What the Dog Knows (22 page)

After reading Lit's study, I began incorporating more negative searches in my training with Solo. The first few times I did it—searching an entire abandoned aviation building without a single hide—Solo yowled in protest, trying to get at the tug toy in my pocket on the way out. He was mad. Here he was, surrounded by sheriff K9s and guys in uniforms who love to play tug. And no hides? My pocket got stained with resentful saliva on the way out, my thigh a bit bruised. He didn't false alert. It was a start.

The next time, the negative search would have to be blind: I wouldn't know there weren't hides out. Then double blind, where the person with me wouldn't know if there were hides or not. At some point, I might graduate to the equivalent of pieces of red construction paper and not react in a knee-jerk fashion. One step at a time. I did call home as we left the training area. David put a cadaver hide out in the yard, so as Solo and I walked from the car to the house, Solo's head flipped. He ran toward the scent. Look! Cadaver after all! Give me my
toy now. He was pleased. I was pleased that I hadn't needed to give a specific command for him to find the hide. Mike Baker had told me at the beginning of training that Solo should be prepared at any time to define the game without waiting for my specific command.

The study by Lisa Lit and her colleagues is not the only detection study that has shown less-than-stellar results and pointed to the need for strengthened training regimes. Larry Myers of Auburn University did an extensive, not-yet-published study of twelve dog-and-handler teams who work full time at detection.

“It was a simple test,” Myers said in his straightforward way. “I was afraid it was going to be too simple.” He randomly placed scent samples in brand-new pizza boxes. He stayed out of the room where the boxes were placed so he wouldn't unconsciously cue the handlers. The reliability of the dog-and-handler teams ranged from one team's dismal score of 30 percent reliability to another handler who had 97 percent reliability. That highest score belonged to an experienced trainer and handler who, Myers noted, works double-blind problems constantly.

A big clump of teams came in between 60 and 85 percent reliability. Eighty-five percent is quite respectable. Sixty percent, not so much. That starts to get closer to chance. Thirty percent reliability should make you think about changing the dog or the handler or the entire training regimen.

“It was interesting to see how bloody awfully a lot of people did who thought they were hot shit,” Myers commented. “I have given up being amazed at how people can think they're honestly doing something right, and how self-deluding they can be.”

•  •  •

He has testified under oath, for example, that even though he does not keep detailed records of his activities he knows that his dogs have almost never been wrong. According to [Keith] Pikett, as of 2009 his dog “Clue” had been wrong once out of 1,659 lineups. “James Bond” had been wrong
once out of 2,266 times. “Quincy” had only been proven wrong three times in 2,831 lineups.

—Innocence Project of Texas report, 2009

Although it's rare, extreme canine versions of Clever Hans have appeared in America's courtrooms, with verdicts of guilt or innocence at stake. Math tricks played for the amusement of crowds can morph into dog tricks played in front of gullible juries, sending innocent people to prison. When handlers lie about or exaggerate their dogs' capabilities under oath, it poisons the well for handler testimony and the credibility of the dog's nose.

This is the kind of testimony that exercises Roger Titus, vice president of the National Police Bloodhound Association. Over the past decades, he has worked trails with his many bloodhounds that made him proud. That work has helped put guilty people in prison. When his dogs are able to follow three- and four-day-old trails, he's incredibly pleased. What undermines the work are the lies he hears in training and on the witness stand. The stories can become albatrosses around the necks of conscientious trainers and handlers. “On occasion, it has become outrageous,” Roger said of handlers' claims. “Four months old? Impossible. People who put trails out in January to run in May are full of it.”

The danger signals are clear, Roger said. “It's the handler who wants to be a legend in his own mind.” Yet such legends end up as sworn evidence in the courtroom and cautionary tales in law journals. Scent evidence, or a dog's sniff, should be one piece of many pieces of evidence in a case, but sometimes it's the major evidence. That's a problem.

Now-deceased Pennsylvania State Trooper John Preston was one such legend. His fraudulent claims of his dog's ability to track scent led to as many as sixty people being convicted solely or partially on his false testimony, according to the Innocence Project. Preston claimed what tracking-dog experts say is impossible—that his dog could smell
human traces months or even years after a suspect walked over the ground or on heavily trafficked streets. One man was freed in 2009 after spending twenty-six years in prison. Florida prosecutors hadn't bothered reviewing Preston's cases after he was exposed as a fraud in the mid-1980s. In 2008, Florida State Attorney Norman Wolfinger ordered a review of murder and sexual battery cases where Preston testified, although the local newspaper editorialized that an independent investigation was needed. That didn't happen. Preston died in 2008.

Keith Pikett, a now-retired Fort Bend County, Texas, sheriff's deputy, is a more recent, still-living legend. His claims about his bloodhounds' scenting abilities resulted in what the Texas Innocence Project told the
New York Times
amounts to fifteen to twenty people in prison “based on virtually nothing but Pikett's testimony.”

Pikett had been involved in helping indict more than 1,000 suspects nationwide. His specialty was the scent lineup. A scent lineup starts with collecting scent from a crime scene, then collecting scent from a suspect. The dog's job is to “match” the scent from the crime scene with the scent of the suspect. For scent matching to be valid, it needs to be done under pristine circumstances, double-blind, with careful preservation methods. In the Netherlands—where the courts accept scent lineup but only as corroborating evidence—they use more than one dog, and the work is done in a sterile room without handlers present. In other words, no cross-contamination and no possibility of Clever Hans. That's not the way Keith Pikett did it in Texas.

Ultimately, the police evidence videos showing Pikett and his dogs running scent lineups “cooked him,” Roger said succinctly. I watched them online. Paint cans with numbers were placed on the grass in a line. An investigator pulled gauze pads in plastic bags out of one can and put them in another with bare hands. If there ever were an uncontaminated scent object with the suspect's scent on it, that scent was now possibly in several cans. Pikett then ran his bloodhounds on leashes down the line of paint cans. The dogs would look up, bay, stop when Pikett stopped. They would shake their heads, slobber flying,
and bay again. They avoided some of the cans. Pikett stopped one dog at a can with the leash, and the dog stood there. Another dog paused squarely between two cans, and Pikett said the dog had alerted on one of them. One dog bayed and ran past two cans, and Pikett said the dog had alerted on one of them. Head shakes, barks, and pauses were all alerts, according to Pikett. The bloodhounds were doing all three of those things.

“This is the most primitive evidential police procedure I have ever witnessed,” Robert Coote, the former head of a British K9 police unit, testified after he watched the videos. “If it was not for the fact that it is a serious matter, I could have been watching a comedy.”

The problem is that cops and prosecutors and juries across Texas bought the comedy for years. One man accused of killing three people, based greatly on Pikett's dog evidence, was partially blind, handicapped with diabetes and bone spurs, and physically incapable of committing the murders Pikett linked him to. He spent seven months in prison before someone else confessed to the killings.

Michael Buchanek, a retired sheriff's department captain, was identified by Pikett's dogs as the prime suspect in the rape and murder of his next-door neighbor, a social worker, based on a police theory that Buchanek had put the body in his car trunk, driven five miles, and dumped the body in a field. Pikett's dogs supposedly followed the victim's scent in a moving car for five miles, twenty-four hours after the crime occurred. As international working-dog experts Resi Gerritsen and Ruud Haak noted with heavy irony in their book,
K9 Fraud
, it was “an exceptional performance that no dog can copy.”

The police, Buchanek told the
New York Times
, “just kept telling me, ‘the dogs don't lie—we know you did it.' ” After months of living under a cloud of suspicion, Buchanek was cleared when DNA implicated another man who later confessed to the crime.

Juries are especially vulnerable to dog testimony, Roger Titus said. “You see them look at each other,” he said. “Out of ten people, you've got eight that like dogs. A receptive audience.”

Coote and Roger were not the only ones horrified. Roger's colleague Doug Lowry, the president of the National Police Bloodhound Association, testified against Pikett, saying he was doing “a disservice to police bloodhound teams throughout the country.” It's rare for organizations or top handlers or trainers to testify against other handlers. But these men believed that Pikett and his practices needed to be stopped. “Pikett has done a lot of damage to the veracity of dogs in the Texas system,” Andy Rebmann said.

While Pikett is retired and no longer testifying, his cases still pop up in the news. In 2007, Megan Winfrey of East Texas was sentenced to life in prison for a murder she was charged with committing at the age of sixteen. The major evidence against her? Keith Pikett's scent lineups. On appeal, her father was exonerated for the same murder. Her brother was tried for the murder as well, but his attorney argued strenuously against the scientific validity of Pikett's scent lineups; her brother's jury deliberated thirteen minutes before finding him not guilty. Megan Winfrey appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in April 2012. On February 27, 2013, she was acquitted of all the charges against her, but the prosecutor in her case requested a rehearing. She was finally released on April 19.

Pikett's attorney told the
New York Times
in 2009 that his client's work with his dogs could seem mysterious. “The first time I saw it, I couldn't understand what the dogs were doing.” But, he added, Pikett clearly knew. “He's been doing it so long, he doesn't understand why we don't see it.”

•  •  •

Corruption, wrongdoing, and cheating exist across the human spectrum. People are smart, just like dogs, so they sometimes cut corners to get their reward more quickly. The vast majority of experiments in cheating show that most people, given the choice and opportunity, will cheat a little. (Most people don't cheat a ton, because cheating a
lot makes us feel too guilty. Unless we're Bernie Madoff.) While we are reasonably tolerant about small levels of cheating, when people use dogs like puppets to create a sideshow, we feel especially duped and betrayed. Those cases end up getting an inordinate amount of attention.

Every sniffer-dog and trailing-dog genre seems to have a handler who becomes emblematic of that dishonesty. And every one of those handlers was enabled by people who should have been suspicious. In the case of cadaver dogs, federal agencies, prosecutors, law enforcement, and even archaeologists contributed to the corruption. From the beginning of my training with Solo, one name kept getting dropped with an occasional covert glance at me. Sandra M. Anderson of Midland, Michigan. A volunteer cadaver-dog handler. Like me.

People would ask during training or even searches if I had heard of her. Yes, I had. Almost every cadaver-dog handler has heard of her. Like Pikett, she has harmed the reputation of everyone who works with dogs' noses. Like Pikett, she is a fine cautionary tale.

Anderson started with—as a search-and-rescue handler who knew her told me—“a really good dog,” a Doberman-pointer mix named Eagle. Her dog found people. But at some point, Anderson, craving more attention, started to plant bones at crime scenes and at mass graves. Subsequent findings indicated that she was planting false evidence as early as 1999.

Like Keith Pikett or anyone who gets away with doing something more than a few times, Anderson had enablers, including the FBI, who thought she was wonderful. Gullible law enforcement investigators and archaeologists called her dog's abilities “mystifying” and “eerie.” That language alone should have been a red flag.

FBI agents arrested Anderson in April 2002 during a search in the Huron National Forest in northeastern Michigan. Michigan resident Cherita Thomas had disappeared more than two decades before, and police continued the search for her remains. Anderson offered assistance. She was arrested after a crime scene investigator and a cop
witnessed her planting bone fragments and bloody carpet fibers in and around a tree stump and in the muck of a drained forest creek.

The FBI ultimately had to review hundreds of cases that Anderson had worked on in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Michigan, and Panama. The early credulity of everyone from the FBI to anthropologists was matched by the angry pendulum of backlash. In her guilty plea, Anderson admitted that she had planted a bloody saw, a toe, carpet fibers, and bone.

The net effect of Anderson's acts was both complex and simple: It made law enforcement even more suspicious of volunteers. That's understandable but not entirely rational. Healthy skepticism should reign in all work that involves prosecuting someone for a crime. Dogs' noses should be just one of many tools. They can be great, and they can do things other tools can't. They aren't mystical, and they aren't perfect. They do need to be reliable.