Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
• • •
Corruption, wrongdoing, and cheating exist across the human spectrum. People are smart,
just like dogs, so they sometimes cut corners to get their reward more quickly. The vast ma-
jority of experiments in cheating show that most people, given the choice and opportunity,
will cheat a little. (Most people don't cheat a ton, because cheating a lot makes us feel too
guilty. Unless we're Bernie Madoff.) While we are reasonably tolerant about small levels of
cheating, when people use dogs like puppets to create a sideshow, we feel especially duped
and betrayed. Those cases end up getting an inordinate amount of attention.
Every sniffer-dog and trailing-dog genre seems to have a handler who becomes emblematic
of that dishonesty. And every one of those handlers was enabled by people who should have
been suspicious. In the case of cadaver dogs, federal agencies, prosecutors, law enforcement,
and even archaeologists contributed to the corruption. From the beginning of my training
with Solo, one name kept getting dropped with an occasional covert glance at me. Sandra M.
Anderson of Midland, Michigan. A volunteer cadaver-dog handler. Like me.
People would ask during training or even searches if I had heard of her. Yes, I had. Almost
every cadaver-dog handler has heard of her. Like Pikett, she has harmed the reputation of
everyone who works with dogs' noses. Like Pikett, she is a fine cautionary tale.
Anderson started with—as a search-and-rescue handler who knew her told me—“a really
good dog,” a Doberman-pointer mix named Eagle. Her dog found people. But at some point,
Anderson, craving more attention, started to plant bones at crime scenes and at mass graves.
Subsequent findings indicated that she was planting false evidence as early as 1999.
Like Keith Pikett or anyone who gets away with doing something more than a few times,
Anderson had enablers, including the FBI, who thought she was wonderful. Gullible law en-
forcement investigators and archaeologists called her dog's abilities “mystifying” and “eerie.”
That language alone should have been a red flag.
FBI agents arrested Anderson in April 2002 during a search in the Huron National Forest
in northeastern Michigan. Michigan resident Cherita Thomas had disappeared more than
two decades before, and police continued the search for her remains. Anderson offered assist-
ance. She was arrested after a crime scene investigator and a cop witnessed her planting bone
fragments and bloody carpet fibers in and around a tree stump and in the muck of a drained
forest creek.
The FBI ultimately had to review hundreds of cases that Anderson had worked on in
Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Michigan, and Panama. The early credulity of every-
one from the FBI to anthropologists was matched by the angry pendulum of backlash. In her
guilty plea, Anderson admitted that she had planted a bloody saw, a toe, carpet fibers, and
bone.
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