ISDP Redux

 

A little over five years ago we called a wrap on our wildly popular I Smell Dead People™ feature, along with the annual Norman Bates Award™ competition. It wasn’t for lack of compelling material. From a simple premise (a person follows a repulsive smell only to discover cadaverous remains) came stories that illuminated the human condition in all its highs and lows. However there were simply too many incidents to catalog and each one took some unraveling. Also, I needed to free up some time to write what would become the fictional adventures of Nick Zollicker.

This week the lurking thrall of ISDP finally broke through my studied indifference. The first item to grab me was a headline in the august Times of London: “Russian admiral’s wife and son found stabbed to death.” The bodies of Rear Admiral Leonid Lobanov’s elderly wife and middle-aged son were discovered in a St. Petersburg apartment after neighbors complained of a bad smell.

No big deal, right? Standard unnoticed deaths. Wrong: “The pair had been stabbed and slashed several times in the torso, neck and face. They were in a sitting position on a sofa.” And here’s the kicker: the bodies were discovered eight days after the Rear Admiral “died under the wheels of a suburban train near Ruchi station in the northeast of the city, two miles from the apartment where they all lived.”

That’s potentially the basis for a typically dark Russian tale of depravity and intrigue. The only question is whether it should be written in the style of Dostoyevsky or John le Carré.

The second item to leap out at me came from the execrable Star Tribune of Minneapolis. [Why so harsh?—Ed.] [It’s Minnesota’s answer to the Los Angeles Times.] [Oh.—Ed.] The headline wasn’t anything special: “Murder charge: St. Paul woman shot ex-husband, buried him in their back yard.” It was the subhead that raised the relevant possibility: “A neighbor told police about a bad smell coming from near Karina Her’s garden sometime shortly after July 5 and persisting for a week.”

So—do we credit the neighbor with an ISDP find?

Karina Her

Enthusiasts know that to qualify as an ISDP incident, the body in question must be discovered by someone smelling it. Suppose an out-of-state relative requests a welfare check on an elderly family member and the responding police officer detects the telltale scent wafting through an open window. Sorry—no dice. The ISDP Rules Committee sets and maintains very high standards.

From the Star Tribune story (along with this one from WCCOChannel 4) it is unclear whether the neighbor’s complaint led directly to the discovery of the husband’s body. After all, the victim’s stepdaughter apparently implicated her mother in a 911 call. The sequence of events is critical to determining whether this is a true IDSP event. (See how much work this takes?)

Finally, this item from the Overpromising and Underdelivering file: “L.A. Woman Says She Slept 3 Feet From Her Neighbor’s Corpse for Weeks.” At first glance it looks like Reagan Baylee deserves a Norman Bates Award nomination. But it turns out her neighbor’s corpse was in a different apartment.  

Ms. Baylee’s emotional and highly personal account, as befits the Age of Social Media, overshares to the point of TMI. (Check out her TikTok video for the full effect.) Still, she supplies some telling details and her story has an excellent plot twist. (Which neighboring apartment was the gruesome odor really coming from?)

Hot Topics for Current Chinese Science

I’m an independent researcher with no university affiliation. But because I regularly publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals I get daily spam from sketchy “journals” asking me to contribute a paper. The pitch is often agrammatical and weirdly formal (“Dear esteemed gracious professor”). They go right to the trash folder.

However, I got one a week ago that has me thinking seriously about a response.

Dear Dr. Gilbert,

An exciting mega Science journal, “Current Chinese Science” is launched this year by Bentham Science Publishers. The Nobel Laureate Prof. Ferid Murad and 43 Academicians of Chinese Academy of Sciences have already joined as Honorary Senior Advisors of this exciting new mega Science Journal. Prof. Atta-ur-Rahman FRS (UNESCO Science Laureate and Academician Chinese Academy of Sciences) is the Editor-in-Chief of this Journal

Current Chinese Science is not limited to a specific field but instead covers all major fields of science, technology, and medicine, through dedicated sections. The Journal is currently in the process of appointing Section Editors in various disciplines.  In this connection, we would like to invite you to join as section Editor in one of the following disciplines.  If you agree to this, please kindly send us your complete CV and a list of your recent publications along with the name of the discipline and sub-section, so that we can send your CV for Editor-in-Chief’s consideration.

    1. Aerospace Sciences

    2. Analytical Chemistry

    (. . . / . . .)

    24. Pharmacology

    25. Structural Engineering

Your responsibilities, if you accept, would entail soliciting one thematic issue each year in a hot area of the journal.

We need the abstract of the thematic issue with a proposed list of authors within 4 months of the appointment of each Section Editor. Section Editors are also expected to occasionally solicit/contribute review articles. 

(…/…)

We look forward to hearing from you in this regard.

Sincerely,

Hasan Khan
Editorial Manager
Current Chinese Science

This sounds like too good a deal to pass up. Here’s the reply I drafted:

Dear Mr. Khan,

Thank you for your invitation to become a Section Editor for Current Chinese Science.

I have several exciting ideas for thematic issues in hot areas.

1. Research under constraints: Effects of criminal indictment on productivity of scientists associated with the Thousand Talents program.

    Proposed contributors: 

    Dr. Charles Lieber, Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor and former chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University

    Dr. Qing Wang, formerly of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation

    Dr. Simon Saw-Teong Ang, a professor and researcher at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville

    Dr. Xiao-Jiang Li, formerly of Emory University

    Dr. Anming Hu, formerly in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Tennessee

2. Organs from executed donors: Is the Chinese transplantation experience a useful model for the West?

3. The “Fee for Service” Solution to “Publish or Perish”

    Proposed contributors:

    Hoping to recruit numerous authors from The Jining First People’s Hospital in Shandong province or whichever paper mill churns out clinical papers for their staff.

Looking forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

UPDATE June 19, 2021

Well, here’s some good local news.

Farewell, My Lovely

 

Here’s a new twist on the stinky grotesquery known to fussy writers as the “corpse flower,” but whose formal botanical name—Amorphophallus titanum— suggests something more delightfully vulgar.

It seems an A. titanum blossomed “in the wild,” i.e., outside the premises of a botanical garden. The site—a public park in Singapore—is not that wild, but it is in the vicinity of the species’ natural range.

Someone mentioned the site on social media and faster than you can say “Sam Spade” the plant was dug up and stolen.

Damn. There goes another plot point I had planned for a NickZollicker novella tentatively titled The Maltese Penis.

My Friend Annie: A Thanksgiving Reflection on Jonestown

It was a long time ago, but I remember the moment vividly. We were lying in our sleeping bags, three or four of us, on a wooden tent platform in the Sierra Nevada. The night sky was dense with bright stars. The conversation turned cosmic: we were, after all, teenagers, and it was the summer of 1971. We talked about what we wanted to do with our lives. Annie was emphatic—she wanted to dedicate her life to helping other people. It was a fine sentiment but it struck me as strangely self-erasing. I was focused on finding out what I wanted to be and what I would achieve. The idea that someone would set all that aside and submerge her self to help others was simply beyond me.

Soon enough Bob Brooks, the U.C. Davis wresting coach and camp director, trudged past and told us to knock it off and get to sleep. Tomorrow was the first day of camp and we would all be on deck as counselors. It was the annual Foster Children’s Camp, sponsored by the Davis Methodist Church. We worked all year to make it happen. In March, the Davis Enterprise ran a photo of a bunch of us at the spaghetti dinner fundraiser. Here it is.



I’m in the back in glasses, sleeves rolled up, holding a handful of cash. Annie is seated at the head of the table, her long hair parted in the middle. She was a year ahead of me in high school. She was tall, thin, and pretty and had a dry sense of humor. Everyone liked her.

Annie and I had been acquaintances since her family moved to Davis in 1966. Her father, John Moore, had been pastor of San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Methodist Church and came to Davis to be the campus minister. Our family attended Davis Methodist Church. My father was a philosophy professor at U.C.D. and often played the organ at services. He had an interest in comparative religion and would later teach some of the first religious studies courses on campus.

Davis was on the forefront of 1960’s liberalism. Our church took up a collection to send our pastor, Rev. Phil Walker, to the civil rights march in Selma, Alabama in 1965. Rev. Moore fit right in—taking part in anti-Viet Nam war protests and providing moral support as Cal Aggie students burned their draft cards.

I recall our family, along with others, being invited to the Moore’s house for Thanksgiving in 1966. It was an unremarkable event. Annie’s older sister Carolyn was there along with her boyfriend, who struck me as a bit odd and standoffish. For some reason, I remember one detail in particular: when most of the guys moved to the den to watch football on TV, he didn’t join us. The ten-year-old me found that weird.

By 1972, our Foster Children’s Camp days were over. High school ended, I headed to Berkeley for college and found my calling in science. Annie got a nursing degree. I moved to Philadelphia for graduate school at Penn. My Davis friends told me Annie had joined a religious commune. That didn’t seem strange—after all, she wanted to help people.

News of the November 18, 1978 Jonestown massacre hit me like a brick. I soon realized that the creepy boyfriend on that distant Thanksgiving was Larry Layton, who took part in the deadly ambush of Congressman Leo Ryan’s party at the Port Kaituma airport. I searched the New York Times for mention of Annie and found it: she was dead with all the rest. Unlike the rest, she died in Jim Jones’ cabin of a gunshot to the head. She did not drink the Kool-Aid. Nor did Jones.

For a time, I struggled to make sense of her role in that evil place of death. I told myself she was too smart, too caring, to have joined in mass murder. She must have resisted, perhaps tried to stop Jones with a gun in the last moments.

And then the circumstances of her death made the papers. On the table, next to her body, was a notebook filled with her final thoughts as the carnage took place around her. Was it a plea for help? A diatribe against the sick bastard who took out 900 people and left them to rot in the jungle?

No. It was an earnest tribute to Jim Jones, “the most honest, loving, caring concerned person whom I ever met and knew.” Jonestown was a “paradise,” “the most peaceful, loving community that ever existed.”

“What a beautiful place this was.”

I look at the newspaper clippings and high school yearbook photos and wonder how this smart, goodhearted girl ended up in Jonestown with her head blown off. How did she go from the sincere, amorphous ideals of that Sierra summer to arranging cyanide-laced drinks and lethal injections for the people she claimed to care about?

The standard answer, I suppose, is that she came under the sway of a cult leader. That may be true, but it is also true that the evil inherent in Jim Jones was apparent all along, well before the final days in Jonestown. By his own account, Annie’s father had been uneasy about Jones from early on when his older daughter Carolyn became involved with the Peoples Temple. But it’s also clear that he and his wife were hamstrung by their devotion to the liberal pieties, shared by Jones, of reducing poverty, improving race relations, and ending the war. When they visited their daughters in Guyana before the massacre, John Moore saw things that made him uneasy but he also approvingly noted the “no smoking” signs in the encampment.

Jones rose quickly in San Francisco’s political arena because his views were in synch with the emerging liberal establishment that found him useful. With the Peoples Temple congregation at his beck and call, Jones could deliver crowds for events and door-to-door campaigning, and San Francisco Democrat pols like Willie Brown, George Moscone, and John Burton were happy to take advantage.

No one stopped to question the assumptions of the day: that human nature can be shaped by decree, that a utopia can be ours for the asking. And so while Jim Jones led his flock in a mad dance toward death, the earnest, well-meaning, forward-thinking people of the Bay Area looked on approvingly, and my friend Annie knowingly and deliberately took part in mass murder.

I have visited her grave in Davis. I felt sad about the waste of a promising life. But I feel worse about the delusions of the 60s that wrecked so many lives and that continue to wreak havoc today.

Grieving and Thieving

A news headline from Dublin, Ireland, late last year: “Bereaved woman ‘stole nine bottles of scent’, court told.”

My authorial juices start to flow. The narrative snaps into place:

A distraught widow, desperate to recover the sensory presence of her late husband, grabs a bottle of his favorite cologne from a store shelf. Then, hoping to sustain his comforting olfactory ghost for years to come, she stuffs eight more bottles into her bag and flees the store. She is apprehended by mall cops and at trial the judge is torn—should he sentence her by the book or show mercy because this is clearly a case of nasal insanity?

But reality intrudes. Natasha Gleeson of Corduff Crescent, Blanchardstown, was caught on security video shoplifting perfume and aftershave. Her solicitor told the court she was “recently bereaved” but this looks like a lame attempt to invoke sympathy from the judge.

Still, it has the makings of a great story.

Delaware State Police Have Incredible Olfactory Abilities

Yes, incredible, as in impossible to believe.

Near midnight last Tuesday, Delaware state troopers pulled a car over for speeding. According to The News Journal, as the officers approached they noticed “an odor of marijuana was wafting from the car, combined with the scent of air fresheners.”

Hmmm. The smell of burning marijuana is easy to recognize, perhaps even when mixed with the aroma of multiple air fresheners. But the police aren’t claiming to have smelled burning marijuana.

On the other hand, unburned marijuana is difficult to detect and reliably identify, especially when it is wrapped up and hidden away inside a vehicle, and even more so when other odors are in the air. (This is a topic I cover in my book.)

In this case, a small bag of pot was stashed inside the center console, and other bags were located elsewhere in the car, location unspecified. In my opinion, it is highly unlikely the troopers could have detected an odor of unburned marijuana “wafting” from the car, much less amid the smell of multiple air fresheners.

It’s probably a moot point, as the troopers claim a “small amount” of pot fell from the passenger’s shirt as he exited the car. That would have been probable cause to search the vehicle, as may have been the driver’s suspended license and the passenger giving a fake name (I’m not an attorney so I’m speculating here).

All of which raises the question: why do police needlessly claim they can smell unburned marijuana, even when it makes them look like idiots?

Bonfire of the Vanities

You want to give a guy credit for trying to do the right thing, but when the outcome is this stupendously bad you have to wonder.

A homeless man is in Northampton County Prison after he allegedly set a fire to mask a foul smell wafting from a restroom at a vacant restaurant in south Bethlehem.

The fire got out of control and the fellow is charged with arson.

Apparently, Burwell tried to create his own air freshener with wood chips and paper towels. He took wood chips that he found in the garage, placed paper towels underneath and then lit it up in the restroom sink.

Lighting a single match is the usual ritual atonement for fouling the air in a bathroom—what on earth did he do that required a bonfire?

Court documents were silent on what caused the stench in the nonfunctioning toilet.

Oh.

Renifleur Alert

Elie Mystal at AboveTheLaw goes all foot stompy over a judge’s decision that aggressive sniffing does not constitute sexual harassment. His post is accompanied by a blank image space captioned “Getty only has images of women or children sniffing things . . . because men sniffing women is TOTALLY CREEPY.” And to prove his PC bona fides he throws in the phrase “a prick Texas judge.”

Feel the force of his intellect—unlike you, Elie Mystal has two Harvard degrees. [Does that make him a pecksniff?—Ed.]

How Do I Smell, Kaori-chan?

There’s a lot about Japan that I really like. Among the common elements are a slightly off-kilter (from my perspective) aesthetic and an unbridled enthusiasm for technology and gadgetry.

The former has fascinated me since the badly dubbed sci-fi films I watched on TV on Saturday afternoons. (Who were those tiny women in the rowboat singing to Mothra?) And I fondly remember listening to baseball broadcasts of the San Francisco Giants on my Panasonic transistor radio—my first-ever technology purchase.

Old habits die hard, and since acquiring a Roku box I’ve been catching up on Japanese sci-fi movies. Judging by some of them, the scene has gotten even weirder. Don’t take my word for it, go watch the disturbing imagery in Meatball Machine (2005) and get back to me.

Or check out the claustrophic and bloody Hellevator (2004), written and directed by Hiroki Yamaguchi who after this effort does not appear to have been allowed near a camera for about five years. In fairness, the guy who played the cannibal-rapist convict was awesome. [And the elevator operator chick was hot.—Ed.] [Yes. Yes she was.]

After my late-night sci-fi viewing, this news story seemed almost charmingly droll:

On 24 August, Kanagawa Prefectural Police picked up Joji Kondo for stealing three seats from women’s electric bicycles in a housing complex at around 4:00 in the morning. After searching Kondo’s home they uncovered a further 200 seats.

According to police he admitted to the crimes saying “I wanted to smell the lingering scent of a woman.” MSN News Japan reported the 35-year-old as saying “I like the texture of the leather and the smell it has, I would lick it and sniff it.”

Alright, then.


Via Saga-S.co.jp

Meanwhile, the twin Japanese obsessions of olfactory technology and robotics have merged to produce a Sniff-Me Bot:

The female robot, Kaori-chan, has brown hair and blue eyes. When a person breathes in her face, she analyzes and quantifies components in their breath, and evaluates the smell on a scale of one to four.

I think I get it. Sort of.

UPDATE August 28, 2013
“Hey, wait a minute. Did that robot just fart?”

Good Dog! . . . Uh, Bad Dog?

Image via TheWeedBlog.

Washington’s recent decriminalization of pot creates problems for the state’s drug-sniffing dogs and their handlers. The big question: Can a drug-sniffing dog be selectively untrained?

Fragrance Felony: Why Steal a Discontinued Perfume?

From the HuffPo: “Juan Bernal Stole $117,000 Worth of Perfume in New Jersey, Including Victoria’s Secret Line: Cops.”

Why is this filed under Weird News? Because it conjures up an image of some guy tiptoeing out of a store with hundreds of bottles of perfume? Not exactly.

Cops say Bernal stole 1,890 4.2-ounce bottles of 5th Avenue by Elizabeth Arden Friday, valued at $109,620. He also reportedly took 234 3.4-ounce bottles of Victoria’s Secret PINK, valued at $7,488.

That’s close to 1,000 pounds worth of goods. Not something you can slip into your pants.

Juan Bernal, 52, allegedly employed a 17-year-old boy to help him pull off the haute heist. The two are accused of loading thousands of bottles swiped from Cosmetics Essence Innovations in Holmdel into an SUV . . .

So the goods were stolen from a manufacturer’s facility and the kid was the muscle. Wholesale perfume theft is big economic issue, although by New Jersey standards this heist was small potatoes. (Cops are valuing the Eliz. Arden at full list price of $58.)

I do think there is a “weird” element to this story. According to this report, the VS perfume was Live Pink, launched in 2010 and now discontinued. Here’s my question: Does this make it more or less valuable on the black market? In other words, is Juan Bernal a criminal mastermind or a doofus?

I’d love to hear what some fume heads think.

Hey Officer, Do You Have a Light?

Odor-based drug searches by police can raise some complex legal questions. For example, yesterday’s Supreme Court decision tossing out a warrantless dog-sniffing search for marijuana involves such arcane legal concepts as curtilage (an area “immediately surrounding and associated with the home,” such as a porch).

Sometimes, however, it’s an easy call. Like last Tuesday in Totowa, New Jersey, just a ten-minute drive from First Nerve Manor. Three guys were waiting for their friend to pick up his car from the auto impound. While waiting they sparked up a doobie—in the parking lot of the state police barracks. A trooper caught wind of it and busted them for possession of fifteen bags of weed and 14 tabs of Ecstasy. Two of the perps had outstanding arrest warrants.

Supreme Court: Drug-Sniffing Dog on Your Porch Needs a Warrant

Today’s Florida v. Jardines decision in a nutshell (by Kevin Russell at ScotusBlog):

The Court held a dog sniff at the front door of a house where the police suspected drugs where being grown constitutes a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment.

The case involved a marijuana grow house and the smell in question was that of pot plants, not pot smoke. (FN and WTNK readers understand that the former scent is much more difficult to detect and has been the subject of over-reaching claims by various police departments.)

The case hinges on expectations of privacy in and around one’s home, on whether a drug-sniffing dog is like thermal-imaging technology, and on the Founder’s view of the legal status of scent-tracking dogs.

Interesting split decision: conservative justices Scalia and Thomas joined by liberals Kagen, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor for the majority; conservatives Alito and Roberts joined by liberals Kennedy and Breyer in dissent.

Dog owner and constitutional law prof Ann Althouse finds Alito’s opinion more “dog positive.”

Another Fart-Related Homicide

Headline: “Teasing over flatulence leads to deadly fight.”

WOIO Channel 19 Action News in Cleveland, Ohio has the story:

Police say a 16-year-old girl is dead and another 16-year-old girl is in police custody. Officials say the girls were fighting around 8 p.m. Wednesday at 4769 Walford Road in Warrensville Heights. 

According to witnesses the victim was teasing the suspect because she passed gas. One thing led to another and fisticuffs began flying. Witnesses also tell 19 Action News that several adults stood around and watched the whole thing go down, including the victim’s stepfather. But by the time he intervened, it was too late.

Good grief.

And yet not unprecedented.

Clueless

An Associated Press wire story has been getting some big play:

Nose for crime: $1.2M in French perfume nabbed. [MSN] 

A nose for crime: Masked thieves nab $1.2 million in French Givenchy perfume [WaPo] 

Masked thieves nab $1.2M in Givenchy perfume in France [USA Today]

First question: Who writes these headlines? Thieves don’t “nab” things, thieves are the ones who get “nabbed.”

On a Friday night a week ago, a gang of thieves overpowered a guard at the Givenchy plant in Beauvais, about an hour north of Paris, and drove off with two truckloads of perfume. The trucks—and perfume—were later found abandoned.

Second question: What the hell happened? The interesting part of this story isn’t the heist, it’s the abandonment of the loot.

One Jean-Marie Salsat is quoted as saying, “the bottles were found unused, with the stoppers still in.”

Third question: Stoppers? Is this 2012 or 1812? Calling all perfumistas: Does Givenchy market a perfume in a stoppered bottle?

Let’s turn to Matthieu Brandely at Le Parisien, for better coverage en française. His lede gets right to the heart of the mystery:

Le coup était presque parfait, mais que s’est-il réellement passé pour que les malfaiteurs abandonnent aussi étrangement leur précieux butin? Les camions étaient-ils munis d’un traceur? La marchandise était-elle « marquée »? Les malfaiteurs ont-ils flairé un piège? Et dans ce cas, pourquoi les camions n’ont-ils pas été incendiés? Les questions ne manquent pas après le casse commis chez Givenchy. 

[My ham-fisted, Google-assisted translation: The caper was almost perfect, but what happened that made the perpetrators strangely abandon their precious booty? Were the trucks equipped with a tracker? Was the merchandise “marked”? Did the robbers smell a trap? And if so, why were the trucks not burned? No shortage of issues after the break-in at Givenchy.]

According to Brandely, the robbers were a team of six or seven guys dressed in black, wearing masks and gloves. They overpowered the guard at the shipping dock and made off with two 12-ton trucks, loaded with five or six tons of palletized goods. The following Tuesday morning, the trucks are discovered at a rest stop in the town of Brie-Comte-Robert, about 40 min southeast of Paris. All the merchandise is intact, except for a few boxes that had been ripped open. (No mention of “stoppers.”)

We are left to wonder: did the fence fail to show? Did the thieves think they were made? What spooked them? Perhaps it’s wise not to overthink it. After all, million-dollar perfume heists can be the work of rank amateurs.

Fart Rage and Old Age

Dan Ivers has the first story at NJ.com:

Police: Teaneck man pulled gun on neighbor for farting

An elderly man was arrested Monday night after a neighbor’s fart allegedly drove him to threaten him with a gun, police said.

The impulse is to criticize 72-year-old Daniel Collins for going all Harry Callahan on his apartment house neighbor. However, FirstNerve readers know that deliberate farting is an effective provocation.

Police say Collins and his 47-year-old neighbor were involved in “an ongoing dispute over noise.” So there could be an element of aggravated farting involved.

Exit question: Why isn’t the alleged victim named in this story? Do journalists have a fart-shield rule?

Meanwhile, a few miles down the Garden State Parkway, some other elderly Old Farts are audibilizing tonight not far from FirstNerve Manor.



70, 67, and 70, respectively.

Natick’s Most Wanted

This alleged perfume shoplifter is pretty brazen. She strolls in, texting on her phone, and drops up to nine bottles into her purse. Yeah, the security alarm went off, but she had a getaway car idling outside.

The Natick, Massachusetts police department has posted the security video in hopes of identifying her. You can watch it here.

Any sharp-eyed readers recognize the store or the brands she swiped? Better yet, anyone recognize the schlubette herself?

Steer Clear of the Chickenshit Jurisdiction of Collinsville, Illinois

In WTNK, I questioned whether the olfactory abilities of police officers live up to the deference shown them by courts in search-and-seizure drug cases. Empirical work by Richard Doty and others casts serious doubt on one typically extravagant claim: that unburned marijuana is detectable by nose when wrapped and stashed in a car trunk.

Nevertheless, the “in plain smell” doctrine is now law in many states: the odor of pot, as perceived by a police officer, is sufficient to establish probable cause for a warrantless search of a vehicle. Thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, an “alert” behavior by a trained drug detection dog also suffices.

Bringing dogs into the equation doesn’t help matters. A recent study suggests that dogs respond to subtle, unintended cues from their handlers that can result in “false alarm” alerts.

Radley Balko now examines some data from the Illinois State Police K-9 Unit and comes to a disturbing conclusion.

Even giving this dog credit for the cases in which the officer found only [drug] residue, over this 11-month period, the dog had about a 28 percent failure rate. Which means that nearly three of the 10 times the dogs alerted provided probable cause for a warrantless search of a motorist’s car without a warrant, the motorist was completely innocent.

What’s that, Lassie? It gets worse?

Include the “residue” stops, which didn’t produce a large enough quantity of illicit drugs to be measured, and the dog’s error rate climbs to 74 percent. And these are all cases in which the dog’s handler presumably was suspicious enough to conduct a sniff search in the first place.

Bad girl!

Before you smack Lassie on the snout with a rolled-up newspaper, consider the tactics employed by officer Michael Reichert of the Collinsville (Illinois) Police Department, and his canine sidekick. Radley Balko has the story here, but you really should watch the nifty little video by Terrance Huff that accompanies the story. It gives you the full gamey flavor of what happens when questionable legal doctrine combines with questionable use of scent dogs and questionable policing in a chickenshit town like Collinsville, Illinois.

[Via Instapundit.]

Who Will Watch the Sniffers?

A sad story, but also a bit . . . ironic.

What time is it, kids? It’s ISDP Time!

The thirteenth of the month has rolled around once again. That means it’s time for all the pallid, questionably groomed, and oddly dressed fans of the Olfactory Macabre to huddle around their dimly lit laptops and wait for their outdated browsers to deliver the latest edition of I Smell Dead People.

If you are tan or have used a razor in the past week, or if you are easily offended, now is the time to tune into something happier. But if you want to savor a nearly perfect collection of ghastly bon bons filled with the bitter dark chocolate of the soul, then read on—this month’s collection hits all the classic notes.

We begin on May 19, with what has become an ISDP sub-genre: foul odor leading to a body in a vehicle. WDEF TV reports from Bradley County in southeastern Tennessee:

The body turned up inside an 18 wheeler in the lot of the Loves [truck stop] at exit 33 on I -75.

... A clerk at Love’s reported noticing flies around a tractor trailer...and a foul odor coming from it.

Deputies responded to find a body lying in the truck’s cab between the driving area and the sleeping compartment.

The body was that of a man reported missing 12 days earlier.

Then there was this bizarre case in San Antonio, Texas, on May 24.

Just after 9 p.m. Tuesday, San Antonio police responded to a call from neighbors reporting a foul smell and liquid running down the driveway from a closed garage in the 4900 block of Port Kenton.

A hazmat team entered the garage and found a person dead in a car with a bucket of chemicals that had produced lethal amounts of hydrogen sulfide. Warning placards and a note indicate that this was suicide. KENS-TV reporter Noelle Gardner has the video here. We think she has big future in broadcast journalism.

On Saturday, June 4, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran with a story by Christopher Seward that is a model of succinct ISDP reportage.

‘Foul smell’ leads Clayton cops to human remains in abandoned car

Clayton County police discovered human remains in an abandoned car on Mount Zion Road in Jonesboro near the Woods of Southlake apartments Saturday.

The remains were found after a neighbor reported a “foul smell” coming from the vehicle.

By the following day the mystery was solved:

The body was later identified as Alena Marble, a resident of the apartment complex.

According to Clayton County Police spokeswoman Captain Tina Daniel, detectives interviewed two individuals shortly after Marble’s body was recovered. The victim’s daughter, Kajul Harvey, 22, and her boyfriend Latoris Grovner, 21, confessed to assaulting Ms. Marble in her apartment and later placing her body into the trunk of the car.

Finally, we have a classic “neighbors search wooded area” incident that marred Memorial Day weekend in the Peaceful Valley area of Spokane, Washington. A badly decomposed body

was discovered in a heavily wooded site by neighbors, according to a Spokane Police Department news release. They had “complained of a foul odor nearby” and found the body at about 7 p.m., the release said.

Because the rats keep chewing through the cable at FirstNerve Manor, we haven’t seen too much of the Casey Anthony murder trial on TV. She is accused of killing her 2-year old daughter.

Much is being made of a foul smell found in her car. Prosecutors believe it was from the decomposing body of her daughter which was found months later in a wood lot. In court, a tow-yard worker described a foul odor coming from her car. He was just one in a parade of olfactory witnesses that included crime scene investigator Gerardo Bloise and Deputy Jason Forgey, “a cadaver dog handler with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office K-9 unit.”

Casey’s mother also took the stand to describe the same awful smell:

Her voice cracking, Cindy testified about the foul smell in Casey’s white Pontiac Sunfire. “I said it smelled like something died in the car,” she testified, before tearfully recounting how she took Caylee’s doll out of the car and wiped it with a Clorox wipe.

“Casey’s purse was on the front seat and Caylee’s baby doll, her favorite doll was in the car seat like it was sitting where Caylee would have sat,” Cindy said. “Caylee’s doll smelled like the car so I took it out ... I sat the doll down and I went and got a Clorox wipe and I wiped the face and hands. The body was soft and so it smelled pretty bad ... I sprayed Febreze all through the car thinking that might help the odor ... I used pretty much a whole can of Febreze.”

Prosecutors didn’t rely on heart-rending or informal smell testimony; they also brought in heavy-weight scientific experts:

Arpad Vass of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee said the test results confirmed what his nose had already told him.

“The odor was extremely overwhelming ... I recognized it as human decomposition,” said Vass, a pioneer in the biochemistry of human decomposition.

Fox News legal analyst Greta Van Susteren thought the prosecution’s parade of olfactory experts was an egregious example of “over-trying” a case.

I think the Casey Anthony prosecution would be smarter to play it safe because it has lots of other evidence and not hand the defense a possible appellate issue.

Think about it…does the jury need for a witness to identify the foul odor as human (what else is the jury going to think it is??)

In her live blogging, Van Susteren also highlighted the prosecution’s novel use of chemical analysis of smell:

Scientist is gonna say air from car had special fatty acids that come from gases emitted from decomposing bodies…will also testify about high levels of chloroform in air

Defense will say these compounds can originate from anything….garbage left in the trunk mixed with baby diapers or wet bathing suit….cleaning products…all mixed together can produce these compounds…can u definitely say it came from a dead body? What are the controls?

First time this evidence has been used in court

Judge allowed in when they had a frye hearing because he said defense can rebut it.

Is this an effective tactic, or like the over-trying of DNA evidence in the O.J. Simpson case, could it backfire?

Stay tuned. See ya next time!