I Find Dead People:
How I got started in Human Remains Detection
by
Loralei Nistal
It was June, 2003, and I had 15 minutes before clocking out
of my job as a senior keeper in the Birds and Reptiles Department at the
amusement park Busch
Gardens. I was looking forward to the best part of my
day – the couch and air conditioning.
I decided to make the best use of this time by finding some
“victims” to give a short talk to about the American Flamingos. This was my favorite time of the year to talk
about the Flamingos as they were still acting out their breeding displays which
gave the guests a good visual as I explained each movement the flock would
make.
I “targeted” a couple right in front of me and began
explaining all the graceful movements these beautiful pink birds were doing to
display just how desirable they were to the rest of the flock. After some time of impressing them with my
knowledge of Flamingo behavior, I asked about them.
Heidi introduced herself and her husband, Mike. She said they were from Thomasville, Georgia,
and were in town to pick up a puppy for Search and Rescue. I could barely contain my excitement as I dug
deeper for more information. Heidi told
me there was an outstanding team right here in the Tampa Bay Area, and I should
contact them. Wow! I was so excited about being in the right
place at the right time as I had been interested in learning more about Search
and Rescue for some time.
We exchanged pleasantries and email addresses and I asked if
they would have someone on their team contact me. Away they went to collect
their new puppy, and, unbeknownst to me, I started my journey into the field
Human Remains Detection (HRD). In Human
Remains Detection dogs are trained to identify the smell of human tissue
decomposing. The dog are trained to
signal a find with a behavior that the handler can easily identify and
reward.
The very next day, I received an email from one of the team
and within a week I was being introduced to the whole team. Now this might seem
intimidating to some, but my full time job required that I get into a display
with 13 alligators everyday, this was mild by comparison.
You could tell that the team was a closely knit group of
people. The team leader and founder,
Sharon, was outgoing, outspoken, charismatic and BLONDE! Lyn was tough, a little aloof and had a good
sense of humor. She was small, but could
pack a powerful punch as evidenced by the fact that she is currently a civilian
K9 Handler on her second tour of Iraq. Then there were Sylvia and Harold. Sylvia was very intimidating and knew it,
which immediately made me like her.
Harold, on the other hand, was outgoing and baked cakes for each team
member on their birthday. Of course, who wouldn’t like a man that cooks! Then there was Mike who was in charge of
Technical Support. He had everything you
needed or ever would need to survive for a week in the woods, and it was all in
his car. Getting lost with Mike around
was not an option since he was a master of the compass and navigation. Terry
and Beth were great people, and would give you the shirt off their backs. They
also made up part of the technical support on the team. Rob was Director of
Training and Shelly was his wife, but since they lived so far away I rarely saw
them. The strangest thing was I had just met all of these people but felt like
I had known them for years.
TEAM TRAINING (aka SEPARATING THE WEAK FROM THE STRONG)
Training was every Tuesday night in Dunedin from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. I
would fight my way over in the after work traffic and then drive back to Tampa so I could get up
at 5:30 a.m. to get ready for work. But
this was just beginning to prepare me for what would be involved in being a K9
Handler. It isn’t unusual to have to get
up at 3 or 4 a.m. on your day off, to drive several hours to do a search in 90°
heat, train, test for certification and then get up the next day and do it all
again. Then there are the six hour
training days each week with your team just to maintain your dog’s skills and
physical condition.
I started by observing the handlers training their dogs.
This meant that I followed behind each handler and watched each dog work. Some handlers
had more than one dog, and some had as many as six. All the dogs were trained
and certified, meaning each team had made huge scarifies to be where they were.
I certainly got my exercise following all the teams around, but
I wanted to make a good impression. My
task was to learn to read each dog’s body language. The problem was that it was dark most of the time. Flashlights didn’t help much, making it
difficult to observe especially when you weren’t sure what you were looking for. On the other hand, I got a lot of practice
walking in woods at night and learning how not to fall on my back side.
I had never heard of Cadaver (HRD) dogs before but had
assumed that recovery work was all about disaster work or missing people. In reality HRD teams are called in to help
find dead human bodies. The bodies can be recently deceased or may
have been dead for a very long time.
Finding the bodies can help solve crimes or give families closure. To my surprise the next thing you know I end
up on a HRD team. Although they had some tracking dogs, dogs trained to follow
the trial of a live human, in the State of Florida they were never used since law
enforcement did not use civilian teams to look for live victims. In other states civilian teams are more often used
in tracking than HRD.
One of my team mates, Sharon, had a German Shepherd named
Kato, who was soon to be a father. Mom was Claire, a hairy beast Sharon co-owned with
Sylvia who had been breeding German Shepherds and Shelties for many years. I really liked the look of Kato and had always
wanted a German Shepherd, so I asked Sharon
if I could buy a puppy.
The puppies were born at the end of August. I went out to the puppy pen and stood in the
middle of all the fluff and play when this one puppy came over, sat on my foot
and proceeded to look out in the same direction that I was looking. At that
moment I felt a real bond with that pup and in a few more weeks I brought her
home.
I named her Buffy as in the vampire slayer. That was not the
name Sharon
gave her and probably didn’t care for my naming a German Shepherd Buffy, but I
was determined. I was a fan of the show,
and after all our plan was to hang out in grave yards.
TRAINING THE HRD DOG
The team used a buddy system for new dogs, and so for puppy
training I was assigned to Sylvia. Little did she know what she was getting
herself into. You’ve heard of squatters
– right? For the next two years I lived
and breathed training every spare moment of the day that I was not working at
my day job. Sylvia and Harold became family to me and I got to eat cakes and
pies on a regular basis thanks to Harold.
My formerly intimidating coach Sylvia worked long hours with
me and her passion was contagious. My
new mentor allowed me to intrude on her 10 acres several times a week for 10-12
hours a day. Not once did she complain or act like I was intruding on her
personal life.
I learned how scent is influenced by heat, rain and terrain because
we trained in all kinds of weather at different times of the day. I was amazed
to see how scent travels into the trees and Palmetto bushes after only a couple
of weeks and in six months the dogs could pick it up 20’ away from the bury
site. I knew then I would have to work
on my handling skills more than Buffy would have to work at detecting HRD, and
I continue to work on them to this day. The learning never ends, that is a big
part of the fun.
Over the next two years Sylvia and I had some very exciting
times – getting chased by loose pit bulls running in a pack, battling very large rattle snakes and lakes full of alligators
were just a few of our challenges. Yes, although alligators are not a problem
for a lot of the country, in Florida, as well
as Georgia and Alabama, SAR handlers have
to worry about their K9 member being eaten.
Finally, it was certification time and water work was part of the
agenda. When Sylvia, my 90 pound German
Shepherd Buffy and me, a rather large woman, piled into the dingy I could only
pray “Oh God, please don’t let my dog jump ship”. Buffy, true to her name,
bravely stayed in the dingy and we passed with flying colors.
Needless to say my coach Sylvia saved the day more than on
one occasion. I told you she could intimidate the best of them and that included
stray pit bulls. Finally, I decided if
she could do it, so could I! I was
having the time of my life working the dogs on all kinds of old crime scenes. I was
learning to become an HRD team with my dog but also detected lots of mosquitoes
and spider webs which always found my face before I saw them.
Training included long conversations on dog nose time, how
long a dog can use his nose before needing a break, the process of decomposition
and impact on a search of certain conditions.
Specifically I learned how to search for grave sites and how criminals
think when trying to discard a body. You
can imagine how devastated I was when my coach moved to Alabama, not to mention all the pies and
cakes I would be missing from Harold. It
was a sad day indeed but I would have to find another place to train the dogs.
WHAT DOES A HRD DOG DO ANYWAY?
My dog smells dead people.
But if you are into volunteering to find people it takes more than that
to try to help. In HRD training there
are tracking dogs, dogs trained to follow a live human and air scenting dogs
that are trained to literally pull information out of thin air to find the
person they are searching for. Tracking
dogs will be given a person-specific scent article, like the scent of a pillow
casing, and will then track that specific scent. Tracking dogs are used in tracking missing
persons from where they were last seen. Air
scenting dogs will find any live human in the area, rather than a specific
person. Air scenting dogs are used more
in disasters when people are buried in rubble or when people lost in the
wilderness need to be found. HRD dogs
are basically air scenting dogs with one difference. When a person dies and starts decomposing the
scent or gases released become generic to every other deceased person. When a person is still alive their scent is
unique, when we die we all smell the same.
HRD dogs have to be trained on a broad scent picture using
scent sources that range from very freshly deceased to very old. A reliable cadaver dog should alert on a body
that has been dead 20 minutes, 20 days or 20 years. A team may be called to look for a child that
has been missing for two weeks and is presumed deceased, or a cold case that is
twenty years old and there has been a new lead, you never know what will be
needed. Some people train their dogs to
only work and indicate archeological digs of old Indian sites and the like. For their purposes these people only train on
old scent so their dogs are more reliable for this specific purpose. My HRD dogs
are trained on all phases of decomposition and most of the teams I work with
today also train this way.
HRD dogs are trained to work lots of different locations
from vehicles, buildings, wilderness, under water, under the ground, or hanging
in a tree. This takes a lot of time out
of a handler’s life, a commitment that continues for as long as the team is
willing to be deployed. Once your dog is
trained you are ready to try for the National Certification. Most certifications are through a law enforcement
organization that certifies police K9s in drug detection, bomb detection,
tracking of live humans, and tactical or bite work. Most organization certifications meet specific
standards that are approved by Federal Agencies like FEMA. There are some other
very good certification agencies, but they may not meet all the strict
standards. Today my two dogs are
certified through NAPWDA (North American Police Working Dog Association) and NNDDA
(National Narcotic Drug Dog Association).
Every year you and your dog have to be recertified. If
someone else wants to work your dog they have to also have to certify with your
dog so that they can be a team. NAPWDA
has a test set for vehicle, building, water, rubble, above ground, and buries. Two hides each with one being low and one high.
Buries are at different levels below ground and water hides are at different
depths. Buries will have dummy holes dug
around because dogs can false alert on fresh dirt if not trained well enough. Dogs
(like humans) can get lazy in training and try to take shortcuts. You must make
sure your dog understands that they only get the reward when they locate the dead
body – the dog will test you more often than once a year. Also part of the certification is to place
animal bones and carcasses in the area to make sure your dog will not false
alert on animal bones. Animal remains
release different gases than human remains and training requires proofing so
the dog only alerts on the human remains. Scent training is not a perfect science you
and your dog have to work hard to be able to pinpoint the location of a dead
body. The last thing law enforcement
wants is to dig somewhere and find a buried deer, which will probably be the
last time your team is used by that agency.
For the NAPWDA Certification, you and your dog are only
allowed to only miss one of the twelve sources of decomposition scent. If your dog false alerts on an animal it is an
automatic failure and you will have to reschedule your certification. In some cases, if your dog ingests the scent
source it is also a failed test. In
order to certify with NAPWDA there are prerequisite courses that must be
completed prior to certification: OSHA Blood Borne Pathogens, DOT- Basic HazMat
Training, Crime Scene Preservation, and FEMA IS-100, IS-200, IS-700 which are on
the National Incident Management systems called (NIMS). You will also have to obtain a background
check from the FBI. This is a rather
daunting list of prerequisites and not all are easy to obtain and planning is
required to ensure all are completed prior to certification.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
It’s been six years since I met Heidi and Mike, as well as
so many other people, who have become some of my best friends. The people who do this kind of work have to
truly love what they do. They are dedicated, strong, and don’t know the meaning
of the word no. They give of their time, money, and heart in order to give
people the gift of closure. I found that
spending a week in the Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina was one of the most
rewarding things I have ever done in my life. People do appreciate the hard work that goes
into training and maintaining the HRD standards. I still have much to learn and even more to
give. I am currently one of the Directors
of Bay Area Recovery K9’s and also a training mentor. Like most things there are ups and down.
People move, puppies pass, and new dogs and handlers come into our world. I can
honestly say that this experience has been one of the main sources of joy and
friendship that I can not imagine getting anywhere else. There is no better feeling than being in the
woods on a cold winter’s morning and doing what your dog does best - using its nose.
Watching your dog work out a problem and
seeing the way their body movements change when they get into scent. Sometimes the behavior changes are very
subtle, but often you’ll see the dog’s tail go high and his head snap like
something grabbed his tail, the he’ll stop dead in his tracks, look at you with
eye contact that could burn a hole in your chest, and give his trained indication.
Then you think to yourself, I trained that dog and look at him. Isn’t he
beautiful? Life is good! We have made a
find.
To contact Loralei Nistal go to www.CourteousCanine.com