Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
just did it: Dogs were indicating that they smelled human decomposition. No one knew ex-
actly what they were alerting on, unless a body, or a part of a body, was there as undeniable
proof. What part of the part, though, were they alerting on? How soon after death could dogs
detect something? How long after death did the scent last? And what, for a dog, was that
“scent”?
Despite numerous studies of how working dogs reliably detect drugs and bombs, few sci-
entific studies have featured cadaver dogs. It's messy work, and the real-world aspect can ir-
ritate scientists in search of conclusive data. It's hard enough figuring out how a narcotics dog
can find pure heroin; figuring out how cadaver dogs can find the infinite variables of dead
humans seems impossible.
Scientific uncertainty hasn't kept people from using dogs worldwide to help pinpoint the
perfume of death, from the faintest emanation of a tooth to the fulsome scent that lofts from
an entire body. A few small studies existed here and there, like Debra Komar's 1999 study
on cadaver dogs' ability to find scattered human remains in Canada, and another in 2003 on
dogs' finding buried remains in the southeastern United States. That 2003 study noted quite
accurately that “dog handlers affected the reliability of the cadaver dog results.”
It was far past time, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, for someone to come
up with a controlled scientific study on cadaver dogs' capacity to detect the faintest smell of
death. That was when an unfortunate series of events—almost always the case when cadaver
dogs are involved—created a perfect opportunity for imagining, then realizing, a small, eleg-
ant scientific study.
A wife in Hamburg, Germany, disappeared off a yacht in 2005 while sailing, apparently
not entirely happily, with her husband. The husband reported her missing. She must have
fallen overboard, he said. When the Hamburg state police sent one of their cadaver dogs onto
the boat, the Belgian Malinois aggressively communicated to its handler that something bad
had happened on the mattress in the yacht's bedroom.
There was no body in the bed. No blood. No tissue. It must have been a soupçon of scent
that caught the Malinois's nose. Who knows? Mattresses can be funky places, even on the
best yacht. Regardless, without a body, tissue, or blood, there was no case.
he prosecutor, however, wanted to believe the dog. He contacted Lars Oesterhelweg, a
forensic pathologist then at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Hamburg, and asked him to set
up a study—not replicating the entire yacht, but providing more definitive proof that dogs
can scent death without the presence of specific forensic evidence, like blood, tissue, or bone.
For his study, Oesterhelweg and his colleagues used two recently deceased men, A and
B, sixty and sixty-three years old. They had collapsed and died on the streets of Hamburg.
Sometime before, they had agreed to donate their bodies to medical science. A and B could
not have known how delightfully and noninvasively their bodies would be used. Each freshly
