What the Dog Knows (32 page)

Nonetheless, challenges to the cadaver dog's primacy are constant. Perhaps it wouldn't be a machine but a bird that would do the trick? No researcher ever wants to give up on the possibility that other species are better at scent detection than dogs. That's why I was worried when I first heard about the turkey vulture experiments in Germany. Although the studies are limited, turkey vultures appear to have the most advanced sense of smell of any raptor. The idea to use them to find human bodies was ingenious. A search dog with wings and a better nose. The Hanover, Germany, police commissioner, Rainer Herrmann,
told fascinated reporters that vultures, with their ability to fly high and cover kilometers of forest, might have a major advantage over sniffer dogs. More than forty agencies from Switzerland, Austria, and Germany expressed interest.

It wasn't the first time people had thought about using vultures as sniffer animals. As early as the 1930s, the famous ornithologist Kenneth Stager reported, oil industry engineers in Texas had added ethyl mercaptan—a chemical that smells like carrion—to pipelines, then watched turkey vultures to see where the leaks were.

For this twenty-first-century version of search vultures, a few small hurdles had to be overcome: The vultures needed to be properly trained, equipped with GPS locators, encouraged to find only dead people, not dead animals—and convinced not to swallow the victim and destroy evidence before the police arrived. Vulture trainer German Alonso told reporters that police probably could arrive in their cruisers before too much important information went down the vultures' gullets, as the birds tend to peck rather than devour. I studied the photos of Alonso with his search vulture in training, Sherlock, perched on his arm. Though I was a sucker for a good-looking German shepherd, I figured I could get over the bird's bald, wrinkled red head and huge Roman beak. Solo has a Roman nose. But I couldn't help thinking about how vultures like to throw up corrosive vomit and how they pee down their own legs to keep bacteria at bay.

Sherlock didn't like to fly when he was searching for his training material. Instead, he waddled around like a duck. He was so anxious and antisocial, Alonso said, that given the command to search, he would hide in the woods or bolt. Miss Marple and Columbo, two younger vultures brought in to assist Sherlock and make him feel as though he were part of a big vulture family, fought constantly. None of the vultures seemed to give a fig about the difference between animal carcasses and human cadaver.

The Social Democratic Party—the opposition party—suggested that the state government start an international training center for
search vultures. By the time the laughter faded, so had the project. “The vultures are not currently available to journalists,” bird spokesman Stefan Freundlieb told
Der Spiegel
reporter Michael Fröhlingsdorf.

For the time being, neither dogs nor people nor vultures nor machines can do it alone. This is especially the case with clandestine burials. A decade-long FBI study on clandestine graves points to the problems of detection: The average age of the burial at the time of the search was four to six years. The bodies were typically off the beaten path, away from traveled roads and paths, surrounded by heavy brush, and buried up to two and a half feet deep.

Unless a murderer confesses and provides a detailed and, more importantly, correct map, looking for a grave takes an enormous number of investigator hours. Then there's investigator bias, cadaver-dog handler bias, forensic archaeologist bias. You can end up with holes dug all over creation. It's exhausting, discouraging work.

“Personally, I think dogs are invaluable for this type of work, but I don't think they should be used alone,” Arpad Vass said. “I'm very cautious about digging a hole where a dog alerts.”

That's not because Arpad doesn't trust good cadaver dogs. He's a fan, and the dogs are doing their best. But scent moves, chemical plumes move, decomposition moves. A victim's remains can be hundreds of feet away from where the dog alerts.

“You need a backup plan,” Arpad said. Several, preferably. Ground-penetrating radar can help, but GPR throws false positives as well and can't be used in all terrains. Also helpful are a hydrogeologist, a magnometer, a metal detector, and great investigators who manage to set aside their preconceptions.

Last, a machine that can recognize the four hundred or so volatile compounds we vent as we head back to dust. That's why the National Institute of Justice decided to support Arpad and his colleagues' work to create a machine that could measure “odor mortis.”

Enter Arpad's LABRADOR. That's an acronym for Lightweight Analyzer for Buried Remains and Decomposition Odor Recognition.
It should be in production this year. It looks like a metal detector. It's not meant to replace anything. It's meant to complement the whole kit and caboodle—investigators, ground-penetrating radar, geologists, forensic archaeologists, hydrologists, magnometers, and cadaver dogs and their handlers.

LABRADOR's early promotional literature, probably because Arpad helped author it, was modest: “The sensitivity of the instrument does not yet compare with that of a canine's nose.” Arpad is human, though. He couldn't resist one additional piece of furry marketing to his prototype beside the acronym: The silhouette of a square-muzzled hunting dog once graced the early machine's instrument panel. Sadly, the company producing Arpad's machine decided to remove both the silhouette and the original name. I doubt it's because they prefer German shepherds.

The holiness of nature is ever a lofty contemplation; and it is well amidst the quiet wildwood and beneath the forest-shades, to be reminded sometimes of death and of the grave. . . .

—Nehemiah Cleaveland,
Green-wood Illustrated
, 1847

When I walk in the Piedmont woods with Solo, on a search or for pleasure, I wonder when he tarries on a particular scent whether it's more than squirrel pee or the ancient track of a pit bull.

As a Yankee, I sometimes paint the Southeast's history with the crude black-and-white brushstrokes of slavery, but these walks remind me that the South's dead go back thousands of years. Once I start to think about who might lie beneath the forest floor, my perspective broadens and deepens.

Historic human remains, as they're known in the cadaver-dog world, can be a distraction during missing persons searches. One long day's work around an abandoned plantation, in a case that was barely cold, ended with Solo sniffing and working the downhill side of a slave cabin foundation with great interest but no final alert. I watched and rejected his interest as insignificant to the search we'd been called to do. As I drove home, exhausted, I realized how much birthing, living—and perhaps dying—must have occurred in that dirt-floored cabin.

Kentucky coroner Barbara Weakley-Jones, who founded and directed the Kentucky State Cadaver Dog Program when she was with the medical examiner's office, said that she doesn't like to train her dogs on “old old” human remains. In Kentucky, she noted, you can legally bury “your brother, your mother, your father” in the backyard. Training dogs to alert on old graves is “insignificant” and even distracting for the medical examiner's office when they are out on cases.

I understand her point. I remember the time that investigators spent pulling a cairn apart based on Solo and another dog independently alerting, only to get down to ground level and find roots that clearly had been there much longer than two years. If someone were farther down, it wasn't the victim we were looking for. They didn't dig. That was fine with me, though I remain mildly curious about that pile of stones overlooking a pond in the middle of the woods.

Increasingly, people are searching for historic human remains purposefully, using family Bible records, land deeds, oral history, Google Earth—and dogs. In the last decade especially, dogs have been used to discover or pinpoint what are essentially open-air museums: old cemeteries, battle sites, archaeological digs. One of the first documented uses of dogs on ancient remains belongs to the now-deceased
bloodhound trainer and handler Bill Tolhurst, who in 1987 took his chocolate Lab, Candy, to an archaeology site in Ontario, Canada, after construction workers found a skull. Archaeologists realized the remains were from the War of 1812. Bill and Candy helped them locate three additional bodies.

Across the United States—from suspected massacre sites along the Oregon Trail, to hasty burials along the Old Spanish Trail, to slave graves, to Revolutionary War and Civil War burying grounds, to the prehistoric mounds of the Mississippi Delta Indians—archaeologists, historians, and geologists are teaming up with cadaver-dog teams to map where the dead might lie. I say “might” with deliberation. Only excavation and good testing can establish what lies beneath. Often excavation isn't possible. Or desirable.

•  •  •

“Thomasville, once simply the end of the railroad line in Georgia, has always been a well-kept secret because of its remote location,” a
Road & Travel
magazine article observed. But to the fabulously wealthy industrialists who flocked there after the Civil War—the Vanderbilts, the Goodyears, and the Hannas—it was no secret at all. They all bought plantations and mansions at fire-sale prices. Cotton plantations became game-bird-shooting plantations after Reconstruction. By 1887,
Harper's
magazine had named Thomasville one of the top winter health resorts on three continents, with its salubrious dry air and increasing wealth.

“Northern beef and good fresh milk can be had here,” the
Harper
's feature noted. After the encomiums, the writer offered a caution: “The popularity of this place makes it important for visitors to see that its sanitary arrangements keep pace with its growth.”

Indeed. Two decades before, Thomasville's sanitary arrangements hadn't kept pace with its sudden growth. In the last throes of the Civil War, a panicked Confederacy, anticipating General Sherman's advance
through North Georgia, shipped five thousand Union prisoners from the notorious Andersonville prison camp to Thomasville. Slaves in the small town hastily dug long trenches, six to eight feet deep and ten to twelve feet wide, to define a five-acre spot in the piney woods. The phalanx of Andersonville prisoners, ill, starving, and near death, were put in that hastily built camp prison.

The prisoners lived—and reportedly five hundred died—in Thomasville during twelve days in December 1864. The deaths were mostly from smallpox and diarrhea, and the numbers might have been higher if it hadn't been for the relative kindness of the locals. Physicians who already lived there and tended to the wealthy set up a temporary hospital in the nearby Methodist church.

Then the nervous Confederacy, realizing that Sherman had taken Savannah just two hundred miles to the east, moved the prisoners out of Thomasville. Those who survived arrived back in Andersonville on Christmas Eve.

The prison camp barely registers as a blip in the history of Thomasville or the Civil War. Though the federal government made the most sustained effort in the history of the country to disinter, identify, and reinter Union soldiers in federal cemeteries, it missed Thomasville. As Civil War historian J. David Hacker noted, “Men went missing; battle, hospital and prison reports were incomplete and inaccurate; dead men were buried unidentified; and family members were forced to infer the fate of a loved one from his failure to return home after the war.”

The lot on Wolfe Street is tiny. Less than an acre of the original five-acre prison is still undeveloped, a patch of scrubby barren grass and a few pines and deciduous trees, surrounded by houses and city buildings. Two sides of the four-sided ditch survive, now L-shaped and sloping. A small historical marker notes the spot's significance, but the marker is dark and the lot shaded. I could find only one obscure guidebook that included its presence. That's in comparison with the hundreds of mentions of Thomasville's glories: its magnificent vacation homes and its huge oak tree.

Lessel Long, a Union soldier from Indiana imprisoned there, wrote at length about the Thomasville citizens, who he believed “manifested much sympathy for us.” He also wrote of the terror sowed by the bloodhounds of the South at Andersonville Prison. These were, he said, the dogs brought from Cuba used to track slaves and to track Union prisoners trying to escape. “There is no doubt but what thousands of our men would have made their escape if it had not been for the dogs . . . They deterred many from making the effort to escape.”

A century and a half later, a different kind of southern scent-detection dog would play a more benevolent role. The idea of bringing in cadaver dogs started when assistant city manager Kha McDonald, born and raised in Thomasville, realized she wanted to know more about that scrubby site with the small plaque. Thomasville had avoided the worst damage from the Civil War, but mysteries remained. Hundreds of Union dead were unaccounted for. Where were the dead who were treated at the Methodist Church buried? Was there a mass grave near the Wolfe Street site? The legend was that Union soldiers were buried under Broad Street, some distance away. That uncertain history was part of Kha's own legacy in a town built on slavery. At one time, the slave population outnumbered the white population in Thomasville. The city has a park named after the first black graduate of West Point, Henry O. Flipper, the son of slaves. “You can't escape that,” Kha said.