Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
On one case, police jokingly—but with an underlying awareness of the neighborhood sur-
rounding the woods—asked me to please find only the body they were looking for. On an-
other case, searchers found skeletal remains, but not the victim they were looking for. One of
the medical examiner's investigators explained that this was simply part of the business. She
and other forensic investigators, she said, can't see a black garbage bag in a ditch along a road
without wondering.
Nonetheless, for all the cruel casualness of people and of nature, there's something reassur-
ing about working a cadaver dog. It's true that finding someone or part of someone can give
closure to a family or allow the police or prosecutors to move ahead with a case. That doesn't
entirely explain why it's important to find remains, even if there's little to nothing left. It's
partly to be able to acknowledge, even momentarily, the spot where someone was hidden or
dumped. And to think on it. I like the fact that, animal predation aside, it can be hard to get
rid of a body. I love the fact that when people die, they don't completely disappear, despite
their murderers' efforts. Yes, they cease to exist. At the same time, they also stubbornly stick
around.
During one search, Solo went right to a spot in the woods, lay down, and looked at me
expectantly. An investigator confirmed Solo had alerted on the exact spot where more than a
year earlier, hunters had found the bones of a murder victim. The pine forest floor held on to
her scent and would do so for years.
• • •
Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like
a candle moving about in a tomb.
—Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick
, 1851
Three main highways go in and out of the old whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts:
Interstate 195, state Route 140, and U.S. Highway 6. During the late 1980s, the height of
the crack cocaine and heroin epidemic, those were the highways used to ferry drugs in. Those
were the highways where women's bodies were dumped on the way out of town. During that
same time, one reporter noted, a local clinic was treating four hundred heroin addicts a day.
Only Boston beat that number in the state. Now, in New Bedford, as across the nation, crime
is down, way down.
But for six months during that epidemic, from April to September 1988, eleven women,
most of them desperately selling sex in exchange for cocaine or heroin, disappeared from
Weld Square, a dreary block of darkness in the center of town.
