I find dead people...

Actually, I don’t, but I have couple of dogs that do the finding for me. I’ve been doing search and rescue(SAR) for close to 15 years now and my dogs and I have yet to find a live person. When I started in search and rescue with my local team, Blue and Gray SAR Dogs, I had no idea that we could use dogs to find dead people. Ben, my first SAR dog, made his one and only find up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. A suicide. Then my next dog, Finn, who is certified as a live find SAR dog, kept finding dead people. So when the Virginia Search and Rescue Council designed their Human Remains Detection Dog Standards, Finn was the first one to pass.

Finn’s ability has taken me places I never imagined I would go. We were in New Orleans after Rita and Katrina.

In the 9th Ward after Katrina and Rita

And in the summer of 2009, we were sent to the jungles of Guyana, South America to look for the flight crew of a plane that was missing.

Trying to get an injured Finn back to the forward base camp on the last day

And too many other local searches to keep track of. Our latest searches have been for a missing college student in Richmond, Virginia and victims of a serial killer in North Carolina.

Friends and family always thought I was a little off. But the fact that I now have 2 cadaver dogs and am in the process of training a third one, has merely confirmed that suspicion. I am a little off. I ask pregnant friends if I can have their placentas to train with. I actually had one friend offer it to me before she told me she was pregnant. She told me this story when she went in to the hospital to have her first child. While she was being wheeled into the delivery room, she told the nurses that she had a request that they may think is a little weird. The nurses assured her that nothing could surprise them, that they’ve heard it all. Well, she requested that they save her placenta so she could give it to me to train my cadaver dogs. The nurses paused a moment, and replied that, yep, that was one that they never heard before. My friend’s only request to me, was that the placenta not still be at her house when she got home with her new baby. It wasn’t.

Training a dog for this kind of work is not easy. It takes imagination and experience to design training scenarios that mimic searches I’ve been on. The tough thing is, every search is different and just when I think I’ve seen it all and trained for it, something brand new pops up. Finn and I have had to deal with many different scenes that I couldn’t train for. A most interesting one was a house fire. My training director at the time told me that unless the house was a log cabin with a tin roof we should be able to find fragments of bones, especially long bones such as the femur, and teeth. A log cabin with tin roof acts as a crematorium, and temperatures can get high enough to completely burn bone and teeth. Usually nothing is left, but a regular house burns unevenly and rarely does the temperature of the fire get high enough to burn bone.

We drove over an hour and half to get to the site of this fire. Then we had to take a tiny two track down into a ravine and then up the ridge to the other side. We rounded the curve in the two track and what should greet us, but a completely burnt out house that started out as a log cabin with a tin roof. Nothing was left but a huge pile of ash. Finn ran over the scene checking everything as if were another training day. Snorting often to clean out his nose and me washing his mouth out with the water bottle. He was eventually able to tell us where the elderly lady was when she passed and also where her ashes had been dragged out while the fire fighters dug through the remains of the house looking for her body. But there was nothing left of her.

I was on another search with my other dog, Cora:

in another state.We were looking for a college student that was missing and might have been buried at a construction site. This site was in the middle of a sketchy neighborhood, sketchy to the point that I had to have a police escort when I was walking the dogs prior to getting to work at the site. We were surrounded by news trucks and there were actually two news helicopters hovering over us as well. Cora was ecstatic to be the first one to work; she was as high as kite with excitement when I let her out of the truck and put her collar with the bell on her. Within the first 100 yards she does her indication, and quick as I can, I throw the ball at her before she can add a bark, because I don’t want the cameras on us! Come to find out, a man had been stabbed about 5 weeks earlier and bled out on that spot. We didn’t find the college student that site.

When my dog makes a find, I am thrilled. They’ve done what they’ve been trained for and have successfully completed their task. Then it is up to the police to finish the job. I get to go home and my dogs get a hamburger from Wendy’s. I get tired of people telling me that the dogs get depressed when they keep finding dead people. That depression comes straight down the leash and the dog reacts to the handler. Dogs don’t care if who they are looking for is alive or dead. All they want is the reward after making the find.

People ask me all the time, “how can you do this kind of work? Doesn’t it make you sad?” My reply to them is there is nothing I could do to change what has happened but I can certainly help the grieving family find some kind of resolution, even if it means a funeral. Then they don’t have to wonder about it for the rest of their lives.