Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The record of what happened next is clear. To make the leap from speculative military
research in Texas and Maryland to paws-on-the-ground cadaver-dog work took not a major
hurricane or flood, as Nick might have predicted, but a brutal murder in New York's southern
Adirondacks. Mary Rose Turner, a mother of five suffering from depression and insomnia,
left her house in the wee hours of April 26, 1973. Her walk led her past Bohling's Shell sta-
tion in rural Syracuse, where a man named Bernard Hatch was working the graveyard shift.
Later that morning, a witness saw a car dragging what he thought was a “six-foot-long
white object.” It bothered him, so he didn't let it rest. He brought the New York State Police
to Potato Hill Road in Steuben, New York, to investigate. The tissue and blood trail was more
than nine miles long. Police found the rest of Mary Turner three days later in a shallow grave.
Her body had been mutilated not only by the dragging but by dismemberment.
Evidence slowly and inexorably piled up against Bernie Hatch. A grand jury indicted him
of Turner's murder on October 17, 1973. That wasn't the end of it. Just a month and a half
after his indictment, hunters found the skeletal remains of Linda Cady, twenty-two, and her
daughter, Lisa Ann, three, in shallow graves. It was two and a half years after their disappear-
ance. They were just a few hundred yards from Mary Turner's grave.
The relationship among the victims, the location, and Hatch appeared more than coincid-
ental. Cady and Hatch had dated for many months, with Cady joyfully noting in her diary
that Hatch had given her a diamond ring. Authorities begin to suspect the area off Potato Hill
Road was a burial ground, and they realized that Hatch was connected not only to Cady and
her daughter but to another missing woman and her children. In mid-December, as search-
ers scoured the area, they found children's charred clothing not far from Turner's grave. The
family identified the clothes as belonging to the three young sons of Lorraine Zinicola, who
had also dated Hatch. She and her sons had been missing since September 1971.
The New York State Police put out the call, and on December 21, 1973, William H. John-
ston flew in from the Military Animal Science program at Southwestern Research Institute
in San Antonio to the little town of Steuben. He looked at the terrain and search conditions
with the state police. Could the military dogs they were training to find buried bodies be
used to find other possible victims of the now-indicted Bernie Hatch?
Investigators turned to a handler living 125 miles away: the New York State Trooper Ralph
D. Suffolk Jr., aka Jim, who had a stellar reputation as a bloodhound handler. He and one
of his dogs, Colonel of Redstone, were already renowned from having run a long trail that
helped police locate three robbers a few years before—a conviction that was upheld in New
York criminal court in 1969. This had been a first for tracking and trailing dogs in New York.
The only legal precedent in New York for using a canine to help convict someone had not
ended so well. In 1917, the New York State Supreme Court overturned the sentence of a wo-
