Can dogs detect where dead bodies have been, especially months after? An interesting article.
Mark Redwine kept mementos of his youngest son in the cab of his truck.
The boy’s name, Dylan, is tattooed on his left shoulder. He distributed missing person posters at truck stops. In November 2012, his 13-year-old son had arrived to spend Thanksgiving at Redwine’s cabin, near the San Juan National Forest in southwestern Colorado. Redwine told an FBI investigator that he left Dylan asleep on the couch when he went to town. When he returned, the boy was gone.
More than 6 months later, hikers found skeletal remains on a trail high in the desert-clear air, about 16 kilometers from Redwine’s cabin. Authorities confirmed the bones belonged to Dylan, but the local coroner could not determine cause of death. To go missing is not a crime, but Redwine’s ex-wife, Elaine Hall, and the couple’s oldest son came to suspect Redwine did something to make Dylan disappear. Redwine flatly denied any involvement, but police soon homed in on him. On 5 August 2013, the investigation took a dramatic turn when Carren Corcoran arrived in Durango, Colorado, with her German shepherd, Molly. At the time, Corcoran worked for the Madison, Wisconsin, police department. In her off hours, she ran Canine Search Solutions, a private firm that specialized in using dogs trained to sniff out cadavers to search for missing people. By her count, she had worked 265 cases in 30-odd years. Molly, or “Bitty,” as Corcoran called the dog, was unusually small for her breed. Molly had started out as “a timid little puppy that was given up to a rescue,” Corcoran later wrote, but under her tutelage the dog became “a legend in the field of human remains detection.”
Corcoran and Molly met local police at a La Plata County Sheriff ’s Office warehouse known as Area 51. Inside, Corcoran let Molly off leash. “Go find,” she said. Nose down, Molly sniffed at the concrete floor. Corcoran understood the dog’s behavior to mean the area was all clear—free of odors. Then she asked investigators to bring in the evidence, three paper packages containing clothes Mark Redwine had allegedly worn at the time of Dylan’s disappearance. Corcoran again commanded Molly to search. This time, her dog went up to the bags, gave a deep, audible sniff, looked Corcoran in the eye, and sat down next to two of them. Because Corcoran had trained Molly to sit when the dog detected the odor of human remains, those “indications” suggested the odor of a dead body lingered on jeans, a pair of sneakers, and a work shirt. ...
https://www.science.org/content/article/should-dog-s-sniff-be-enough-convict-person-murder
