nauseating, and we didn't need the whole thing: just six-inch-by-six-inch patches that we could pop into Mason jars. The scissors would be bagged and tossed. We knelt in front of our bounty to make careful cuts, then rocked back on our heels. We had to make sure our double-nitrile-gloved hands didn't touch anything except the material. We were smiling. Solo was whining in the car, waiting for training. It was a beautiful evening.

I permanently borrowed a wide variety of kitchen storage containers from David, whose home-chef habits benefited me on several fronts: Mason jars, honey and jam jars, bigger Rubbermaid and Cambro and gallon glass jars for holding the smaller jars, all storage for Solo's training materials. I bought others new. Using an assortment would prevent Solo from associating the smell of any one container with the scent of the dead. If I were ever called to testify, I wasn't going to be trapped by a good attorney into admitting it was possible that my dog was trained to smell and alert on plastic storage containers, or Ziploc bags, or cotton sheets, instead of the human remains I was trying to train him on.

There's great debate about whether dogs get rewarded accidentally for finding whatever storage material you are using instead of the training material you want him to find. Or for alerting on the smell of the
gloves you use to place the samples, for that matter. Some trainers and handlers contend that material should be stored only in glass jars with metal lids, or it will be contaminated, and you will inadvertently cross-train your dog on plastic bags. Others insist that material needs to be stored in everything and everywhere: teeth in the freezer in a freezer bag, dried blood in the fridge in a jar, bone in the pantry.

Almost everyone believes that if your state laws allow it, it's ideal to train your dog on the wide range of stages humans go through before they disappear entirely—from fresh tissue and blood, to what's called greasy or wet bone, to adipocere, to the dry bones of the desert, and even the ashes of the crematorium.

Everyone agrees that exposing dogs to whole bodies, in their various stages of decomposition, is great training. A cadaver-dog handler's version of paradise is tucked into the western corner of North Carolina. Western Carolina University calls it the FOREST, an acronym for Forensic Osteology Research Station. Do not, even lovingly, call it a body farm in front of its founders. The site is up a gravel road and a wooded hill, surrounded by a huge cyclone fence with razor wire.

Paul Martin recently graduated from Western Carolina with an anthropology degree. Paul's research work kept creeping closer to his dog work. He was a former sheriff K9 handler, then a cadaver-dog handler. As an undergraduate student, Paul realized that the new FOREST could help not only forensic anthropologists and their students with training and research, but also cadaver dogs and their handlers. Though Paul has moved on to a graduate program at the University of Mississippi, he helped found and continues to organize cadaver-dog seminars at WCU. Dogs and handlers get a chance to train in the small fifty-eight by fifty-eight-foot plot. It might seem an odd highlight for a seminar, but serious handlers know how crucial it is that both they and their dogs accustom themselves to what they might encounter out in the world.

Dogs used to training on small samples, as most samples are, can be overwhelmed by the large pool of scent an entire body can emit.
Bodies on the ground, even live ones—as everyone knows who has played with dogs and puppies by lying on the ground—can be scary. I've watched many dogs react at the FOREST. Some come up to bodies with great hesitation, sniffing cautiously, then starting back. The sound of flies or maggots moving inside a bloated body can freak them out. A few growl. Some crouch and crawl up to a body. A few bound up to the bodies in good humor. That's great, but a handler worried about an enthusiastic dive into unctuous remains can jerk back the lead so quickly that she corrects the dog when she should be rewarding that lack of fear—while still keeping the dog from doing damage.

Paul talks quietly to all of them, keeping an eye on the dogs and handlers, making sure that no dog does a belly flop into the remains, but that none is discouraged with a too-harsh leash correction. He soothes both handlers and dogs as they negotiate the small plot that has ten bodies in various stages of decomposition, from a body bloated like the Michelin man to skeletonized remains to buried ones. Enthusiastic or fearful dogs pull handlers in all directions while the handlers work on controlling their dogs, praising them, and keeping their own balance.

“She's doing good,” Paul told one handler, and then burst out crooning, “Good dog! Good dog! Good dog!” as the border collie decided it might be fun after all and went straight up to a body, wagging her tail.

That kind of hugely positive experience can set up a dog for a happy life finding the dead.

•  •  •

As much as I was learning about the scent of death, it would be some time before Solo was exposed to a whole body. These were early days of training for us. Solo was ten months old. We'd begun training with Nancy five months before. By this time, January 2005, I had started to carry around cadaver training material in a small picnic cooler.

David and I were headed to the beach with friends and dogs piled into a rented SUV. I wasn't dreaming about romantic walks on the beach at sunset. I had started seeing the North Carolina landscape as one endless opportunity to train Solo. As David drove, I stared out the window at loblolly pine plantations and abandoned concrete-block buildings. Could we train there? That long-harvested soy field looked like a promising place to stash a cadaver hide. Sand, bitter blustery wind, and prickly pear at Kill Devil Hills sounded like a great way to challenge Solo in a new environment.

Solo learned to find his “hides” at the beach, in the garbage can at the end of the driveway of our rental house, in the backyard sand, amid a patch of prickly pear. I was elated as I wrote my training report. On the second night at the beach, I called Oregon to talk with Dad about our impromptu vacation. I told him I would send him pictures of his Megan, who had been floating blissfully up and down the beaches, a maroon-colored wraith in the winter fog. Dad sounded dreadful, his voice thick and slow. His hip had been hurting the last six months, since shortly after he had visited us in North Carolina. While we thought it was a side effect of Lipitor, it hadn't improved. Only good Scotch, Dad said, made it feel better. I got off the phone and cried.

I had never said much to Dad about what I was doing with Solo; I didn't know why, exactly. I couldn't talk to him about bodies and crime—it felt base, rather than biological. Part of it was that he was an academic. What I was doing with Solo wasn't academic, much as I might contend that it was about reading winds and understanding decomposition and scent patterns. Part of it was that he didn't fully understand my odd love of dogs like Solo, rather than the female setters who draped themselves on him, placing their paws on the sleeves of his old cardigans, pulling the threads out ever so gently and insistently with their untrimmed nails.

Perhaps somewhere deep down, I knew. When he called a few days later, we were home from the beach. I was oddly unsurprised that Dad finally had a diagnosis. I was shocked at how far along it was. Cancer
specialists, I have learned since, always say the same thing to Stage IV patients: You have six months to a year. Even when you don't.