Marilyn's Musings

By Robert D. Calkins,    If you think you got away with your crime, you should be very, very nervous. Oh, what’s that? “They never found the body,” you say?  Well stand by. Even the coldest of cold cases are getting warmer these days thanks to a partnership between dogs and technology. I recently attended a week-long class to help my otherwise proficient cadaver dog tune his nose into the extraordinarily small amount of scent that percolates up from very old clandestine graves. As part of the class we also learned to partner with ground penetrating radar (GPR) to narrow down what the dogs find. Over the years I’ve found that cadaver dogs don’t sniff the ground and say “dig here.” That’s not the dogs’ fault. Scent from decomposing remains will percolate up where the soil composition allows, and that might not be directly over the body. I’ve seen dogs alert yards away from a known burial- too far to just start digging. Even more challenging is that the amount of sce...