Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
• • •
Dogs helped in a case in Tennessee a few years ago. The victim was last seen covering her boat
on a long dock off an East Tennessee lake. Two dogs from Roy and Suzie Ferguson's Ten-
nessee team were called in two weeks after her disappearance. The dogs both alerted on the
dock, right where the victim was last seen. By that time, dragging equipment and underwater
cameras were lying everywhere, complicating the scent picture. Searchers had worked nearly
nonstop for two weeks around the dock area, with sonar, with deep-water cameras, with drag-
ging, and with diving. Nothing. Investigators wondered whether the victim had left the dock.
Or whether something nefarious had happened. A natural reaction when one doesn't have an
answer.
The family didn't want to give up. They brought in an underwater construction crew with
a deep-water robot from out of state. Roy and Suzie Ferguson came this time, along with the
two other team members and the dogs who had originally alerted. Suzie brought her female
German shepherd, Schatzie. Roy was the point man, observing the dogs from an opposite
dock. It's always valuable on land searches if someone is there who knows how dogs work on
land. Having a person who knows how they work on water is invaluable. Roy watched the
dogs' alert patterns as they worked from boats and off other docks. Then he calibrated where
the dogs alerted. The handlers and dogs did the same the next morning, when there was no
wind. Roy reported the team's findings: The dogs had narrowed the area to a twenty-by-forty-
foot oval. The crew put the little submersible robot, with its video camera and sonar, into
the water at that spot. Using a joystick, they sent it down. The water was remarkably clear.
In less than two minutes, the robot operators saw the victim, caught in the eye of the video
camera. She was about thirty feet out from where she was last seen alive, covering her boat.
That was in one dimension. She was 230 feet down, the equivalent of twenty stories beneath
the lake's surface. University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist Bill Bass said that given the
cool water, the depth, and the victim's fit build, she never would have floated. After falling,
she probably floated down at an angle, away from the dock, flipping slowly like a leaf turning
over and over as it drops from a tree. She managed, nonetheless, to send a final clear signal to
the dogs.
• • •
I entered upon the small enterprise of “learning” twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mis-
sissippi River with the easy confidence of my time of life. If I had really known what I was about to
require of my faculties, I should not have had the courage to begin.
—Mark Twain,
Life on the Mississippi
, 1883
