What the Dog Knows (26 page)

Take a person with Alzheimer's or dementia. Her behavior differs from that of other lost people. If an unimpaired person is right-handed and gets lost, she tends to move to the right. Not someone with dementia. That person doesn't behave logically, even at a subconscious level. She will walk straight into thick brush. Her brain can't compute turning around and backing up. She will keep walking in place. The body of a man with Alzheimer's was found in the woods two streets away from his suburban home, a month after he went missing. The
police, I heard through the grapevine, had been given my name and number soon after he went missing. But the call never came. There could be a hundred good reasons they never reached out. Or none. It was one of those times when I sat and waited.

Most people with dementia or Alzheimer's—nearly 90 percent—are found less than a mile from their point of departure and within thirty yards of a road. I know that because, when I was waiting for the call, I did the research. It wasn't wasted effort. I've used that knowledge for other searches. I still think about that one man and his family. Perhaps even more than if I had gone on the search.

•  •  •

How do you search properly along a roadside? How many yards back would your basic panicked or lazy murderer drag a victim? Not far. Twenty-five yards. Check farther back. Animals are more industrious: How much farther back might they drag something? Much farther, depending on the animal. Dogs have been known to carry parts of people up to a couple of miles. What kinds of animals inhabit the search area? Bears tend to go downhill to a clearing or creek; they can move a whole body, crack femurs, and bat heads around like soccer balls. Coyotes can go uphill to a den, carrying limbs. Possums and raccoons tend to dine on the spot, although they can drag material vertically. We have coyotes in every county in North Carolina. We have black bears in 60 percent of North Carolina, throughout the mountains of western Carolina, and down through the swamps and shrubby pocosins of what we call “Down East.”

Then there are the obvious areas that need searching, as Brad Dennis pointed out: abandoned properties and outbuildings. Piles of wood and debris that can be used to conceal a body. Impromptu garbage dumps where someone can drag an old mattress over the body. For clandestine burials, natural holes made by roots and erosion that form ready-made graves, with only minimal additional digging needed. Did
the suspect have easy access to a shovel? Wasn't he homeless? Most clandestine burials are no deeper than two and a half feet, yet that's enough for someone to disappear forever. Arpad Vass calls the clandestine burial his “nemesis.”

There's the time frame to consider. In North Carolina, areas can get overgrown in one season. Hunters tend to find skeletal remains more often than law enforcement officers do. Mostly skulls, as they are the easiest to identify. A turkey hunter found a skull more than a year and a half after a young girl disappeared. The search for her remains was one of the most thorough mounted in recent memory in North Carolina. Other bones tend to blend in with leaf litter like chameleons. But anyone who has searched in North Carolina woods knows that heart-stopping moment when you see a light brown or green-moss-covered turtle shell, a hump coming out of the surrounding humus or leaf fall, and momentarily mistake it for a skull.

On one case, police jokingly—but with an underlying awareness of the neighborhood surrounding the woods—asked me to please find only the body they were looking for. On another case, searchers found skeletal remains, but not the victim they were looking for. One of the medical examiner's investigators explained that this was simply part of the business. She and other forensic investigators, she said, can't see a black garbage bag in a ditch along a road without wondering.

Nonetheless, for all the cruel casualness of people and of nature, there's something reassuring about working a cadaver dog. It's true that finding someone or part of someone can give closure to a family or allow the police or prosecutors to move ahead with a case. That doesn't entirely explain why it's important to find remains, even if there's little to nothing left. It's partly to be able to acknowledge, even momentarily, the spot where someone was hidden or dumped. And to think on it. I like the fact that, animal predation aside, it can be hard to get rid of a body. I love the fact that when people die, they don't completely disappear, despite their murderers' efforts. Yes, they cease to exist. At the same time, they also stubbornly stick around.

During one search, Solo went right to a spot in the woods, lay down, and looked at me expectantly. An investigator confirmed Solo had alerted on the exact spot where more than a year earlier, hunters had found the bones of a murder victim. The pine forest floor held on to her scent and would do so for years.

•  •  •

Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb.

—Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick
, 1851

Three main highways go in and out of the old whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts: Interstate 195, state Route 140, and U.S. Highway 6. During the late 1980s, the height of the crack cocaine and heroin epidemic, those were the highways used to ferry drugs in. Those were the highways where women's bodies were dumped on the way out of town. During that same time, one reporter noted, a local clinic was treating four hundred heroin addicts a day. Only Boston beat that number in the state. Now, in New Bedford, as across the nation, crime is down, way down.

But for six months during that epidemic, from April to September 1988, eleven women, most of them desperately selling sex in exchange for cocaine or heroin, disappeared from Weld Square, a dreary block of darkness in the center of town.

One woman's body was found while other women continued to disappear. No one connected the cases until it was too late. These were women whose lives had started to slip away before they were murdered.

In early July 1988, a woman stopped her car along state Route 140 to pee in the nearby scrubby brush. She discovered the first body. Debra Medeiros, twenty-eight, was spread-eagled, her bra wrapped around her neck. She had been missing since late May. Later that month, two motorcyclists also felt the call of nature and found Nancy
Paiva, thirty-one. Paiva was on her back, her feet pointed toward the westbound traffic on Interstate 195. Next, a public works employee collecting cans on his lunch break found a third woman's remains: Debbie DeMello's body was just off an I-195 onramp.

That was when the Bristol County district attorney's office contacted Andy Rebmann's supervisor at the Connecticut State Police. By that time, Andy was working Lady's replacement, Josie—another Fidelco dog who wasn't cut out for guide-dog work, just like Rufus and Lady. Too much drive. She was cute, light on her feet, intense. Not that big for a shepherd and as tightly articulated as a cat. Andy hadn't been working her long, but that didn't seem to matter. She was a natural, cross-trained to find both live people and dead ones. She didn't care which as long as she got her reward. She was the kind of dog who would dash two or three times into and out of impenetrable brush to find Andy—to make sure he understood, hitting his pocket with her nose. The ball. The ball. The ball. Jeez. Get it out already. Her first callout, the day after she was certified, was for a suicidal person. It took her two minutes to find the guy. Still alive.

“She was a lot of fun,” Andy said simply. “She was the easiest dog I had ever trained in my life.”

The New Bedford highway search was not fun. It was dangerous and hard going. Dense traffic on one side. Claustrophobic thorns, brush, pine, and dead animals on the other. Josie worked for five hours that first day, searching the north side of Interstate 195. That may not sound like a lot of time to people who punch in and out and get to play on the web for part of the workday. But for a search dog spending all her time sniffing and quartering and leaping over obstacles and getting caught up in dense brush, it's a brutal schedule.

Josie was young, though, three years old. And while Andy wasn't a spring chicken, he was fit and experienced. Andy set up half-mile sectors and worked the shoulder. Then he'd go in twenty-five yards and work inside the deer fence. Nothing. All that day.

Nothing the next morning, either. By midafternoon, Josie and Andy had worked their way down to the ramp coming off Reed Road. The north side. They would have to do the south side, but all in good time.

Like most operational air-scent dogs, Josie was off-lead so she could go where her nose led her. Suddenly, she was in the trees, not twenty-five feet off the ramp, tail wagging madly. She bounded out of the woods and hit Andy's pocket. Give me the ball.

It was the remains of Dawn Mendes, twenty-five, from New Bedford, last seen leaving her home on September 4, 1988. Josie found her on November 29, 1988. After Mendes was identified, the New Bedford
Standard-Times
's headline was blunt and offensive. The headline started with Mendes's body, went to her sex work, and left her name out entirely: I-195
BODY IS CITY PROSTITUTE'S
.

Andy gave Josie a day's break and then went back to searching on December 1, 1988. Back and forth. Debbie McConnell, from Newport, Rhode Island, disappeared sometime in June 1988. Josie and Andy found her in the midafternoon on December 1, 1988, down an embankment off Route 140 northbound, thirty feet from the road. McConnell was less than three miles from where the first victim was found.

These were linear miles of demanding work, going twenty-five yards in, coming out, gridding the length, working the high spots, trying to keep the dog downwind, mostly avoiding dead deer and smaller mammals. Josie did manage one delightful break where she rolled in a dead skunk. At one point, a television truck crew distracted the sociable dog, and she started to dash across the highway to greet them. A semi barely missed her.

Andy and Josie were back at it in late March 1989 when Josie found a third victim: Robin Rhodes, twenty-eight, off state Route 140 southbound, lodged within the trees, just twenty-five feet from the highway. After that, Andy organized a four-day search, pulling in six
dogs and their handlers from four states. They found no more bodies. After several days without results, Andy called a halt to the search. “At least we know where the victims aren't,” he told a newspaper reporter.

Only one more victim was found after that—Sandra Botelho—miles away from the others, on I-195 in Marion. Nine women's bodies in nine months. Two other women who fit the profiles of the Weld Square victims remain missing. Although the police honed in on two suspects, a third possibility emerged: The killer might have worked on a seasonal fishing vessel based in New Bedford.

Lighthearted Josie died in 1991, two years after that search, of a blood disorder. She was still a young dog. Andy retired from the Connecticut State Police that same year.

If Andy hadn't pushed forward, would as many women have been found? I didn't bother asking him; I already knew the answer. Unlikely. This was not a case where hundreds of good-hearted volunteer searchers showed up and the Red Cross arrived to provide Gatorade and Dunkin' Donuts for everyone. The case didn't become a case until it was too late for five of the victims. Would it have changed anything for the women if they had been warned that a killer (or killers) was targeting them? Perhaps not. No one will ever know.

In New Bedford, a small number of people—and one dog who loved to work and play—cared a lot. Yet all of the victims, except the three Josie and Andy found, were found by accident: people needing to relieve themselves on the side of the highway; hunters; two boys walking along the breakdown lane and seeing a body just ten feet away.

Twenty-four years later, the cases remain open and unsolved.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you'll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

—Siegfried Sassoon, “Suicide in the Trenches,” 1918

Dogs have been used during war for centuries: first for attack, then for scenting the presence of enemy soldiers, then for sending messages to the front, and then for finding bombs and mines. Starting in the nineteenth century, dogs were also tasked with finding wounded soldiers. Through it all, the dogs' stated purpose in war was to focus on finding the
living
rather than the dead. Dogs were supposed to assist in the
heat of battle, not find the bodies in its aftermath. Canines were simply additional cogs in the machinery of war.

Nonetheless, immediately after a battle, triaging among the dead and the living is a critical task. The Red Cross knew that better than any organization. World War I saw the first widespread deployment of the dogs Germans had started training in the late 1800s:
Sanitätshundes
, or “sanitary dogs.”