What the Dog Knows

by Cat Warren

  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.

  16

  Grave Work

  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.

  A historian by nature, Kha decided this part of Thomasville’s Civil War history, as well as the historic black cemetery, needed sunlight cast on it. She learned about cadaver dogs through a town librarian who was with a Florida search team just south of Thomasville. Dogs, Kha learned—including Suzi Goodhope’s dogs—were being used in the Mississippi Delta to find 800- to 1,200-year-old human remains from the mound-building civilizations that lived there. Kha got in touch with Suzi, who connected her with cadaver-dog trainer Lisa Higgins.

  Historic human remains weren’t an obvious choice for Lisa. She had plenty of criminal and missing persons cases to deal with and a grueling seminar schedule. Lisa also admitted that in the beginning, she was deeply skeptical that the dogs were capable of detecting ancient remains. She has been converted, partly by watching her own dogs alert on remains going back more than 800 years, partly from watching other top handlers work their dogs. In several instances, she’s received clear confirmation from excavations.

  So Lisa brought Dixee and Maggie to Thomasville. Suzi brought her two Belgian Malinois, Temple and Shiraz, or, as she calls them, “the guttersnipe and the princess.” Temple was a shelter rescue with post-traumatic kennel disorder and probably only part Malinois. Nonetheless, she carried many of those genes: high drive, opinionated, and hardheaded. Shiraz is like a piece of delicate, expensive china, also opinionated. With a fine nose. Shiraz’s father won best of breed at Westminster.

  Kha contributed her amateur historian’s passion, as well as a geologist with ground-penetrating radar. Ephraim Rotter, curator of the Thomas County Historical Society, provided documents.

  For Suzi, the work at Thomasville was fascinating and good for her dogs. It’s not that the stakes are lower in these cases than for more recent missing persons, but they are different. Getting it right matters. Suzi noted that it takes time to imprint the dogs on “the older stuff.” “To me, they work a little harder and a little slower.”

  Looking for the long gone is not straightforward. As Lisa Higgins noted, “Scent is all over.” We humans might think scent would be strongest down inside the coffin-sized rectangular depressions that seem to indicate where bodies were buried in old cemeteries. That isn’t always the case. As Lisa said, we can’t know exactly where the dogs are smelling scent the most strongly. Low spots gather more scent. Animal burrows can make the scent more accessible in one area rather than another. Where roots engage, the scent can travel, although the means by which it does that are unknown—and controversial in both the handler and scientific worlds. We don’t know all the mechanisms that make vegetation and roots more attractive to cadaver scent, although moisture may play a role, roots breaking the soil surface may play a role, and even certain compounds may become more available through vegetation. At this point, dueling and contentious theories abound. What’s clear to everyone is that dogs appear drawn to vegetation and trees near a burial.

  At the Wolfe Street site, the dogs moved along the partly filled-in ditch, slowing and alerting within a few feet of one another, in the same general area. Suzi lost count of the alerts. Kha, watching the dogs work, saw the pattern. “Suzi and everybody had just significant hits in the trench,” she recalled. Then the dogs would go over to the property line. There’s one tree there, on the embankment with a hole in the bottom of it. Every dog indicated enthusiastically there, Kha said, acting as if they’d “hit the glory land,” as if someone were “blowing the fumes up” from the earth below.

  When the ground-penetrating radar operators came in, they confirmed anomalies and soil changes in the ditch where Suzi had flagged dog alerts, as well as on the scrubby flat grass.

  None of this is a scientific certainty. Kha knows that. But it’s enough, combined with the historical records, for her to try to get a grant, even in this tight economy, to bring the obscure site out of the shade. Perhaps the town will add a fence or some markers. Many prisoners died on that site. If the massive oak tree in downtown Thomasville gets recognition for being the bigger oak in the Southeast, perhaps the final days of the Union prisoners in Thomasville will finally get some acknowledgment.

  • • •

  All of us, five middle-aged white women, looked at the open land in front of us. We were in West Virginia, 780 miles to the north of Thomasville, Georgia. A hill’s curves ended at a pond half covered with duckweed. A red-winged blackbird trilled “conk-la-ree, conk-la-ree” before dropping off the power line to the reeds below. The hill was awash with blooming Bermuda grass, white and pink clover, a sprinkle of horse nettle. Streaks of green shot across the crest of the hill and just below the crest. A bull thistle interceded here and there. The six slaves reportedly were buried without coffins and not too deep. Maybe a child or two was there. A few might have slabs of granite on top of them, thought the farmer who owned the field, to keep animals from disinterring them.

  It had taken a half hour for Kathy Holbert and her good friend and fellow cadaver-dog handler Lisa Lepsch to negotiate the search with the old man who owned the cattle farm, with its pristine white house and barns. Some of that time was taken up with listening to his memories of cattle drives from Montrose to the slaughterhouse in Elkins when he was young. About the two herding dogs who didn’t mind getting kicked in the face and would challenge the recalcitrant back into line. His master herder, a long-haired red dog, was scarred and tough as nails. Probably not an Irish setter. Much of the talk was about the rules of dog engagement: that the gates be opened and closed quickly. That the dogs not stress the herd. Whatever the outcome, he said, he didn’t want any archaeologists digging. If the bodies were there, they should be left in peace.

  Thi
s site, unlike Thomasville, had no surviving documentation that we were aware of—if, indeed, anyone who could have created a record had cared enough. The oral history of the slaves, three men and three women, who perhaps lay on this particular West Virginia hillside in unmarked graves, had already served a modern purpose as a small branch of a bigger protest against a highway. The stories of the buried slaves—combined with endangered flora and fauna, Confederate and Union historic sites—helped prevent the huge ribbon of Route 33, a Senator Robert Byrd pork barrel project, from being laid across a section of Randolph County. The highway ended at Montrose and began again beyond.

  When slaves were there, the top of the hill would have been filled with apple trees. Apples always played a big role in West Virginia agriculture. Any orchard would have had at least five or six varieties: for cooking, for eating, for cider, for preserving, for shipping, dried, to England.

  Digging a grave in that orchard would have been difficult, with tree roots and rocky soil interceding. That was what West Virginia had: rocks and apples, salt and coal. What it didn’t have was a lot of slaves; it was a mountainous region with few large plantations, and tobacco grew only in a few areas. Cotton nowhere. Other than the salt mines, where slaves like Booker T. Washington toiled, most West Virginia slave owners were farmers with fewer than five slaves.

  Just because slaves were relatively few in number didn’t mean they were treated humanely. Some scholars believe that the treatment of Appalachian slaves was worse than on many Deep South plantations, with accounts of much harsher physical abuse and families torn apart more readily. Far too many scholars, one researcher wrote in frustration, “confront me with the mythological construct” that Appalachian slaveholders were “small farmers who only kept a couple of slaves to help their wives out in the kitchen.”