What the Dog Knows

by Cat Warren

  • • •

  The number of missing servicemen from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was small, but the military had learned its lesson from the Vietnam conflict and was going to make sure no one was left behind. By the time the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the military was quite clear that dogs could be useful for any number of things: bomb and land-mine detection, sentry duty, and enemy tracking and apprehension.

  Kathy Holbert was one of the cadaver-dog handlers invited to apply to go to the Middle East as a contractor. Kathy runs a kennel in the mountains of Barbour County, West Virginia. Self-deprecating, self-sufficient, and humorous, she trains detection and patrol dogs, boards people’s pets, and breeds a variety of working shepherds and Beaucerons, an ancient French herding breed. She occasionally throws a Malinois into the mix to keep things interesting.

  Kathy had been in the military, first as a parachute rigger and then as a military-dog handler. That didn’t go swimmingly. Her first dog, a “find ’em and bite ’em dog,” appropriately named Dick, bit her at least a hundred times. “Actually, I was a terrible, terrible handler,” she said. “My timing was awful. They used to use me to show handlers how not to do things.”

  That’s hard to believe. Watching Kathy with both dogs and people makes the work seem simple, straightforward, and low-key. When Kathy got the call about going to the Middle East in June 2009, she was working her second cadaver dog, Strega, a sable German shepherd with an extra-long tail, big ears, and a witchy, mature intelligence. The decision about whether to go was oddly easy. Kathy and her entire family—her grandfathers, her father, her brother, and her husband, Danny, an electrician—had been in the military. She said yes. Then she thought, “You crazy woman, your dog’s eight years old, and you’re fifty, and you’re going into hundred-degree weather. What the hell are you thinking?”

  She did it anyway. Kathy remembered Vietnam. “They didn’t put that much in trying to recover our boys at the time,” she said. She took it personally. She and most of her family had served overseas. So Kathy started getting in shape, running, lifting weights, losing weight. She didn’t want to be, as she said, “the missing link,” the person who put soldiers in more danger than they already were.

  Yet getting off the plane in September in Iraq felt like a body blow. “It’s hard to describe the heat. It’s like having a blow dryer in your face.” A fetid blow dryer that smells like urine and blows sand at you. Kathy put booties on Strega, but they sometimes melted. The temperatures there average 110 in the summer. That’s before one puts on heavy equipment and a flak jacket. Instead of trying to escape the heat, Kathy decided to embrace it. She stayed outside with Strega as much as she could. They both adjusted, and the experience made Kathy rethink what breeds and personalities of working dogs work best where. Strega, though a German shepherd, had a big, boxy nose but not a lot of huge muscle mass. She worked longer than some of the snipier-nosed breeds and seemed to do better in the heat than some of the big-muscled Labradors. She was a methodical worker, not too fast, not too slow, plenty of drive, but not flashy. Those qualities served her and Kathy well.

  Greg Sanson, the personnel recovery advisor to the U.S. military in Iraq from 2009 to 2012, had a complex job: first to prevent kidnapping or abduction; then, once a contractor or soldier did go missing, to find him or her alive. If that failed, the next phase involved bringing in teams like Kathy and Strega. It was, he said, “an honor” to talk to me about the work Kathy did in the Middle East with Strega to help find the missing. “We don’t quit looking for them,” he said.

  The work of looking was hard, both physically and emotionally. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) shatter people. Kathy and Strega found themselves looking not for bodies but for small pieces of tissue. Being able to slow a dog down when searching for someone blown up with an IED was terribly important. At first, Kathy said, just as at any explosion site, Strega didn’t do perfectly. The scent of death was both everywhere and nowhere. Kathy understood that their job went beyond gathering enough DNA material to identify the victim. Kathy and Strega’s job was different: to keep searching for anything and everything that could be found of someone.

  Soon enough, with adjusted training, Strega understood the job. She started finding the little that remained.

  14

  Running on Water

  “Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,” he went on dreamily . . .

  “Look ahead, Rat!” cried the Mole suddenly.

  —Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 1908

  David and I could hear Nancy Hook muttering in the kennels, getting the dogs watered and fed so we could leave. Our helping only slowed her down. “You son of a bitch,” she told a massive pit bull mix. She kept her tone conversational. He had been biting people. Nancy would fix him. She specializes in dogs who bite without being ordered to.

  Near the kennels, the bass boat sat on a rusty trailer, hitched to Nancy’s pickup. Weeds had sprouted inside the boat. I plucked at them until Nancy arrived and told me to leave them alone. She was growing them on purpose, she said. Last night’s rain had left an inch of murky water to water and fertilize the weeds. I offered to bail, but Nancy said a bit of water wouldn’t sink us.

  So off we drove, trailer bouncing, to Taylors Millpond. Two women, a man, a dog, a boat.

  We were going to work on water.

  Stories about dogs alerting on submerged bodies sounded vaguely apocryphal to me at first. But water is an ideal medium for transporting cadaver scent to a dog. Bodies seem to effervesce in water, like slow-motion Alka-Seltzer tablets. They are doing the same thing bodies on land do: decomposing and sending off gases. In the water, those gases bubble up to the surface and hit the air, then the dog’s nose. Oils float up as well, providing a slick on top of the water that sends out additional scent.

  Lakes or rivers can veil a body, though, even when searchers have the latest sonar equipment on hand. Often, especially in the Southeast, divers can’t see their hands in front of their faces. Even when the water is relatively clear, diving and dragging don’t always locate the body. A good water cadaver dog’s nose can narrow the search substantially.

  Solo and I had just one or two or twelve training issues. Nancy thought she could fix us.

  Taylors Millpond is more lake-sized than pond-sized, more than a half mile long, created before the Civil War and now the site of bass tournaments. It’s a few miles down the road from Nancy’s farm. A general store faces the concrete boat ramp. A small group of men often sit on the concrete porch, chewing or smoking, cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon in hand. Today was no exception. I nodded, and they nodded back. The store owner shook her head vehemently as I tried to hand her the two-dollar boat-launch fee. She knew Nancy. She also knew we weren’t there to drink beer and troll for largemouth bass.

  We backed the trailer down the ramp and got the boat freed and floating in the duckweed without too much embarrassment and only minor slipping and sliding. David and Nancy planted themselves in the boat; Solo, who had already swum several laps across one end of the pond, leaped on board, spraying water over them. Solo loved boats. He thought it was fun to jump into them and even more fun to jump out of them. I pushed us off and leaped as well. The boat rocked woozily, and Solo climbed over us to the prow, a soggy figurehead. David fiddled with the trolling motor. He’d lowered it into the water, but it wouldn’t start. He scowled. He was irritated. He likes things to work.

  “It was free,” Nancy reminded him. Like the trailer. Like the boat. Like Nancy working with us to train Solo on water cadaver. Acrid smoke oozed off a battery connector. I wondered aloud if batteries could explode. Nancy said no, but we knew she was lying. Bent over the dead motor, David noted that he could feel the boat moving. It was following the pull from Moccasin Creek. As we drifted closer to the edge of the overflow, I could see where the pond ended and water slid over the concrete edge
in a fat silky ribbon and disappeared. I could hear the ribbon shatter ten feet below. I may have said something to David, because Nancy told me to stop giving him directions.

  “Is she always like this?” she asked him. They smiled at each other. I shut up and took one of the paddles so I could save us. The motor sputtered to life and then settled down into trolling-motor Zen. The boat, finally under David’s control, crawled away from the overflow and toward the center of the huge pond, dotted with floating islands of lily pads.

  Water is not my element, though I like to look at it. My childhood swimming lessons were spent in a quiet panic. Water came up over my nose even in the shallowest end of the pool. I was short and skinny, with big bones that jutted out and no fat to help me float. I would sink, gulping chlorinated water; my long pigtails were ropes pulling me under while the instructor looked on, disappointed.

  Water is Solo’s element. He loves it and knows he has blanket permission—unless I specifically forbid it and sometimes even when I do—to dive into any available body of water or mud hole. Now he was singing a throaty paean that carried across the pond.

  I could see his point. A great blue heron rose up out of the loblollies in primordial slow motion. Crappie, bullhead, bass, and catfish lurked beneath the lily pads and hunkered under the scrubby swamp roots that reached out into the alluvial floodplain. I couldn’t see them, but a blue-gray-and-chestnut belted kingfisher knew they were there. She was perched on a snag, her outsize head cocked slightly. At our approach, she dropped and flew along the edge of the shore with a chittering rattle of irritation.

  Though she was out of my league, I, too, knew how to fish. My grandfather, my father, and my brothers had taught me everything from worm-and-bobber fishing to fly-fishing. I knew how to creep up on a deep hole in a creek without casting a shadow or creating bank tremors that the brook trout could feel. In high school, I had made my own spinning rods, carefully layering thread to fix the guides onto the graphite poles. I stopped fishing thirty years ago. I wasn’t patient, and I ended up feeling sad for the fish. I still like to eat them.

  It was past time for me to return to the water. This time, I could let Solo find the fish. He was now seven years old. In the not-too-distant future, his increasing mental prowess would no longer be able to compensate for his slowly decreasing physical prowess. But as long as Solo had a good nose, water cadaver might extend his callout life.

  That was why Nancy was pushing us out onto the water, toward certification. I’d turned down a healthy handful of water searches, and I hated saying no. One investigator swore that the victim had just walked straight out into the lake with his boots on, no way it was a criminal case. Could I please bring Solo? I was so sorry to say no. Mike Baker pointed out to me that all the investigators had to do was put on hip waders and walk straight out into the lake a few yards to find the victim themselves. Sometimes it is that simple. Sometimes the body floats. Mostly, it’s more difficult. For people, that is. That’s when dogs can help.

  • • •

  Dogs helped in a case in Tennessee a few years ago. The victim was last seen covering her boat on a long dock off an East Tennessee lake. Two dogs from Roy and Suzie Ferguson’s Tennessee team were called in two weeks after her disappearance. The dogs both alerted on the dock, right where the victim was last seen. By that time, dragging equipment and underwater cameras were lying everywhere, complicating the scent picture. Searchers had worked nearly nonstop for two weeks around the dock area, with sonar, with deep-water cameras, with dragging, and with diving. Nothing. Investigators wondered whether the victim had left the dock. Or whether something nefarious had happened. A natural reaction when one doesn’t have an answer.

  The family didn’t want to give up. They brought in an underwater construction crew with a deep-water robot from out of state. Roy and Suzie Ferguson came this time, along with the two other team members and the dogs who had originally alerted. Suzie brought her female German shepherd, Schatzie. Roy was the point man, observing the dogs from an opposite dock. It’s always valuable on land searches if someone is there who knows how dogs work on land. Having a person who knows how they work on water is invaluable. Roy watched the dogs’ alert patterns as they worked from boats and off other docks. Then he calibrated where the dogs alerted. The handlers and dogs did the same the next morning, when there was no wind. Roy reported the team’s findings: The dogs had narrowed the area to a twenty-by-forty-foot oval. The crew put the little submersible robot, with its video camera and sonar, into the water at that spot. Using a joystick, they sent it down. The water was remarkably clear. In less than two minutes, the robot operators saw the victim, caught in the eye of the video camera. She was about thirty feet out from where she was last seen alive, covering her boat. That was in one dimension. She was 230 feet down, the equivalent of twenty stories beneath the lake’s surface. University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist Bill Bass said that given the cool water, the depth, and the victim’s fit build, she never would have floated. After falling, she probably floated down at an angle, away from the dock, flipping slowly like a leaf turning over and over as it drops from a tree. She managed, nonetheless, to send a final clear signal to the dogs.

  • • •

  I entered upon the small enterprise of “learning” twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi River with the easy confidence of my time of life. If I had really known what I was about to require of my faculties, I should not have had the courage to begin.

  —Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883

  Lisa Higgins knows water. She has the deserved reputation of being one of the top water trainers in the country. She also trains and deploys her own dogs; finding the time to do that on top of a hectic seminar schedule is, as all trainers know, a challenge.

  Lisa was in the middle of a team training with Haylee when she got the call in July of 2011. Could she bring her dogs and come out to a Louisiana reservoir past Morganza, a reservoir that was part of a dam system for the Mississippi River? The system, challenged by record rains, wasn’t perfect. The Army Corps had made the difficult decision to open the Morganza spillway and flood small towns downstream to relieve pressure on the levees in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The reservoir was still high in early July when a family of four went out to fish. It was an area the family knew well, but the water level created a churning boil at one spot. Their boat stalled on a log, and the boil pulled it in. The boat capsized. The father managed to boost his wife and one of the boys to safety on the spillway wall. He got his second son over to the wall, and his bruised and injured wife was able to pull the boy to safety. That last effort was too much for the father.

  “He saved his whole family. He was too tired to help himself,” Lisa said. She and another team from Jefferson Parish got the call; Lisa was with Haylee in a spot where it wasn’t easy to get Haylee home first. Law enforcement on the scene said sure, bring her along. Haylee, being Haylee, was thrilled. Lisa, being Lisa, figured that, carefully handled, it was another opportunity to school Haylee away from home. Law enforcement on the scene were “exceptionally wonderful to her,” Lisa said.

  That first day was long. When it’s hot and windless, it can be even hotter inside a boat. Lisa was working both her dogs, Dixee and Maggie, along with the Jefferson Parish team, with their dogs. Because of the heat, handlers were working their dogs twenty minutes each. They gridded, worked the dogs, rested and cooled them, then worked them again.

  Toward the end of the first day, “I noticed that Maggie thought she had an area,” Lisa said. They marked that and one other area of interest for local law enforcement and divers. They didn’t have time to narrow it down more that day.

  Authorities called Lisa back on July 4 to keep looking. Law enforcement on the scene were a bit disappointed Haylee couldn’t come that day; she had been good company. Lisa started in the area where little Maggie, her seasoned Australian shepherd, had reacted a couple of days before. At the end of thirty minutes, Maggi
e was panting. Lisa put her up in the truck to cool. She talked with the people on the scene. Dixee, her intense Malinois-German shepherd mix from Kathy Holbert’s kennel, had never had a water recovery. On the other hand, she wasn’t exhausted, like Maggie.

  Dixee went out. Dixee alerted. Law enforcement recovered the victim there that night. He was in 129 feet of water, more than 200 yards from where an eyewitness had seen him go down. “Bodies can travel much further than that in water,” Lisa said.

  It’s not just the horizontal distance. Water searches have a three-dimensionality that can make it difficult, if not impossible, to find bodies, even using the latest technology and divers. Depending on electronics is bound to disappoint. Side sonar can help, but if you’ve got a search area as large as a reservoir, a body can be a needle in a haystack of objects at the bottom: boulders, logs, bushes, snags. Or a body can be suspended between the bottom and the surface because of temperature gradients and currents. People who do recoveries in cold water say that if the person went in alive, he can curl up in a fetal position and end up on the bottom, camouflaged as a large rock. The best side-sonar scanner in the world won’t help distinguish that rounded shape from the others.

  There are drownings with fluid in the lungs and cases when the person is dead before going into the water, whether by accident or murder. Victims who are dead before entering the water, or get only a bit of water in their lungs, tend not to sink. Each factor affects the disposition of the body and whether it floats or sinks; it also matters whether and what the person has eaten before going into the water, and whether the person was weighted down with concrete, wrapped in a tarp, or wearing hip waders.

  Then there’s alcohol. Whether or not it played a role in the first place, and it often does, it definitely plays a role once someone is dead. Beer bloats. “If there’s beer on board, refloat time could be a lot quicker,” Lisa Higgins told handlers. In Louisiana, Lisa also considers whether there’s a Creole influence in the mix: Red beans and rice speed float time.