DeFUNIAK SPRINGS — The talents and efforts of a couple of dogs with a unique specialty were the topic Monday at the murder trial of Barry Davis.
Rob Roy and Rosco are cadaver dogs, or more politically correctly, human remains detector dogs. Their owner and trainer, Mary Starnes Saunders, took the stand as the third week of the Davis trial opened to describe work they’d done on behalf of the Walton County Sheriff’s Office.
“We train the dogs to find the odor of human remains,” Saunders said.
On Oct. 18, 2012, both dogs were tasked at separate times with sniff testing a Cadillac Escalade that belonged to South Walton County resident John “Greg” Hughes, who had been missing since early that May.
Prosecuting attorney Bobby Elmore hopes to convince jurors that Davis used the truck to remove Hughes’ body, and the body of Hughes’ girlfriend Hiedi Rhodes, from Hughes’ residence. Elmore theorized the bodies were stored in the Cadillac for as long as two days before Davis disposed of them, likely by burning them.
Saunders described for the court Monday how her dogs train and how they work. Finally, she testified as to how first Rob Roy and then Roscoe alerted on the Escalade and indicated they’d found the odor of decomposing human remains even though the seats and carpeting in the truck had been removed and the vehicle interior scrubbed clean.
Saunders was followed on the witness stand by Ken Strutin, an academician who for more than 20 years has studied “what chemicals dogs use to find forensic substances.”
Strutin described the unbelievable canine sense of smell and discussed how dogs can be faithfully employed to use their noses to find anything from explosives to trace amounts of dried blood to human remains.
Asked if a trained cadaver dog could detect human remains in a truck, scrubbed clean, that was left sitting in a hidden location for five months, Strutin said yes.
The prosecution’s case continues this morning. The trial is expected to run through at least this week.