badhorsie
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Thank you for this, I appreciate your expert opinion
the cadaver dog
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Thank you for this, I appreciate your expert opinion
K9Snoop
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I don't wish to wade into a emotional fray but curious when the terms "common belief" and "scientific study" get paired together. Could you please list the studies that support this belief?
thanks in advance.
You are misrepresenting what Lowe said. he was not saying that yes this is Madeleine's DNA when he said "it would be simple to say". It means it would be a simplistic view to loo at components and assume that because a person has those components in their dna it must be theirs. he goes on to say that one has to look at the sequence. 100% of the components in Madeleine's DNA will be found in the DNA of her parents, so it is impossible to say whether the components belonged to Madeleine or her parents (or anyone of a large number of the population, especially those related to her). As her parents used the car, there is no reaosn to assume it is not theirs.
Also Eddie, the cadaver dog, is not just a cadaver dog. he also alerts ot bodily fluids including blood. Given that the chemicals that produce "the scent of death" are present in several bodily fluids such as urine, and will appear when any bodily fluid begins to break down (i.e if you cut yourself and got blood on something, that blood would give off the scent of death as it would decompose).
The company that employs grimes is also directed by grimes. Grimes does not have a license to use the dogs as cadaver dogs in the UK. No-one has been able to rpovide any primary spurce for the claims they have worked on 200 cases successfully. Also Eddie has alerted to coconut before. people can argue all they want, but he still alerted to it. Eddie did nto alert to the luggage compartment, but as he is also trained to alert to bodily fluids his alerts do not signify a body was there. There are good reasons why cadaver dogs are not regarded as evidence.
Also Eddie, the cadaver dog, is not just a cadaver dog. he also alerts ot bodily fluids including blood. Given that the chemicals that produce "the scent of death" are present in several bodily fluids such as urine, and will appear when any bodily fluid begins to break down (i.e if you cut yourself and got blood on something, that blood would give off the scent of death as it would decompose).
The company that employs grimes is also directed by grimes. Grimes does not have a license to use the dogs as cadaver dogs in the UK. No-one has been able to rpovide any primary spurce for the claims they have worked on 200 cases successfully. Also Eddie has alerted to coconut before. people can argue all they want, but he still alerted to it. Eddie did nto alert to the luggage compartment, but as he is also trained to alert to bodily fluids his alerts do not signify a body was there. There are good reasons why cadaver dogs are not regarded as evidence.
I do not know why you say that as every time you ask for links, I provide them. I also normally only link to reliable news sources, or primary sources rather than unreliable webpages set up by random people. People kept asing me for the lins on this thread earlier, and every time I posted them, they just get asking why I did not post them!
http://www.hmdb.ca/metabolites/HMDB02322
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7435118
http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/ar...t-oral-malodor
http://iese.nust.edu.pk/Dr. Ali .../Paper 2.pdf
http://kops.ub.uni-konstanz.de/bitst...pdf?sequence=1
http://news.sky.com/home/uk-news/article/15959107
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/eur...ey/7723860.stm
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...#ixzz1JuPiWWaT
K9,
I will get the link for you, but it might only link to the abstracts if you do not have access to the journal.
Mani
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G'day from Australia - Hey Brit - is it possible to get links to those other cases of children being abused and flats being broken into? Did they make it into the British papers?
Also - was it ever established that the twins were given Phenergan or similar due to their grogginess when the police arrived?
The problem with the study of the hamburg dogs was that no other materials were used. As cadaverine is found in other bodily fluids, and found in decomposing matter that came from a living person (i.e old blood), it would have been more interesting to see how the dogs reacted to material that had other material containing cadaverine on it.
The other thing about the mccann dogs is the way the searches were carried out. There is no way those searches would not be ripped ot pieces in court, especially the ones for the car and cuddle cat. In the video of the cars, eddie runs past all the cars including the mccann's. However when Grimes reaches the mccanns car he stops, and keeps calling eddie back to it, time and time again, until eventually eddie barks near the door. This is the only car he is seen doing this to on the video, eddie also barks at another car, but this is ignored. As for cuddle cat, the video shows eddie running around the villa, and at one point getting cuddle cat and throwing it about, but not barking at it. We then see eddie continue to run around, and not bark at anything. We then see eddie being repeatedly called to look at a long cupboard consisting of three or four doors. Eddie does not bark at this the first few times, but eventually stands near the corner of the cupboard facing away from it into the room and barks. he does not bark at any particular bit of the cupboard. At this point instead of opening the cupboard the handler and eddie, go out of the room followed by the person filming. A few minutes later they return, and the handler goes straight to one of the middle doors of the cupboard opens it up and takes out cuddle cat. We do not see at which point cuddle cat was put in there, there is no explanation given as to why the middle cupboard was checked first when eddie had not alerted to that bit, nor do we see at any point eddie alerting to cuddle cat. The PJ also raised concerns about this, questioning why the dogs ignored things they later alerted to. There is little chance this would not be ripped to pieces in a court even if cadaver dogs were allowed as evidence.
These are two reports about the problesm with sniffer dogs. One is just about drugs sniffer dogs, but talks about handlers influencing the alerts, but the other talks about the problems with british cadaver dogs. there is no system to ensure they are trained well (despite the licensing system), no system to record their successes etc. The dogs used were british trained therefore these problems applied to them (hence eddie did make an alert to what turned out to be coconut, and other british dogs have alerted when the person being searched for was alive). I think a problem may be with the british dogs, that you are going to be har dpressed to find a house in britain that has not either had someone die in it at some point, or have old antique or second hand furniture in it. Plus the dogs do not seemed to be trained to look at the different levels of cadaverine and so their alerts could mean anything from an entire body is there, to there being another bodily fluid containing cadaverine there. So its fine if you actually find a body, but if you do not the alerts mean nothing. Its all well and good people claiming the dogs are supersensitive, but if they are too sensitive their findings becoming meaningless.
http://news.sky.com/story/844071/sniffer-dogs-can-hinder-police-work
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21225441
I will try to find the articles you asked for, but cannot access full articles at the moment 9and none seem to have abstracts which is odd). A colleague who works with the forensic side of science was telling me about this so he will know which authors to look for.
http://news.sky.com/story/955182/former-top-detective-madeleine-may-be-alive (look on right of page for his report, he mentions the attacks towards the end)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...sappeared.html (near end of article)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...lieve-her.html
http://news.sky.com/home/world-news/article/1315666
http://issuu.com/canarianweekly/docs...w&pageNumber=1 (in gran canaria, but some have said there may be a link due to the timing)
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/83773089...sh-paedophiles (as above)
casa pia (and some related to madeleine mccann)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...eine-case.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004...dprotection.uk
I am not sure if it made it into the british media at the time, but it did briefly after madeleine disappeared.
Although yeremi vargos was a boy and disappeared in Gran canaria, two of the suspects (who are now serving time in the UK for murder and sexual abuse) were in Gran canaria acting as cleaners in a holidya resort according to reports. They are also believed to have lins to other paedophiles, and may have been in Portugal at the time of madeleine's disappearence (she disappeared two months after Yeremi). The other disappearence was Joanna Cipriano three years before and seven miles away from where madeleine disappeared. Now her mother confessed and was convicted, but she retracted her confession shortly after making it and claimed torture by the police. Two courts have upheld that she was tortured by the police, and amaral who had claimed she fell down the stairs received a criminal conviction for falsifying evidence. It is rare for children to disappear and there to be no clues as to their whereabouts for this long, yet here we have three connected by time or geography, so it would seem sensible to at least look at the connections.
The twins did have their hair tested about three months later (the drugs would have staye dint heir hair this time), but none were found. I do not think the police ever thought the twins had been drugged, but it was something the mccanns had in hindsight wondered about because they were so sound asleep. To be honest I think this is a case of people desperatly looking for clues, which is normal behaviour after something has gone wrong like this.
K9Snoop
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only 3 of the links you listed work. I tend to discount the news.sky.com because that is a general news article and full of general info.
If I understand the main thrust of part of your argument is that due to the fact that cadaverine and putrescine are naturally occuring processes (in small amounts) in the body and is also part of the decay process in mammels which invalidates the alerts or makes them, at best, suspect. I won't argue that however, one must bear in mind that, to date, there are 8 major classes of chemicals containing 478 compounds have been identified with cadaver odor. 30 have been identified as key markers in human decomp, including 12 of 72 compounds emitting from bone. To say that dogs are only focusing only one or two compounds (cadaverine, putrescine) I would characterize as inaccurate. What is more likely is that dogs are using several scent markers to help draw a determination that *this* particular combination of chemical signatures matches ones the dog has been trained to locate and alert on.
Other major components associated with cadaver odor is Dimethyl Sulphide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulphide) which is also present in living humans specifically expired breath, however, bacterial metabolism of this chemical produces methanethiol (Methanethiol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) which is also found in both human blood and the brain. Both compounds produce nasty sulfur odors making them extremely pungent. Others are various aldhydes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldehydes) also naturally occuring as well as various acids and acid esters, and the list goes on.
What I tell people is to not focus on the individual piece but to take in the whole picture. There is a relationship between VOC chemical signatures and the canine response. While humans are attempting to understand exactly what it is that dogs are alerting to it has been shown that dogs trained on natural material (in this study narcotics and explosives) and then tested on pseudo scents have had a "lack of response by trained detector dogs indicated a mis-match between the instrument-measured, human-interpreted profile and the dogs' recognized scent signature." Human cadaver scent is actually more closer to chickens than to cow or pig. Clearly, we lack the understanding between the VOCs of human remains and the odor that dogs understand to be the target odor. And we may never know because we may never know the relationship of chemicals that tell the dog that this is it.
A cadaver dog alert is not to be considered proof positive. There has to be other evidence either direct (actual body) or indirect (purchasing of a tarp, shovel, gas can, etc). The indirect is all circumstantial. Each piece, in and of itself, will not stand up alone. But when you put it all together makes for a strong argument. Someone once equated dogs to being in the same class as police informants. You take the info they give you and then see how it fits into the case or moves along an avenue of investigation. The sky.com article alludes to the argument that dogs muck up or take away valuable investigative time. If this argument is valid for dogs then it is valid for any other lead or tip called in to police. Each tip or lead must be investigated but no one is asking for police tip hotlines to be disconnected.
You say that the searches will not stand up in court. Well, until this case goes to court it would be best to give that argument a rest. I'm not sure how the U.K. runs its court system but in the states there are hearings with arguments by both sides over the relavency of stuff entered into evidence. The judge makes a determination whether or not it will be admit to be presented during the actual court trial. We do not know what else the police have uncovered but clearly the dog evidence by and of itself is not proof positive, beyond a reasonable doubt, of the McCanns' involvement because they have not arrested or brought charges forward.
This is a long response for me over an extremely complicated subject (cadaver and guilt) that may not make anyone happy. I'm not even sure all my reply makes sense. If there are any questions allow me to clarify tomorrow. I'm off to bed.
K9Snoop
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Forgive me but I thought your original argument was that the odor didn't last for more than 30 days (clearly it does) not to just the presence of cadaverine. Dead humans produce more than just one compound (cadaverine) and dogs do not alert solely on it's presence because it is a common component in urine and semen both of which cadaver dogs are proofed off of (trained to not respond to those odors) because both substances are common in a typical household. My suggestion is to stop focusing on only cadaverine since that is not the main source dogs seem to use to alert on. It is only one component not the whole picture.
As far as being to sensitive to be meaningless, this is argumentative. It depends on what it is you are looking for. In my cited case, we were looking for a possible body in a burned structure. My dogs' alerts caused further investigation. Did we find a body? No. But if I had been looking for a potention murder scene covered up by an arson fire? We had found it. Since dogs scent down into the parts per trillion (most human machinery only detects into the parts per billion) its hard to tell the dog at what level to stop on.
There may be no easy answer for you. My thought is that you are pinching the grains of rice to prove the whole meal. Look at the whole meal.
I do not know why the links do not appear on your computer I can access them here. I copied and pasted them from an earlier posting maybe that is it. If you scroll up a few posts they shoudl be still there, maybe those ones will work.
You have to remember these are british trained dogs, which is why the fact the police have reported they need to be better trained is relevant. The dogs in the Uk tend to be trained with pigs, and cadaverine. Cranfiled university are trying to come up with better ways to detect "the scent of death". There is no real training programme, which I do not understand as they have a license system. The dogs in this case no longer have a license in the UK, and have alerted to coconut before.
But Grimes basicly said what you said, they are not evidence in themselves, just a guide. In the UK as well they are used for locating bodies rather than an indication a body was there, they are rather a blunt tool in that respect. Grimes has also said (will try to trawl back to find links), that his dogs can detect tiny amounts of material, however old it is. To be honest if it is so tiny as he claims, it is easier to see why they might make false alerts.
In the UK cadaver dogs are not allowed as evidence in court, not sure about Portugal but it is also under EU and ECHR laws. But if you watch the videos of Eddie ignoring everything and only alerting after being called bac several times and even then never actually alerting to cuddle cat as claimed, it is hard to see that not being ripped to pieces especially when the police themselves questioned it. My personal opinion is that in fact these videos would be very good for the defence if the mccanns were taken to court. But like you say, no evidence has been found to even warrant keeping the mccanss as aguidos (which is not as strong as suspect in the UK) which is what the PJ wrote in their conclusions (the prosecutor also said it had been too hasty a decision to even mae them aguidos in the first place)
You have to remember these are british trained dogs, which is why the fact the police have reported they need to be better trained is relevant. The dogs in the Uk tend to be trained with pigs, and cadaverine. Cranfiled university are trying to come up with better ways to detect "the scent of death". There is no real training programme, which I do not understand as they have a license system. The dogs in this case no longer have a license in the UK, and have alerted to coconut before.
But Grimes basicly said what you said, they are not evidence in themselves, just a guide. In the UK as well they are used for locating bodies rather than an indication a body was there, they are rather a blunt tool in that respect. Grimes has also said (will try to trawl back to find links), that his dogs can detect tiny amounts of material, however old it is. To be honest if it is so tiny as he claims, it is easier to see why they might make false alerts.
In the UK cadaver dogs are not allowed as evidence in court, not sure about Portugal but it is also under EU and ECHR laws. But if you watch the videos of Eddie ignoring everything and only alerting after being called bac several times and even then never actually alerting to cuddle cat as claimed, it is hard to see that not being ripped to pieces especially when the police themselves questioned it. My personal opinion is that in fact these videos would be very good for the defence if the mccanns were taken to court. But like you say, no evidence has been found to even warrant keeping the mccanss as aguidos (which is not as strong as suspect in the UK) which is what the PJ wrote in their conclusions (the prosecutor also said it had been too hasty a decision to even mae them aguidos in the first place)
I cannot comment about training in the US, but in the UK they are trained mainly on cadaverine. We do not actually have that many cadaver dogs so there training is not as formal as I suspect the US training is. But the sensitivity is important if you live in a place like the UK where most houses will have at some point either had a death in, or have had second hand or antique furniture that has been in a house with a body (when british cadaver dogs alerted in the home of a person child who later turned up alive, it was claimed the mistake may have been down to second hand furniture). If one cannot tell whether the dog is alerting because there is a piece of furniture that was once in a house where someone died, or because someone recently died there, or because other biological material was there then it renders there alerts meaningless. Also in the UK cadaver dog handlers do not have to have any scientific training, which I think would help a lot.
But like you say look at the whole meal, we have a search carried out in a way that will be ripped apart in court, a cadaver dog that is also trained to alert to bodily fluids, a cadaver dog that has alerted to coconut and now no longer has a license to practice in the UK, and no other evidence whatsoever (the FSS stated no bodily fluid could be identified in the car, and the biological material did have madeleines components, but not her sequence, and 100% of her dna components are found in the dna of her parents so it was impossible to tell who the dna belonged to).
I always use the analogy that if you were going through border control and a dog started alerting to you - the police wouldnt just arrest you and charge you - they would have to find the evidence first .
Also no-one seems to ever mention the tracker dogs that the PJ did bring in right at the beginning - if Maddy had been hidden near by then surely to goodness these dogs would have picked up the scent - in fact it was reported that they did pick up a scent but lost it which indicates to me that Maddy was long gone by then.
I still go back to the argument that if a dead maddy had been placed in the boot of the care after 3 weeks of being " hidden " then you wouldnt just be looking at trace elements of DNA - you would have needed a shovel to pick it all up .
Dogs are not infallable - unfortunatley they cant speak . It would take me 3 miniutes on google to find a case where there has been some misscarriage of justice due too much eveidence from dogs - bet ya !!
Also no-one seems to ever mention the tracker dogs that the PJ did bring in right at the beginning - if Maddy had been hidden near by then surely to goodness these dogs would have picked up the scent - in fact it was reported that they did pick up a scent but lost it which indicates to me that Maddy was long gone by then.
I still go back to the argument that if a dead maddy had been placed in the boot of the care after 3 weeks of being " hidden " then you wouldnt just be looking at trace elements of DNA - you would have needed a shovel to pick it all up .
Dogs are not infallable - unfortunatley they cant speak . It would take me 3 miniutes on google to find a case where there has been some misscarriage of justice due too much eveidence from dogs - bet ya !!
Interesting article on the dangers of relying on dog scent evidence
http://www.hg.org/article.asp?id=7370
I know thisn is just one police dept - but it took me 2 minutes to find. The final paragraph makes the point that proper forensinc evidence ALWAYS takes precident .
quote
This criteria makes it abundantly clear that there is no room for either the deputy or his dog in the courtroom. Dog scent lineups belong in the discredited science closet with its ancient kindred “the world is flat” discipline. We can only hope that not only will all Harris County prosecutors follow the lead of Vic Wisner by keeping Keith Pikett and his dogs out of the courtroom, but that prosecutors across the State, including the Attorney General’s office, will do the same. For any prosecutor to compare a dog scent lineup to DNA evidence is borderline ludicrous and places that prosecutor’s professional competency on the same level as deputy Pikett. We can only hope that the 14th District Court of Appeals or the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals will revisit the findings made in the Winston decision that dog scent evidence is a credible forensic discipline. The Winston decision stands an ugly legal stain on the entire Texas judicial system.
http://www.hg.org/article.asp?id=7370
I know thisn is just one police dept - but it took me 2 minutes to find. The final paragraph makes the point that proper forensinc evidence ALWAYS takes precident .
quote
This criteria makes it abundantly clear that there is no room for either the deputy or his dog in the courtroom. Dog scent lineups belong in the discredited science closet with its ancient kindred “the world is flat” discipline. We can only hope that not only will all Harris County prosecutors follow the lead of Vic Wisner by keeping Keith Pikett and his dogs out of the courtroom, but that prosecutors across the State, including the Attorney General’s office, will do the same. For any prosecutor to compare a dog scent lineup to DNA evidence is borderline ludicrous and places that prosecutor’s professional competency on the same level as deputy Pikett. We can only hope that the 14th District Court of Appeals or the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals will revisit the findings made in the Winston decision that dog scent evidence is a credible forensic discipline. The Winston decision stands an ugly legal stain on the entire Texas judicial system.
K9Snoop
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The Pickett situation has casted problems. Partly because he failed to provide and adhere to a protocol for the work. When I saw a video of some of his work, my first thought was that it was to sloppy and loose. Europe (specifically Holland) has done very, very credible work in the field of scent matching. Scent matching should not be in the catagory of the world is flat because it is a viable investigative tool. And useful but it needs to belong in the indirect evidence catagory and used as circumstantial evidence. In some of the Pickett cases, it was used as primary evidence, which is should not be.
But the thing is that in the UK the training is sloppy. There have been claims that eddie is world renowned as a cadaver dog and has been successful in over two hundred cases. This is misleading, he is famous because of the mccann case, and I have seen no primary source for him having worked on 200 cases successfully. During his years at SY police, he worked less than forty cases, and found a body in less than half of these. Off the top of my head there have been at least two cases in the last five years, the jersey care home, and shannon mathews where the dogs have been incorrect. If you look at the videos of the search, they look very badly done to me and it would not look good in court. There is a reason why these dogs are not allowed as evidence, the science behind them is in exact and shaky and it is often down to the handlers interpretation, and their skills at carrying out the search. And in the U the trainig is in exact, plus if people start claiming a dog alerting when no body is present means a body was present because a dog can never be wrong, then one has to ascertain the entir ehistory of the building and its contents. Remembering also that in this case the cadaver dog was also trained to alert to bodily fluids.
Also remember that madeleine was seen alive and well at six thirty, her parents arrived to dinner approx, eight thirtyish, and from then until ten when madeleine was discovered gone, they are only unacccounted for five minutes each. that means there is only a maximum space of two hours for madeleine to die, and her parents arrange the cover up. Which means her body will only have been in place for less than two hours by which point not all organs would have died.
Mani
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Brit, Thank you for the links - some worked some didn't but it gave me enough information. I had not heard about the Joanna Cipriano story, nor the van.
The Madeleine McCann case got huge press here in Australia in the early days of the investigation. It just goes to show you that there were some other abductions around the same time and it appears that the Portuguese police were sloppy and did not link the two cases up.IMO
Mani
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Regarding links - we find on our thread that if too many people access the link, it can become broken!
The Cipriano torture is also mentioned in amnesty international's 2012 report on Portugal.
I think the problem was that at the time Madeleine disappeared the police were already being investiagted for torturing Joana Cipriano's mother. This makes me think two things, 1) the police were already predisposed to the "we do not have paedophiles here, it must be the mother" type attitude (casa pia had been ignored for years before action against paedophila there was taken) and 2) because they were facing torture charges, it would not look good if an abductor was found to be in the area as it would seriously weaken the case against Joana Cipriano's mother, and therefore make it appear more likely her confession was false and the result of torture. therefore it would have been a huge disadvantage to the police to find Madeleine had been abducted. I have no idea if this line of thinking did influence them, but I believe that they should not have been allowed to be in charge of Madeleine's case as it meant the case had the potential to be loaded from the start, the police must not only be unbias, but they must be seen to be unbias if they are to have credibility in court. As it is ther eis always going to be a question mark over the police investigation.
badhorsie
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