What the Dog Knows (29 page)

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Dogs helped in a case in Tennessee a few years ago. The victim was last seen covering her boat on a long dock off an East Tennessee lake. Two dogs from Roy and Suzie Ferguson's Tennessee team were called in two weeks after her disappearance. The dogs both alerted on the dock, right where the victim was last seen. By that time, dragging equipment and underwater cameras were lying everywhere, complicating the scent picture. Searchers had worked nearly nonstop for two weeks around the dock area, with sonar, with deep-water cameras, with dragging, and with diving. Nothing. Investigators wondered whether the victim had left the dock. Or whether something nefarious had happened. A natural reaction when one doesn't have an answer.

The family didn't want to give up. They brought in an underwater construction crew with a deep-water robot from out of state. Roy and Suzie Ferguson came this time, along with the two other team members and the dogs who had originally alerted. Suzie brought her female German shepherd, Schatzie. Roy was the point man, observing the dogs from an opposite dock. It's always valuable on land searches if someone is there who knows how dogs work on land. Having a person who knows how they work on water is invaluable. Roy watched the dogs' alert patterns as they worked from boats and off other docks. Then he calibrated where the dogs alerted. The handlers and dogs did the same the next morning, when there was no wind. Roy reported the team's findings: The dogs had narrowed the area to a twenty-by-forty-foot oval. The crew put the little submersible robot, with its video camera and sonar, into the water at that spot. Using a joystick, they sent it down. The water was remarkably clear. In less than two minutes, the robot operators saw the victim, caught in the
eye of the video camera. She was about thirty feet out from where she was last seen alive, covering her boat. That was in one dimension. She was 230 feet down, the equivalent of twenty stories beneath the lake's surface. University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist Bill Bass said that given the cool water, the depth, and the victim's fit build, she never would have floated. After falling, she probably floated down at an angle, away from the dock, flipping slowly like a leaf turning over and over as it drops from a tree. She managed, nonetheless, to send a final clear signal to the dogs.

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I entered upon the small enterprise of “learning” twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi River with the easy confidence of my time of life. If I had really known what I was about to require of my faculties, I should not have had the courage to begin.

—Mark Twain,
Life on the Mississippi
, 1883

Lisa Higgins knows water. She has the deserved reputation of being one of the top water trainers in the country. She also trains and deploys her own dogs; finding the time to do that on top of a hectic seminar schedule is, as all trainers know, a challenge.

Lisa was in the middle of a team training with Haylee when she got the call in July of 2011. Could she bring her dogs and come out to a Louisiana reservoir past Morganza, a reservoir that was part of a dam system for the Mississippi River? The system, challenged by record rains, wasn't perfect. The Army Corps had made the difficult decision to open the Morganza spillway and flood small towns downstream to relieve pressure on the levees in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The reservoir was still high in early July when a family of four went out to fish. It was an area the family knew well, but the water level created a churning boil at one spot. Their boat stalled on a log, and the boil pulled it in. The boat capsized. The father managed to boost his wife and one of the boys to safety on the spillway wall. He got his second
son over to the wall, and his bruised and injured wife was able to pull the boy to safety. That last effort was too much for the father.

“He saved his whole family. He was too tired to help himself,” Lisa said. She and another team from Jefferson Parish got the call; Lisa was with Haylee in a spot where it wasn't easy to get Haylee home first. Law enforcement on the scene said sure, bring her along. Haylee, being Haylee, was thrilled. Lisa, being Lisa, figured that, carefully handled, it was another opportunity to school Haylee away from home. Law enforcement on the scene were “exceptionally wonderful to her,” Lisa said.

That first day was long. When it's hot and windless, it can be even hotter inside a boat. Lisa was working both her dogs, Dixee and Maggie, along with the Jefferson Parish team, with their dogs. Because of the heat, handlers were working their dogs twenty minutes each. They gridded, worked the dogs, rested and cooled them, then worked them again.

Toward the end of the first day, “I noticed that Maggie thought she had an area,” Lisa said. They marked that and one other area of interest for local law enforcement and divers. They didn't have time to narrow it down more that day.

Authorities called Lisa back on July 4 to keep looking. Law enforcement on the scene were a bit disappointed Haylee couldn't come that day; she had been good company. Lisa started in the area where little Maggie, her seasoned Australian shepherd, had reacted a couple of days before. At the end of thirty minutes, Maggie was panting. Lisa put her up in the truck to cool. She talked with the people on the scene. Dixee, her intense Malinois-German shepherd mix from Kathy Holbert's kennel, had never had a water recovery. On the other hand, she wasn't exhausted, like Maggie.

Dixee went out. Dixee alerted. Law enforcement recovered the victim there that night. He was in 129 feet of water, more than 200 yards from where an eyewitness had seen him go down. “Bodies can travel much further than that in water,” Lisa said.

It's not just the horizontal distance. Water searches have a three-dimensionality that can make it difficult, if not impossible, to find bodies, even using the latest technology and divers. Depending on electronics is bound to disappoint. Side sonar can help, but if you've got a search area as large as a reservoir, a body can be a needle in a haystack of objects at the bottom: boulders, logs, bushes, snags. Or a body can be suspended between the bottom and the surface because of temperature gradients and currents. People who do recoveries in cold water say that if the person went in alive, he can curl up in a fetal position and end up on the bottom, camouflaged as a large rock. The best side-sonar scanner in the world won't help distinguish that rounded shape from the others.

There are drownings with fluid in the lungs and cases when the person is dead before going into the water, whether by accident or murder. Victims who are dead before entering the water, or get only a bit of water in their lungs, tend not to sink. Each factor affects the disposition of the body and whether it floats or sinks; it also matters whether and what the person has eaten before going into the water, and whether the person was weighted down with concrete, wrapped in a tarp, or wearing hip waders.

Then there's alcohol. Whether or not it played a role in the first place, and it often does, it definitely plays a role once someone is dead. Beer bloats. “If there's beer on board, refloat time could be a lot quicker,” Lisa Higgins told handlers. In Louisiana, Lisa also considers whether there's a Creole influence in the mix: Red beans and rice speed float time.

Serious water cadaver-dog handlers carry around a “body float” chart; many of them know it by heart. It provides information on water temperature and estimated days-to-float time, along with variables like body composition.

Water cadaver training works just like land cadaver—finding the strongest source of scent. Then it gets hard. At first it's canine torture, like tying a dog's feet together and then commanding him, “Go find!”
The dog doesn't get to run around and climb over obstacles to find scent. Instead, he's trapped in the boat, which has become his legs, and he's forced to communicate with scent illiterates to make those legs move anywhere.

“We're taking a lot of things away from them,” Lisa Higgins warned handlers during one lecture. “We're taking away their ability to run the scent cone with their own four legs. Now they are dependent on us.”

Water search was taking patience away from me. Solo and I were not the perfect pupils. Neither of us fully understood the concept of what we were doing on water. Training a couple of times a week on water wasn't possible. We'd already been out in a boat with Nancy a number of times. It was trigonometry to me, trying to understand the currents, the wind, the scent cone, the boat chugging in a zigzag across the water. For Solo, water work was hyperbolic geometry. It takes patience and nerve strength on the dog's part. Solo has a great deal of drive and good nerve strength, but less patience.

Solo also needed to learn to modulate, so that if we were on an actual search, the buoys that searchers threw down each time he alerted would define a small area for dive teams, not an entire lake of dog screams. Sending a diver into murky water with snags or dangerous current, based only on an insufficiently trained dog's alert, isn't just a waste of time. It's endangering living people to recover a dead one. The first three times we went out to train on water, Solo screamed incoherently, even when we were a hundred yards or farther away from the scent source, lunging in frustration for the reward toy, which I had stupidly placed in the breast pocket of my life preserver.

Solo was in scent, just not the strongest scent. I threw up my hands, Nancy laughed and shook her head, explained the principles again, and around the lake we went once more. Nancy wanted him quieter, and she wanted him closer to the source. I agreed.

Dogs who have worked on land have to learn a whole range of new behaviors in a boat, where a dog needs to give increasingly strong cues to the handler as the scent gets stronger. Solo needed to learn to
use what little physical freedom he had to tell me and the boat driver to follow his lead, by turning this way and that, or by going from the front of the boat to the back. He needed to communicate with the captain that the boat was moving into or away from the perfume rising from a body far beneath the water's surface. Solo, working on land, is usually able to run where the scent is strongest and lie there. He can work out problems on his own timetable, not that of a moving boat. If I know he is honing in on something, I can slow down a bit and let him work. Water is a different gig. Instead of just moving himself closer and closer to the strongest emanation of scent, he needed to tell the boat driver exactly what he wanted. His bossy attitude would come in handy—if he could learn to give clear directions.

Andy Rebmann wrote much of the book on cadaver dogs, but Marcia Koenig wrote the chapter on water cadaver. It was only after studying the illustrations in that chapter, watching Solo on water, and watching a bunch of experienced water cadaver dogs that I started to fully understand the fundamental differences that dogs—and their handlers—face in water work. And how dangerous a “three-dimensional problem” can be for everyone when flood stages, boiling currents, and logjams are in the mix.

Marcia researched and re-created an extraordinary search and recovery using dogs on a flooded Ohio River. Her hypothesis is that dogs alert where water breaks around an object, where scent gets strongest, and then suddenly disappears. The handlers on the Ohio River search all noted the same phenomena. Nikki, a German shepherd, had an entirely new reaction: Her bottom jaw vibrated as she worked scent. She was still nearly a mile and a half downstream from the victim. As the boat got closer and closer to the body, Nikki gulped water, spat it back out, clawed, tried to jump into the water. When the boat crossed the invisible scent line, just upstream of where the body was located, she visibly relaxed. She smelled nothing but fresh, unscented water. “Nikki went completely limp for just an instant.” Game over. Scent, scent, more scent . . . no scent.

Her handler dropped a buoy on that line. Marcia wrote: “She remembers thinking, ‘What have I done?' ” Nikki's handler had never seen her react that way. Yet as one of the dog handlers said, for the dogs, “it was like stepping from one room to another.”

That threshold was where the victim was located, trapped under logs.

Water work, even more than land work, depends on being able to know and read your dog, and having someone along who can watch closely. The dog's cues may be much different and run the gamut between subtle and dramatically obvious.

On land, Solo uses his whole body, including his large tail, and I get to watch him from a distance. He has a much smaller stage to work on when he's on a boat; he's working in close-up. We'll need to work with a whole series of clues, escalating signals that can help the handler and the boat operator work in tandem. Licking lips, lapping water, throwing his head: It's a new vocabulary. Because water work is so different, Solo might also need to find a new way of alerting, so there's no question in anyone's mind that there's something there. Biting at the water, yowling, who knows? I don't fully know what Solo's alert will be on water. We're still working on it. I hope we get there.

Detective Art Wolff's gorgeous Belgian Malinois, Radimir, whose name means happiness and peace in Russian, digs at the bottom of the boat. If he could just dig through, he knows he could get to the body lying in the water beneath. He has gone all over Tennessee on water recoveries.

On one of the most emotionally difficult cases that Canadian trainer and handler Kevin George ever worked, on a flooded river in Calgary that claims victims each year, his Belgian Malinois started barking, leaning over the side of the Zodiac, snapping at the water. In his excitement, he snapped at the side of the inflatable boat. Thankfully, he didn't deflate it. Sadly, the river was too high and filled with unstable logs to recover the victim safely.

Nancy liked what her big German shepherd, Indy, used to do: When he couldn't stand it anymore, his big question mark of a body
would become more and more unbalanced over the water until he would tumble in where the scent was strongest.