Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
man convicted of arson based on a German shepherd's nose. That dog, the court declared,
simply showed off for houseguests.
Jim Suffolk's bloodhounds didn't show off for guests. They tracked people almost daily.
To Suffolk's great credit, he admitted under oath that bloodhounds were not infallible. His
honesty garnered him more credibility.
The scientists at SwRI had wanted to use dogs to work domestic crime scenes, and Suffolk
was the ideal man to take the lead. For this job, his trusty bloodhounds wouldn't do the trick.
Though they were ideal for tracking the living, he needed dogs trained to locate the dead.
Suffolk flew to San Antonio in early May 1974 to start working with a newly invented
category of search dog: the body-recovery dog, or body dog for short. Suffolk made training
and handling suggestions; SwRI researchers made other recommendations; and Suffolk re-
turned to upstate New York with two dogs. Pearl, a sweet-looking, white-blond Lab, was the
furthest thing from a classified military project one might imagine. She was five years old
in 1974 when she landed in Oneida County to take up the hunt for a possible serial killer's
victims. Every snapshot of her has her mouth open, gazing lovingly at either Jim or whoever
was behind the camera. Maybe that someone might slip her a cookie? Pearl had been shipped
from place to place to train for narcotics, bombs, and land mines. Her last trained specialty
was buried bodies.
Her sidekick, Baron Von Ricktagfan, a muscular black-and-tan shepherd, had already
trained as a military scout dog in Fort Benning. Baron had a snarky edge to him, Jim Suffolk
recalled. He could also do the work.
Jim Suffolk and his two new body dogs hit the woods of Oneida County, New York, start-
ing in the patch of land where several of the victims had been found. They searched for ad-
ditional shallow graves for the next seven months, until snow and ice in November stopped
them. The search included four thousand acres of land, most of it pinewoods planted in the
1930s. They spent eighty-three days in the woods.
The search was interrupted occasionally for more pressing police business, including Pearl's
search for bombs in the Oneida County airport before Vice President Gerald Ford landed
there. Pearl found nothing except the training material planted by the Secret Service to make
sure she knew her bomb business. Jim and his dogs also went out to a sewage treatment
plant in nearby Onondaga County after a sewage worker admitted to raping and burying a
Syracuse University student there two years earlier. Both dogs alerted on the same spot. The
Syracuse police brought in a bulldozer and found Karen Levy buried a few feet down. After-
ward, Suffolk studied his records and the terrain. The dogs were about fifteen feet off, on
the downhill slope, probably because of an underground creek. He thought he should have
insisted on continuing to work up the hill even after the dogs alerted. This is the kind of
