PET TRACKER

Chapter 9, Pt 1 - Accident or Murder? (Part 1 of 2)

NOTE FOR THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED: This story is also available as an audio recording, read by Kat, the author.

I’m back after a brief break due to a family loss. Today, I pick up the Pet Tracker story with more description about my work as a police bloodhound handler. But don’t worry; it won’t be long before I return to writing about tracking lost pets.

You’re actually about to read a section from the middle of my memoir. To read the FULL Substack (free!) version of PET TRACKER from the very start, go to this link, scroll down until you see the Scroll Down > icon-thingy and click on it. Then, scroll all of the way to the very bottom and you can start reading the beginning of the book with the “Dedication & Introduction.”

In spite of loving my pet detective side job, I loved my job as a police bloodhound handler more. A.J. was doing an amazing job on the very few criminal and missing person cases that we managed to work. My beautiful female bloodhound puppy, Chase, was almost a year old and doing an amazing job in training. Whereas A.J. was a sissy with brambles and prickly berry vines that caused him to abruptly quit tracking, as if a teeny, tiny sticker in his paw was enough for him to file a worker’s comp case, Chase was a bulldozer! When she was dragging me on a scent trail, whether on soft grass, sharp gravel, stickers, or maybe even a bed of hot coals, nothing would slow her down. Although she was not quite ready to work cases, Chase was shaping up to be the S.W.A.T. bloodhound I had dreamed she would be.

Chase, my S.W.A.T. bloodhound in training, always tracked with her nose on the ground. (photo by Kat Albrecht)

I was keenly interested in using my bloodhounds to reconstruct crime scenes by using the scent evidence not only to search for a person, but also to retrace the path a suspect took in order to develop new leads. This was an aspect that talented bloodhound teams have done for many law enforcement agencies across North America, but just not in my area of California. I wrote about this topic in a 1997 article I crafted called “Bloodhounds and Scent Evidence” where I shared criminal cases (originally published in the National Police Bloodhound Association’s newsletter) where bloodhounds were used to follow a suspect’s scent and solved cases.

Here are a few of those cases:

New York, New York

The mutilated body of a female was found on the roof of a Manhattan apartment building There was no blood at the crime scene, leaving investigators to believe the crime had been committed elsewhere. But where? The bloodhounds were called and led the officers from the rooftop to an apartment, and the bathtub in it. Lab analysis proved that the body had been in the tub and that the drain was still holding the victim’s blood.

Hagerstown, Maryland

Maryland State Trooper Doug Lowry and his bloodhound Jimmy were called in to assist with a homicide investigation. The body of a woman was found in her apartment. The woman’s wrists were bound, her throat was slashed, and a rag was stuffed down her mouth. Lowry used the rag as scent material because it had been touched by the suspect. Jimmy scented off the rag, tracked from the apartment to the parking lot, and sniffed at some cigarette butts located in a vacant parking stall. Jimmy continued to show interest in this area of the parking lot and eventually indicated that there was no foot trail leading away from the parking lot. Lowry told investigators that Jimmy had indicated that the suspect probably left in a vehicle parked in the parking lot. Investigators interviewed neighbors. One neighbor reported that at 2:00 a.m. they saw an unfamiliar sedan parked in the vacant parking stall with a subject smoking a cigarette by the car. Investigators obtained a surveillance video of the parking lot from security and obtained a license plate from a sedan parked in the stall with the cigarette butts. Investigators contacted the registered owner, who came to the police station for questioning. The subject confessed to the homicide.

Dearborn, Michigan

Dearborn Police Department Corporal John Salem and his bloodhound Chester were instrumental in solving a murder/robbery of an armored guard. Corporal Salem described the search as follows:

“We had an interesting armed robbery case in which two armored car guards made a stop to stock an ATM. The passenger guard was shot in the head and dead on the scene. The driver guard ran to call for help. I ran Chester off the empty cargo area of the armored car. The strange thing is, he took a trail consistent with where the driver guard said he ran to call for help. The driver guard had said he never went anywhere near the cargo area of the armored car. I then began thinking the driver guard was not telling the truth about something. Why would Chester take the suspect scent from the cargo area and run the trail of the driver guard? Unless the driver guard was in on the crime. As a result, our detectives began focusing on the driver guard as a suspect. The driver guard became very nervous and refused to answer any more of our questions without an attorney. The next afternoon, our detectives reviewed the ATM surveillance camera tape, and Chester’s work was confirmed. Apparently, the camera captured the driver guard shooting his partner and helping to unload the $1.2 million from the cargo area. He was then officially charged with the murder/robbery. The loot was unloaded into a pickup truck driven away by the driver guard’s cousin. Seven days later, the FBI located the cousin in a local Red Roof Inn. A shootout ensued, and the cousin took his own life. They recovered about $1 million in the cousin’s hotel room.”

Thankfully, I did work A.J. once on a crime scene reconstruction case. In February 1995, Chief Fuselier from the Carmel Police Department called me about a suspicious death case. Carmel is a lovely, quaint, and highly expensive tourist town located an hour south of Santa Cruz and in Monterey County. An elderly woman with Alzheimer’s went missing from downtown Carmel. When her body was found, face down, on the beach across town and her purse was missing, foul play was suspected.

Chief Fuselier had previously heard of my successful work with A.J. and how he tracked down and found an Alzheimer’s patient in Watsonville (you can read that particular recovery story here). Chief Fuselier asked me if A.J. could follow the woman’s scent from the senior center where she was dropped off by her husband to determine if she was perhaps kidnapped, robbed, and dumped on the beach. I readily agreed to respond, excited at our first effort at reconstructing a possible crime scene.

Yippie ki yay!

(to be continued…)