What the Dog Knows

by Cat Warren

  Finding appropriate training material for body-recovery dogs was a challenge. Nick’s position in the military, with its long history of honoring deceased servicemen, kept him from using human tissue for training. Nonetheless, he wanted to get as close as he could to the real deal. He visited morgues and talked to morticians. He talked with military people who had been around lots of bodies. His solution was a combination of sweaty soldier uniforms and monkey meat (or as the report called it, “macerated subhuman”) with some other chemicals added. It was a potent mixture, Nick recalled. The dogs found it. The four German shepherds in the study learned to work in fields, in buildings, in rubble, with a 92 percent accuracy rate in the final tests. Nick signed off on the study in May 1973, and the dogs went on standby for disasters.

  It’s difficult to trace the exact relationship of who did what and when because of gaps in the record. People die. Memories fade. Some of the work was classified. But at the time Nick finished his report, Southwest Research Institute, too, was studying whether dogs could help find the dead.

  The record of what happened next is clear. To make the leap from speculative military research in Texas and Maryland to paws-on-the-ground cadaver-dog work took not a major hurricane or flood, as Nick might have predicted, but a brutal murder in New York’s southern Adirondacks. Mary Rose Turner, a mother of five suffering from depression and insomnia, left her house in the wee hours of April 26, 1973. Her walk led her past Bohling’s Shell station in rural Syracuse, where a man named Bernard Hatch was working the graveyard shift.

  Later that morning, a witness saw a car dragging what he thought was a “six-foot-long white object.” It bothered him, so he didn’t let it rest. He brought the New York State Police to Potato Hill Road in Steuben, New York, to investigate. The tissue and blood trail was more than nine miles long. Police found the rest of Mary Turner three days later in a shallow grave. Her body had been mutilated not only by the dragging but by dismemberment.

  Evidence slowly and inexorably piled up against Bernie Hatch. A grand jury indicted him of Turner’s murder on October 17, 1973. That wasn’t the end of it. Just a month and a half after his indictment, hunters found the skeletal remains of Linda Cady, twenty-two, and her daughter, Lisa Ann, three, in shallow graves. It was two and a half years after their disappearance. They were just a few hundred yards from Mary Turner’s grave.

  The relationship among the victims, the location, and Hatch appeared more than coincidental. Cady and Hatch had dated for many months, with Cady joyfully noting in her diary that Hatch had given her a diamond ring. Authorities begin to suspect the area off Potato Hill Road was a burial ground, and they realized that Hatch was connected not only to Cady and her daughter but to another missing woman and her children. In mid-December, as searchers scoured the area, they found children’s charred clothing not far from Turner’s grave. The family identified the clothes as belonging to the three young sons of Lorraine Zinicola, who had also dated Hatch. She and her sons had been missing since September 1971.

  The New York State Police put out the call, and on December 21, 1973, William H. Johnston flew in from the Military Animal Science program at Southwestern Research Institute in San Antonio to the little town of Steuben. He looked at the terrain and search conditions with the state police. Could the military dogs they were training to find buried bodies be used to find other possible victims of the now-indicted Bernie Hatch?

  Investigators turned to a handler living 125 miles away: the New York State Trooper Ralph D. Suffolk Jr., aka Jim, who had a stellar reputation as a bloodhound handler. He and one of his dogs, Colonel of Redstone, were already renowned from having run a long trail that helped police locate three robbers a few years before—a conviction that was upheld in New York criminal court in 1969. This had been a first for tracking and trailing dogs in New York. The only legal precedent in New York for using a canine to help convict someone had not ended so well. In 1917, the New York State Supreme Court overturned the sentence of a woman convicted of arson based on a German shepherd’s nose. That dog, the court declared, simply showed off for houseguests.

  Jim Suffolk’s bloodhounds didn’t show off for guests. They tracked people almost daily. To Suffolk’s great credit, he admitted under oath that bloodhounds were not infallible. His honesty garnered him more credibility.

  The scientists at SwRI had wanted to use dogs to work domestic crime scenes, and Suffolk was the ideal man to take the lead. For this job, his trusty bloodhounds wouldn’t do the trick. Though they were ideal for tracking the living, he needed dogs trained to locate the dead.

  Suffolk flew to San Antonio in early May 1974 to start working with a newly invented category of search dog: the body-recovery dog, or body dog for short. Suffolk made training and handling suggestions; SwRI researchers made other recommendations; and Suffolk returned to upstate New York with two dogs. Pearl, a sweet-looking, white-blond Lab, was the furthest thing from a classified military project one might imagine. She was five years old in 1974 when she landed in Oneida County to take up the hunt for a possible serial killer’s victims. Every snapshot of her has her mouth open, gazing lovingly at either Jim or whoever was behind the camera. Maybe that someone might slip her a cookie? Pearl had been shipped from place to place to train for narcotics, bombs, and land mines. Her last trained specialty was buried bodies.

  Her sidekick, Baron Von Ricktagfan, a muscular black-and-tan shepherd, had already trained as a military scout dog in Fort Benning. Baron had a snarky edge to him, Jim Suffolk recalled. He could also do the work.

  Jim Suffolk and his two new body dogs hit the woods of Oneida County, New York, starting in the patch of land where several of the victims had been found. They searched for additional shallow graves for the next seven months, until snow and ice in November stopped them. The search included four thousand acres of land, most of it pinewoods planted in the 1930s. They spent eighty-three days in the woods.

  The search was interrupted occasionally for more pressing police business, including Pearl’s search for bombs in the Oneida County airport before Vice President Gerald Ford landed there. Pearl found nothing except the training material planted by the Secret Service to make sure she knew her bomb business. Jim and his dogs also went out to a sewage treatment plant in nearby Onondaga County after a sewage worker admitted to raping and burying a Syracuse University student there two years earlier. Both dogs alerted on the same spot. The Syracuse police brought in a bulldozer and found Karen Levy buried a few feet down. Afterward, Suffolk studied his records and the terrain. The dogs were about fifteen feet off, on the downhill slope, probably because of an underground creek. He thought he should have insisted on continuing to work up the hill even after the dogs alerted. This is the kind of knowledge that would help forensic anthropologists understand the patterns of cadaver-dog alerts around clandestine burials.

  Bernie Hatch, despite being suspected of killing a total of seven women and children, was convicted only of Turner’s murder after a seventy-day trial, the most expensive in the history of Oneida County. He is still in prison in Auburn and says he is innocent. Jim and his two body dogs, despite months of careful effort, never did locate additional buried victims. Lorraine Zinicola and her three young sons were never found.

  While Jim Suffolk and his dogs didn’t find more bodies in connection with the Hatch case, his contribution to the history of working dogs was significant: the first fully recorded occasion when body dogs were used in the United States.

  That was only the beginning for Jim Suffolk, who worked with Pearl and Baron for years. He used “the real stuff” to keep their training up: Bodies lying out in the woods tend to produce good training material. Jim retired from the state police in 1986 and is now in his early eighties. Despite recently losing a leg to circulation problems, and repeated shoulder surgeries as a result of holding on to harnessed bloodhounds running up and down hills in the Adirondacks, he is a local town justice. He and his wife, Sally, live in a house overlooking Ca
nadarago Lake.

  I couldn’t resist asking Suffolk the obvious question: Did he consider using bloodhounds? I knew he would admit that shepherds and Labradors were better suited for cadaver work.

  “Use the bloodhounds for cadaver?” he responded with horror. “Heck no! That was a colossal waste of a nose.” On the other hand, he admitted upon reflection, while he believes bloodhounds have the Cadillac of noses, they aren’t great at hopping around and getting into tight corners. Then his voice got wistful. “I’ve always wondered if I could train a cadaver cat.”

  The army and SwRI researchers, ever optimistic and open-minded, had already been there and tried that. Cats didn’t care to communicate with the researchers about whether bombs were close by. “Cats were excluded from the final programs because of their demonstrated refusal to cooperate consistently in joint ventures with man.”

  • • •

  I wasn’t qualified until I said the two magic words, “Andy Rebmann,” and they said, “My God, you trained with Andy Rebmann? You can search.”

  —Edward David, deputy chief medical examiner, Maine, 2011

  It would be inaccurate to say that the cadaver-dog world was empty and void before Andy Rebmann arrived on the scene. Other people came before him: Nick Montanarelli, the researchers at SwRI, and, of course, Jim Suffolk. That same decade, William D. Tolhurst, a famous bloodhound trainer and handler in New York, noted in his memoir that he started training his bloodhound, Tona, in 1977 as both a “mantrailer” and a body dog. Other handlers and trainers are probably lost in the spotty records.

  The world of the body dog was, though, still somewhat formless.

  Andy was at a cop conference in the mid-1970s when Jim Suffolk gave a presentation on body dogs. Andy, fascinated, approached Jim afterward. The two men must have made a distinctly odd couple. Jim Suffolk looked like a burly James Garner, with an even more heroic chin. He filled out his immaculate state trooper’s khakis. He had a full head of dark wavy hair, usually confined under his trooper’s hat. Because he was at a conference, Andy might have been in uniform and not wearing his trademark faded baseball cap pushed up at an angle, exposing his large eyes, mobile mouth, slabs of facial plane, and magnificent ears. He probably was smoking a Pall Mall.

  Andy introduced himself and asked Jim how he trained the dogs. Jim refused to tell him. It was still classified information. Andy didn’t take the refusal personally; he knew Jim was working with a military research group. It simply stoked his determination. “Goddammit,” Andy said, “I was going to have a body dog.”

  So Andy went his own way. He talked to a pathologist at the Connecticut Department of Health, who suggested that he start with the noxious chemical compounds of cadaverine and putrescine. Redolently available when animal tissue decays, they had been identified and isolated for over a century, having first been described by German physician Ludwig Brieger in 1885. Neither is the exact equivalent of human decay, since some stinky cheeses and even bad breath contain those compounds, but these were the early days of cadaver-dog training and human decomposition science.

  In the mid-1970s, just as Andy was working out the scent of human death with the Connecticut pathologists, a cognitive psychologist at Tel Aviv University, Robert E. Lubow, was honing in on a question about the Lancashire Constabulary’s program and the U.S. military program: “We must return again to the problem of stimulus generalization,” Lubow wrote in his fascinating book The War Animals, published in 1977. “The British trained a pig detector, the Americans a monkey detector. What evidence is there that these dogs, each trained to a very specific odor, will be able to generalize to the real world human body odor task?”

  That basic question would plague all sniffer-dog work—not just cadaver detection—for decades to come. Early in his training, Andy had speculated that decomposing animals and people smelled pretty much the same. Soon he, like Jim Suffolk before him, realized there were significant differences. Training dogs on the real thing was ideal, and law enforcement didn’t have quite the same constraints about using human remains as the military did. After crime or suicide scenes were processed, something always remained that could be harvested to help train the dogs.

  Rufus, Andy’s stocky, dark German shepherd patrol dog, had started out as a potential guide dog for the blind at the Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation in Bloomfield, Connecticut. Rufus had flunked out of the program because he wasn’t suited to calmly and gently guide anyone. He was a fine patrol dog, but Andy also started training him on a combination of cadaverine and putrescine but also with the dirt harvested underneath bodies that contained fluids and adipocere (the waxy fat that persists in some environments). That was in 1977, the same year Andy’s other dog, Clem, a bloodhound, won the award for being the best man-trailer in the nation. As long as people were alive, Clem was happy to find them. If they were assumed to be dead? Rufus took over. It was a sweet deal for both dogs.

  By 1980, Andy was starting to use Rufus and his nose for increasingly challenging work. Clandestine burials are the worst cases to work. They involve shovels and bulldozers and sometimes jackhammers. If you are off by more than thirty feet, a body might as well be a mile away. No one likes to dig to find bodies. Especially without a lot of corroborating evidence.

  Everything looked perfect and orderly at the neat, raised-level, shingle-sided ranch house in Monroe, Connecticut. It had a manicured lawn, a round swimming pool in the backyard, and a new patio next to the pool. Robin Oppel, twenty-eight, had disappeared. Her husband, Kent Oppel, a twenty-nine-year-old self-employed businessman, had given the police permission to search the premises without a warrant.

  Robin’s car had been found abandoned twenty-five miles away nearly a month after she disappeared. Inside the car was a broken-off portion of an owl key ring but no sign of Robin. She was seen last on September 19, 1980. At first Andy thought he might start one of his bloodhounds to see if the dog, even after all that time, could pick up a trail and give them a direction of travel. That was a stretch, and he knew it. By then, detectives working the case had a hypothesis.

  Rufus had been working as a body dog for three years when he and Andy arrived at the Monroe house to search. While Kent Oppel watched, Andy started Rufus on the front lawn, then down the side of the house and to the rear of the lawn. Rufus walked along the fence toward the swimming pool, stuck his nose in the dirt next to the newly laid concrete patio, and started digging. That was it. Andy walked him away and shrugged casually. He could hear Oppel telling bystanders that the dog obviously hadn’t found a thing.

  For long terrifying minutes, Andy thought perhaps Rufus had screwed up. Investigators jackhammered the concrete next to where Rufus had indicated, dug down a foot, and ran into electrical wires. Andy brought the dog’s nose back in. Rufus, Andy recalled, started “digging to China.” Investigators kept shoveling. Just a little farther down, they saw a small object in the hole: the other half of the plastic owl key ring found in Robin’s abandoned car. They kept going. Robin was four and a half feet down, under the concrete, beneath a layer of lime powder.

  Because the body dog represented a new and fascinating canine career, sometimes journalists got the terminology wrong. Rufus, one newspaper reporter noted with great sincerity and inaccuracy, was “one of eight ‘dead dogs’ in the country; the only one in New England.” Such reports of Rufus’s death were premature. He recovered twenty-six bodies in his career.

  Andy Rebmann and Jim Suffolk’s relationship didn’t end at that cop conference. A picture of the two men in a 1986 Vermont newspaper shows them using their body dogs on a homicide search. Jim looks spit-shined in his pressed khakis, facing straight into the camera with a nice smile. Andy looks informal if not disreputable, in jeans, T-shirt, baseball cap, grinning broadly, sideways to the camera. Jim Suffolk’s shepherd was a big male called Argus. Rufus’s successor sat next to Andy: She was a delicate, light-boned German shepherd he had named Dupa—Polish for “ass” or “hot chick.” After a missing persons sear
ch in a Polish neighborhood, the Connecticut State Police made Andy rename her, and after that, he called her Lady.

  Like Rufus, Lady ended up earning her kibble and taught Andy more about dogs’ ability to find the dead. In mid-January 1987, it wasn’t a buried body but a body spread far and wide—a case that involved forensic scientist Henry Lee (who later became famous as a defense expert in O. J. Simpson’s trial). The case became the inspiration for the darkly comic Coen brothers’ movie Fargo. Helle Crafts, a flight attendant, was missing after beginning divorce proceedings against her philandering husband, Richard Crafts, an airline pilot. Crafts had used his credit card to rent a wood chipper and to buy a freezer and a chain saw. A snowplow driver reported seeing a man using a wood chipper along the bank of Connecticut’s Housatonic River in the middle of the night during a snowstorm.

  Lady was put to the tedious task of sniffing piles and piles of frozen wood chips hauled in from the riverbank. One pile was particularly interesting: Lady alerted. It’s here. What she had found, although tiny, was human. Ultimately, because of Lady’s alert, police recovered sixty tiny chips of bone. A bit of blood. Strands of blond hair. A tooth with a gold crown. And a fingernail whose color exactly matched a bottle of polish in Helle Crafts’s bathroom cabinet. It was the first time in Connecticut history that a murder conviction was secured without a body. Richard Crafts was sentenced to fifty years in prison in 1990. The earliest he can be released is August 2021, when he’ll be eighty-four years old.