Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The problem is that cops and prosecutors and juries across Texas bought the comedy for
years. One man accused of killing three people, based greatly on Pikett's dog evidence, was
partially blind, handicapped with diabetes and bone spurs, and physically incapable of com-
mitting the murders Pikett linked him to. He spent seven months in prison before someone
else confessed to the killings.
Michael Buchanek, a retired sheriff's department captain, was identified by Pikett's dogs
as the prime suspect in the rape and murder of his next-door neighbor, a social worker, based
on a police theory that Buchanek had put the body in his car trunk, driven five miles, and
dumped the body in a field. Pikett's dogs supposedly followed the victim's scent in a moving
car for five miles, twenty-four hours after the crime occurred. As international working-dog
experts Resi Gerritsen and Ruud Haak noted with heavy irony in their topic,
K9 Fraud
, it
was “an exceptional performance that no dog can copy.”
The police, Buchanek told the
New York Times
, “just kept telling me, 'the dogs don't
lie—we know you did it.'” After months of living under a cloud of suspicion, Buchanek was
cleared when DNA implicated another man who later confessed to the crime.
Juries are especially vulnerable to dog testimony, Roger Titus said. “You see them look at
each other,” he said. “Out of ten people, you've got eight that like dogs. A receptive audien-
ce.”
Coote and Roger were not the only ones horrified. Roger's colleague Doug Lowry, the
president of the National Police Bloodhound Association, testified against Pikett, saying he
was doing “a disservice to police bloodhound teams throughout the country.” It's rare for or-
ganizations or top handlers or trainers to testify against other handlers. But these men be-
lieved that Pikett and his practices needed to be stopped. “Pikett has done a lot of damage to
the veracity of dogs in the Texas system,” Andy Rebmann said.
While Pikett is retired and no longer testifying, his cases still pop up in the news. In 2007,
Megan Winfrey of East Texas was sentenced to life in prison for a murder she was charged
with committing at the age of sixteen. The major evidence against her? Keith Pikett's scent
lineups. On appeal, her father was exonerated for the same murder. Her brother was tried
for the murder as well, but his attorney argued strenuously against the scientific validity of
Pikett's scent lineups; her brother's jury deliberated thirteen minutes before finding him not
guilty. Megan Winfrey appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in April 2012. On
February 27, 2013, she was acquitted of all the charges against her, but the prosecutor in her
case requested a rehearing. She was finally released on April 19.
Pikett's attorney told the
New York Times
in 2009 that his client's work with his dogs could
seem mysterious. “The first time I saw it, I couldn't understand what the dogs were doing.”
But, he added, Pikett clearly knew. “He's been doing it so long, he doesn't understand why
we don't see it.”
