Early on the morning of Aug. 27, 2006, 16 year-old Casey Crowder was driving home to Watson Chapel, Ark., from her boyfriend’s house in Pickens when her car ran out of gas just outside of Dumas. She called her mother to say she was going to walk to the nearest gas station for help … then she vanished.
Initial searches were unproductive, so search-and-rescue volunteers and their canine partners from Arkansas Alliance of Bloodhound Search Specialists (AABSS) were called in to assist. Kim Burnett, a founding member of AABSS, took her bloodhounds and started at the boyfriend’s house and worked the scent trail through Dumas and back out of town. They led searchers to the area where the girl’s body was found six days after her disappearance.
AABSS was formed in 2005, and the K-9 handlers come from an array of backgrounds and professions. Burnett, an accountant by trade, became interested in search-and-rescue dogs when she was employed as a veterinary technician while still in high school. A client came in with search-and-rescue bloodhounds, and Burnett started working with that handler. Then in 1996, she began training her own bloodhounds. She is qualified to respond to criminal searches as a law enforcement officer, and now does work with the Pope County Sheriff’s Office. Although some AABSS members work with cadaver dogs in searches for human remains, Burnett prefers live-scent bloodhounds. “You don’t see a lot of bloodhounds doing cadaver work,” Burnett said. “I’m not saying they can’t do it. They can be trained for it, but bloodhounds don’t work as well off lead as Labs, shepherds and herding dogs. Where bloodhounds start excelling is in the older searches. The oldest confirmed trail that my dogs have successfully worked was 12 days.”
In that instance, a man who was wanted for questioning tried to fake his own death by leaving a suicide note in a remote mountain location. Cadaver dogs found nothing, but 12 days after the supposed suicide, Burnett’s dogs trailed the man’s scent to items he had thrown into the woods. That evidence led to an individual who admitted to picking the fugitive up and helping him get out of Arkansas. Authorities were then able to apprehend him.
Trailing dogs sometimes amaze their own handlers. “There are a lot of handlers who don’t believe their dogs can do anything over two or three days,” Burnett said. “They don’t believe they can do vehicle trails.”
But with the proper training, the dogs can follow a human-scent trail even through freeway traffic. A person sheds 50 million skin cells per day, and the ventilation systems in vehicles send some of those sloughed-off skin cells into the air. Blown by wind currents, the human scent travels to nearby areas of dirt or vegetation and stays there until it dissipates fully, which can take up to a year, according to International K-9 Search and Rescue Services. When trailing through traffic, the team checks for scents at intersections or freeway off-ramps to determine the direction taken by the human.
Julie R. Jones and her K-9 partner, a yellow Labrador retriever named Quincy, have quite a bit of experience in trailing scents through traffic. Jones is second in command of the Virginia-based VK9 Scent Specific Search and Recovery Unit, and she is the officer in charge of the New England Region. She and Quincy have followed scent trails as old as six months. When they were called in on the case of missing Little Rock executive John Glasgow in 2008, they picked up the trail off I-40 in Russellville and Conway where unsubstantiated sightings had been reported at a gas station, a motel and an eating establishment. Though none of these potential leads resulted in the finding of Glasgow, Jones and Quincy’s reputation is intact because of numerous other successful searches.
One of the remarkable skills dogs possess is the ability to sniff an article that belongs to the missing person and separate that scent from many other scents. Handlers have a term for this part of the dog’s job. It’s called scent inventory. If you see a news clip of dogs arriving at a scene, you may think it looks as if the dog and handler are just milling around, but the dog is actually sorting the scents of individuals participating in the search and those who have had contact with the scent article. The dog eliminates them and concentrates on the remaining scent, knowing it is the one to trail to its source.
Handlers make a distinction between trailing dogs and tracking dogs. Trailing dogs follow a person’s scent path, while tracking dogs follow the actual footstep path where vegetation, having been disturbed by the human, gives off a bacterial odor.
“Trailing dogs think of scent as smoke,” Burnett said, explaining, “So on a windy day, you may be working a quarter of a mile away from where the person actually walked.”
Training methods vary somewhat from dog to dog, partly because of different personalities. Two of Burnett’s dogs respond well to food rewards, while 8-year-old Reuben “just wants you to love on him at the end of the trail and wrestle with him and play with him.”
Another reason all dogs can’t be trained the same way is that they are bred for different things. “Bloodhounds,” Burnett said, “were bred to trail. The ears, the nose, the skin, the drool — that all helps them be a better trailing dog. The drool is to put moisture back in there. You’ve got to have moisture to have scent. The ears act as fans and keep the scent stirred up, and then all those wrinkles catch it and concentrate it.
AABSS handlers get dogs from breeders and various other resources. Once in a while, people donate the animals. Burnett said that sometimes people get a young bloodhound without realizing the cute little puppy will weigh 100 pounds by the time it is one year old.
“A big misconception is that bloodhounds are big, lazy porch dogs. They’re very active dogs. They’re bred to follow a scent trail for miles. They will literally trail themselves to death. I’m careful with my dogs all the time, but especially this time of year. Every 20 or 30 minutes, I physically stop them and make them take a break.”
George Stowe-Rains, the county ranger for the Arkansas Forestry Commission in Benton County, uses K-9 teams to validate trails already worked by human trackers. He and Burnett’s team worked together on the case of 3 year-old Aiden Bell, who wandered away from his grandparents’ home in Carroll County.
“We used man trackers and dogs in conjunction with each other,” Stowe-Rains said. “We’re not relying on dogs, but we use them as tools to backup other tools, and that makes the search so much more effective.”
Sadly, the search for Aiden Bell ended with the discovery of his body near a creek. It is thought he tried to cross the creek but slipped, fell in and drowned.
Burnett’s organization welcomes people and their canine companions to train with the group. “We will help them get going in the right direction,” she said.
