What the Dog Knows (43 page)

The courts have consistently found that patrol dogs used for apprehension do not constitute the use of deadly force.
Robinette
v.
Barnes
, 854 F.2d 909 (6th Cir. 1988), is one of the earliest opinions. During a search of a car dealership because an alarm had gone off, a handler sent his dog into a darkened area after giving the K9 warning. The suspect was lying under a car, and the dog bit him in the neck, killing him. This is the only major legal case at this point involving a dog fatality. There
are, however, numerous lawsuits contending “excessive force” in using dogs for suspect apprehension. Sometimes entire departments come under justified scrutiny, such as Prince George's County police K9 unit in the 1990s. The
Washington Post
, especially reporter Ruben Castaneda, did numerous stories on the Prince George K9 unit, including, for example, “FBI Probing Canine Unit; Lawsuits Recount Attacks by Pr. George's Police Dogs” (April 4, 1999), A1. By 2007, the K9 unit, which had operated under a consent decree, improved to the extent that a federal judge ruled the unit no longer needed oversight.

The section on Steve Sprouse being shot depended on a number of sources, including Steve himself, but also newspaper articles at the time of the shooting, as well as a court case filed by the arrested and charged defendant. That case was dismissed.

Interviews and correspondence include those with Mike Baker; Deborah Palman; Milo Pyne, NatureServe's senior regional ecologist for the southeastern United States; and North Carolina State University botany doctoral student Wade Wall. Ellerbee Creek Watershed Association's naturalist tours of the Durham area also helped me re-create the flora of this search area. Though I did not use names in this account, no facts were changed.

Two books were helpful, especially
Wildflowers and Plant Communities of the Southern Appalachian Mountains and Piedmont
, by Timothy P. Spira (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); and
Field Guide to the Piedmont
, by Michael A. Godfrey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

Deborah Palman's account of distance alerts comes partly from a lecture she gave at the National Search Dog Alliance February 2011 conference, in Eatonton, Georgia, and from her article, “ ‘Distant Alerts'—Long Distance Scent Transport in Searches for Missing Persons,”
USPCA Canine Courier
22, no. 1, March 2011: 47–51. It can be downloaded from emainehosting.com/mesard/pdf_documents/Distant%20Alerts.pdf.

Interviews and correspondence for this chapter include those with Mike Baker, Terry Fleck,
Texas Tribune
managing editor Brandi Grissom, Lisa Lit, Larry Myers,
Andy Rebmann, and Roger Titus, as well as numerous personal communications with handlers and trainers, and my own training experience and observation.

Books important to this chapter include Harry G. Frankfurt's punchy
On Bullshit
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), originally published as an article in
Raritan Quarterly Review
6, no. 2, Fall 1986; Oskar Pfungst's
Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr. Von Osten): A Contribution to Experimental Animal and Human Psychology
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911), available at
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33936/33936-h/33936-h.htm
; Bowling's
Police K9 Tracking;
Ensminger's
Police and Military Dogs
, as well as Ensminger's blog:
http://doglawreporter.blogspot.com/
. The two
New York Times
stories about bed bugs were “A New Breed of Guard Dog Attacks Bedbugs,” by Penelope Green (March 10, 2010), Home and Garden section; and “Doubts Rise on Bedbug-Sniffing Dogs,” by Cara Buckley (November 11, 2010), New York Region News section.

The piece on dog alerts, “Handler Beliefs Affect Scent Detection Dog Outcomes,” by Lisa Lit, Julie B. Schweitzer, and Anita M. Oberbauer, was published in
Animal Cognition
14, no. 3, 2011: 387–394; Lit has also written on search-dog and handler performance: “Effects of Training Paradigms on Search Dog Performance,” Lisa Lit and Cynthia A. Crawford,
Applied Animal Behaviour Science
98, 2006: 277–292.

The sections on John Preston and Keith Pikett depended on lengthy investigative journalist reports, especially from
Florida Today
and the
Texas Monthly
. The
New York Times
also covered the Pikett trials. The Innocence Project of Texas report, “Dog Scent Lineups: A Junk Science Injustice” (September 21, 2009), can be accessed at
http://www.ipoftexas.org/documents
; the CNN videos of Keith Pikett with his dogs can be accessed at
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/05/texas.sniffer.dogs.controversy/#cnnSTCVideo
.

The section on Sandra M. Anderson utilized numerous news sources. The fulsome language of the
Archaeology
magazine article entitled “Hounding the Dead: A Remarkable Michigan Mutt Sniffs out Ancient Human Remains,” by Brenda Smiley,
Archaeology
53, no. 5, 2000, was followed several years later by an online feature written by an intern: “Canine Case Closed?” about Sandra Anderson's conviction,
http://archive.archaeology.org/online/features/dogs/index.html
, accessed November 2011. Two research papers on the web were especially helpful: “No, Your Friend Cannot Do Magic:
United States
v.
Sandra Marie Anderson and Cadaver Dogs on Trial
,” by Liz Burne,
http://www.searchdogsne.org/reference.html
, accessed December 2011; and “Fraudulent Use of Canines in Police Work,” by Daniel A.
Smith, Lincoln Park Police Department,
http://ebookbrowse.com/fraudulent-use-of-canines-in-police-work-pdf-d18075497
, accessed December 2011.

Interviews and correspondence for this chapter include those with Brad Dennis, search director for KlaasKids Foundation; Roy and Suzie Ferguson; Lisa Higgins and her granddaughter Haylee; Nancy Hook; Benjamen Ortiz; Andy Rebmann; Arpad Vass; and Roane County Sheriff Detective Art Wolff, founder of Tennessee Special Response Team-A. Seminars where scenarios were used included a February 2011 National Search Dog Alliance seminar in Eatonton, Georgia; a September 2011 Washington Explorer Search and Rescue (WESAR) DogMeet in Bremerton, Washington; an October 2011 Network of Canine Detection Services Working Dog Seminar in Holly Springs, Mississippi; a November 2011 Cadaver Dog Workshop at Western Carolina University; and an August 2011 training with Tennessee Special Response Team-A in Sevierville, Tennessee.

The scenarios that Art Wolff and his team develop are sophisticated and invaluable, and I am appreciative of their generosity in letting me write about them.

The Winthrop Point isn't a widely advertised phenomenon; indeed, it doesn't exist on the web.

The scenario that Brad Dennis used to help educate handlers was based on the rape and murder of Chelsea King in San Diego in 2010: see
http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/04/17/chelsea.king.gardner.plea/index.html
and “Creation of a Monster, John Gardner,” by Don Bauder,
San Diego Reader
,
http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2012/jun/27/citylights1-creation-monster-john-gardner/
, accessed June 2012. The Washington State study cited by Brad Dennis is
Case Management for Missing Children Homicide Investigation, Report II
, by Katherine M. Brown, Robert D. Keppel, Joseph G. Weis, and Marvin Skeen (published by cooperative agreement between Rob McKenna, attorney general of Washington, and the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2006),
http://www.atg.wa.gov/ChildAbductionResearch.aspx#_jmp0_
, accessed December 2011.

This chapter is based on my own search experience, my academic and professional knowledge of the media, personal conversations with numerous other cadaver-dog handlers and trainers, and correspondence and interviews with Brad Dennis, Nancy Hook, Lisa Mayhew, Andy Rebmann, and Arpad Vass, as well as visits and training at Western North Carolina's FOREST facility.

Books and articles, in addition to the always helpful
Cadaver Dog Handbook
, include
Analysis of Lost Person Behavior
, by William Syrotuck and Jean Anne Syrotuck (Mechanicsburg, PA: Barkleigh Productions Inc., 2000); “The Lost Alzheimer's and Related Disorders Subject: New Research and Perspectives,” by Robert J. Koester,
Response 98 NASAR Proceedings
, 1998: 165–181; “Behavioral Profile of Possible Alzheimer's Disease Subjects in Search and Rescue Incidents in Virginia,” by Robert J. Koester and David E. Stooksbury,
Wilderness and Environmental Medicine
6, 1995: 34–43; and “The Search for Human Remains in the Search and Rescue Environment,” by Mark Gleason, Search and Rescue Tracking Institute, Virginia, February 2008.

The National Crime Information Center's list of “endangered” missing people for 2012 can be found at
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ncic/ncic-missing-person-and-unidentified-person-statistics-for-2012
. Crime rates in North Carolina can be tracked at
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nccrimn.htm
.

The section on New Bedford, Massachusetts, was greatly aided by Carlton Smith's book
The Killing Season: The Unsolved Case of New England's Deadliest Serial Killer
(New York: Onyx, 1994) and Rosenthal's
K-9 Cops
. Archived newspaper clippings from the
Hartford Courant
and other local papers from the period were helpful, as well as Denise Dowling's article “Speaking for the Dead,”
Rhode Island Monthly
, May 2009,
http://www.rimonthly.com/Rhode-Island-Monthly/May-2009/Speaking-for-the-Dead/#_jmp0_
, accessed December 2011; and Curt Brown's series for the North Kingstown, Rhode Island, newspaper, the
Standard-Times
, “Dark Days Revisited: Bristol County Highway Killings, 20 Years Later,” July 7, 2008,
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080707/NEWS/807070337
, accessed December 2011.

Interviews and correspondence for this chapter included Kathy Holbert; University of Rhode Island associate professor and documentary filmmaker Mary Healy Jamiel; Andy Rebmann; Greg Sanson, personnel recovery advisor to the U.S. military in Iraq; freelance writer and journalist Michael Sledge; Rhode Island State Trooper Matt Zarrella; and a number of personal communications with handlers, trainers, and military working-dog personnel.

The epigraph by the World War I hero Siegfried Sassoon reflects his increasing disillusionment with the war. The Oxford University Press biography for its collection of his works notes: “[D]uring his recovery period, discouraged by the politics of war at home and the deaths of numerous friends at the front, he made contact with the group of pacifists led by Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell. He returned to France in January 1917, was wounded by a sniper during a raid near Fontaine-les-Croisilles in April, and was sent back to England. Encouraged by Russell and the journalists John Middleton Murry and H. W. Massingham, he wrote his soldier's statement, dated 15th June 1917, calling for a negotiated peace, and acted to resign his commission. Robert Graves intervened, fearing that his friend would be court-martialed. His commanding officers were sympathetic, and sent Siegfried to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh to be treated for neurasthenia.”

Books that were important to this chapter include Michael Sledge's
Soldier Dead: How We Recover, Identify, Bury, and Honor Our Military Fallen
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) and Drew Gilpin Faust's
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
(New York: Knopf, 2008).

Ellwood Hendrick's “Merciful Dogs of War” ran in the February 1917 issue of
Red Cross Magazine
. Although I could not access the original magazine article, it is cited and reproduced in several newspapers and magazines from the early months of 1917, including the
Oakland Tribune
, February 20, 1917: 10, under the heading “Tale of the Red Cross Dog.” Theo. F. Jager's eighty-three-page book,
Scout, Red Cross and Army Dogs: A Historical Sketch of Dogs in the Great War and a Training Guide for the Rank and File of the United States Army
(New York: Arrow Printing Co., 1917) can be accessed via googleplay:
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=hCUwJ8dyzcYC
.

Historian J. David Hacker's work has been seminal—and is thought to be considerably more accurate—on revised counts of deaths in the Civil War.
Civil War History
journal editors, in awarding his piece “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,”
Civil War History
57, no. 4, 2011: 307–348, the best of 2011, wrote: “These results have far-reaching consequences, encouraging historians to rethink assumptions not only about the war's human cost, but the ways in which we try to measure and comprehend the size of that cost.”

Ernie Pyle's draft column can be read at the Indiana University School of Journalism's website dedicated to Ernie Pyle:
http://journalism.indiana.edu/resources/erniepyle/
. Pyle is one of my heroes, and I still get emotional reading his work. In his photographs, he resembled my grandfather as a young man.

The section on Matt Zarrella depended on numerous sources, including the following: “Soldier Gets Proper Burial After 39 years,” by David A. Markiweicz,
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, July 3, 2005: 2D; “Dogs to Aid in Search for Vietnam MIAs,” by Matt Sedensky,
Associated Press
, February 11, 2003,
http://www.armytimes.com/legacy/new/1-292925-1582144.php
, accessed July 2012; and “Is Time Running Out to Find Soldiers' Remains in Vietnam?” by Geoffrey Cain,
Time
, May 13, 2011,
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2071021,00.html
, accessed January 2012. Mary Healey Jamiel's documentary on Zarrella's work,
Reliance
, is forthcoming. You can access trailers, photographs, and more information on the website:
http://www.reliancethemovie.com/index.html
.