31. The McCanns also claimed that sniffer dogs were ‘notoriously unreliable’. They quoted a U.S. case where a cadaver dog’s alert was said to be wrong. Months later, the dog’s alert was proved right.
Verdict - Misquotation and Misleading
Source - Media articles, Interviews and Blog.
This "fact" will be addressed in parts.
As with all of their "facts", the Madeleine McCann Research Group do not provide sources. Once again, the quote they have used is inaccurate. The two available primary sources of Gerry McCann commenting on the dogs are provided below. In neither does he use the word "notoriously". Whilst arguably a minor point of difference in the sentiment of the quote, we feel it is important to highlight the disturbing level of inaccuracy which has been found in the MMRG's leaflet - especially when many primary sources are freely available and would not take long to check.
The first is an interview with Sandra Felgueiras on 5th November 2009. The relevant portion is quoted below. It can be found at approximately 5.30 minutes into the interview.
Quote:
Gerry McCann :I can tell you that we have obviously looked at evidence about cadaver dogs and they are incredibly unreliable. Sandra Felgueiras: Unreliable Gerry McCann :Cadaver dogs. Yes, that’s what the evidence shows if they are tested scientifically. |
The second is from Gerry McCann's blog Day 988:-
Quote:
The dogs: We realise that the behaviour of the dogs was the turning point in the investigation for the PJ. The use of dogs has proved to be problematic and unreliable in previous cases. (please refer to the Jersey 'Haut de La Garenne' case and other research published about their use and reliability). It is vital to note that alerts by such dogs are classified as intelligence rather than evidence, as police officers familiar with their use will verify. These alerts must be supported by forensics in order to be used as evidence. The results of the forensic examinations did not identify any blood or Madeleine's DNA. To suggestor use the dogs' reactions as evidence is simply wrong and abusive. |
Misquotation. Although this is a minor technical point, it is important to highlight it in view of the extensive inaccuracies of quotations which have been found in the MMRG leaflet. Basic fact checking is an essential part of research. Failure to produce sources or to provide accurate quotations is indicative of a general lack of regard for the integrity of information.
The following is taken from an article in The Sun newspaper in 5th September 2008:-
Quote:
EXPERTS say sniffer dogs can play a vital role in fighting crime - but warn it is "madness" to rely on their findings. The animals are used to lead police to evidence, but do not provide evidence themselves. One expert told The Sun: "The dogs can identify traces of blood, but it's crazy to draw major conclusions just from what they find. "Any evidence they find should be used as a starting point. It's madness just to rely on the findings of the sniffer dogs."
Handler Martin Grimes, who worked with his dogs on the Maddie case, admitted the animals offered no more than "a guide". He said: "They can identify traces of blood and detect the smell of a decomposing body, but that is as far as they go." Martin said his dogs Keela and Eddie would only give him an indication when they find what they are trained to detect.
Unreliable He said: "Blood could be invisible to the naked eye, but Keela will detect it. It doesn't matter if it's hundreds of years old. "Eddie smells for the scent of a decomposing human body. He can detect any part of a human body that is decomposing - hair, bones, flesh, anything. "The smell of a decomposing body is very difficult to get rid of. It can easily be transferred to clothing and on to a person." A spokesman for the McCanns said: "Dog alerts can be unreliable. The handler himself makes it clear in the police report that such alerts are meaningless without corroborative evidence. There was no such evidence. "Gerry and Kate are not interested in dwelling on mistakes that were made. They and their investigation team wish to focus entirely on finding Maddie." |
The misquoted phrase "notoriously unreliable" can be attributed directly to the Secretary of the "Madeleine Foundation" in a letter to the Prime Minister.
Quote:
"The McCanns have rebutted this evidence by claiming that the evidence of these dogs is (I quote) ‘notoriously unreliable’, yet
despite that claim, Mr Grime’s dogs have been used successfully dozens of times to alert to the scent of places where corpses have lain for a period." |
Once again, no source was provided.
In his blog, Gerry McCann referred to the Jersey 'Haut de la Garenne' case.
Below are some media articles which were published during the investigation into the Jersey Children's Home followed by the actual findings.
From Sky News:-
Quote:
"A sniffer dog trained to find human remains has had an "extremely strong reaction" in a cellar at a former children's home where police are digging for bodies - as another "suspicious" bricked-up room is discovered. |
From The Times:-
Quote:
“Police fear grim finds in Jersey cellar after sniffer dog reaction“ |
From The Telegraph (with a picture of Eddie - the McCann case cadaver dog):-
Quote:
“Sniffer dog hunts for more bodies in Jersey children's home” |
From The Guardian:
Quote:
“Six more bodies feared buried in Jersey home” |
Despite the “extremely strong” reactions of these top dogs which had been used in the McCann case and about whom the McCann’s persecutors will claim a 100% success rate, the Haut de La Garenne investigation ended with the following headlines:-
From the Daily Mail:-
Quote:
“£4m Jersey 'House of Horrors' investigation shut down after police chiefs admit NO children were murdered in care home”
They revealed that 'human remains' found at the former home were almost all animal bones and that only three might be human. These dated from between 1470 and 1670 - hundreds of years before the care home opened. |
From the BBC:-
Note that the piece of Victorian coconut shell was the "child's skull" which Eddie the cadaver dog had "an extremely strong reaction to" (see Sky News report above)
Quote:
Mr Warcup said: "Our assessment is that the forensic recoveries do not indicate that there have been murders of children or other persons at Haut de la Garenne. |
Quote:
“The fact that there was a piece of coconut shell where Eddie alerted is irrelevant: it just happened to be there. No body or body parts found does not mean that there never was a body in that place or that the dog failed.“(Anna Esse on MissingMadeleine forum) |
The fact remains that if it weren’t for the discovery and sophisticated forensic testing of these fragments, all we would have had to go on were the “extremely strong” dog alerts upon which the McCann’s persecutors place so much faith!
The media reported that the McCanns were in touch with the lawyers of Eugene Zapata who had been charged with the murder of his wife based upon the evidence of sniffer dogs.
From The Times:-
This case is one in which no body was found. Note that the County Judge refers to research which proved the unreliability of sniffer dogs in his explanation of why dog alerts are not considered admissible evidence in their own right.
Quote:
“Now [The McCanns’] lawyers have requested the case files from the ongoing murder trial of Eugene Zapata in Madison, Wisconsin. His estranged wife, Jeanette, a 37-year-old flight instructor, vanished in October 1976 after taking her children to school. Her body has never been found. Detectives suspected that Mr Zapata killed her but did not have enough evidence to go to court. Mr Zapata, 68, was charged with murder last year after sniffer dogs were brought in. They allegedly detected the scent of human remains in a basement at the former family home. But Dane County Judge Patrick Fiedler ruled that the evidence was inadmissible, saying that the dogs were unreliable. He quoted analysis of the three dogs’ performance record which showed that they were, respectively, incorrect 78 per cent, 71 per cent and 62 per cent of the time. The judge told the court: “The state has failed to convince me that it’s any more reliable than the flip of a coin.” The jury is considering its verdict.
A source close to the McCanns’ legal team said: “The court papers, giving the legal submissions, are on their way to the McCann team for consideration. At the moment there are no formal charges and therefore there is no formal allegation against which the McCann team can work. We are having to work a little bit in the dark. “But given that we understand the central plank of what the police are alleging involves sniffer dogs – albeit British ones, which are said to be particularly good – this is important and relevant, and will be raised with the police and brought to the judge’s attention.” |
Misleading. Despite his wife’s body not being found, Eugene Zapata changed his plea to guilty. This does not change the reason why the alerts of sniffer dogs on their own are not admissible in court as "evidence". The reason they are not is because they have been found to be unreliable 78-62% of the time - too high an error margin upon which to base a charge of murder.
Another case where cadaver dogs have been used recently is that of Jaycee Dugard.
From The Telegraph:-
A spokesman for the case said this:-
Quote:
Sgt Nelson would not say where in the yard the dogs picked up a scent and warned that the indications do not always prove
accurate.
|
There is no doubt that these dogs do sterling work and their efforts are frequently rewarded by the discovery of missing persons or their remains. However, there is good reason why sniffer dog alerts are not admissible as evidence on their own and that is the evidential proof of their unreliability.
The fact is, these dogs are used as a tool to find bodies. All the experts quoted above are at pains to emphasise this. The final proof of the dog's success is the discovery of forensic evidence. Although there was much media speculation and many false stories about the forensic evidence in the Madeleine McCann case, the final and official conclusion was that there was nothing to suggest that Madeleine McCann had died in Praia da Luz or that her parents had harmed her. The fact that stories to the contrary were in circulation at all was a crime in itself.
When searching for human remains, these dogs indicate places where investigators can dig. If the investigators do not find remains in the first place the dog alerts to, they don’t give up, they keep searching and often, they are rewarded with the discovery of the corpse they were looking for. In Praia da Luz, the dogs found no body.
It is a also a fact that cadaver and blood dogs cannot differentiate between the scents of different people. For that, you would need a Scent Article Method dog known as a SAM dog. These are the scent dogs which most of us have in our imaginations. SAM dogs which we see being offered a sniff of the missing person’s clothing and which then track down the person to the exclusion of all other scents. However, there are only a handful of these SAM dogs in the UK and these are hired out at significant cost to police constabularies throughout the country. McCann case dogs, Eddie and Keela are not SAM dogs.
Martin Grime is the handler of the dogs, which were used in the McCann case. The following are extracts from his report in the McCann case regarding whether his dogs’ alerts were proof that Madeleine McCann had died in apartment 5A.
Quote:
|
Sky News reporting on the findings of the National Policing Improvement Agency:-
Quote:
"Police sniffer dogs used to find missing people and dead bodies "urgently" need better training and monitoring, according to an official report. request by Sky News. "There is no consistency in what the dogs can do and how it is done," the report states. "Furthermore, there is no national standard for accrediting dogs and handlers or record keeping of the success rate they achieve."
The report added the dogs, which are trained to detect the smell of dead bodies, have "the potential to cause complications in an inquiry". "There is an urgent need to have national policy on their training, accreditation and deployment," it concluded.
"This resulted in numerous indications that required further investigation to confirm whether they were connected to the investigation, or to previous owners of the furniture."
The Association of Chief Police Officers told Sky News it was consulting individual police forces and hoped to have national training standards for the dogs later this year. " |
There is no doubt that sniffer dogs can be useful in police work, but it is clear that there are issues with regard to the establishment of standards of training, monitoring and accreditation. A dog alert on its own is not considered evidence on its own and the reasons for this are fundamentally clear - EVRD dogs can tell us that they can smell "something", but not "what" or "who" that might be. This is further complicated by the ease of scent transferal and the fact that the scent can linger for years. Therefore, we have Eddie the sniffer dog alerting to ancient bones at Haut de La Garenne and the dogs in the Shannon Matthews case alerting to the "scent of death" on second-hand furniture which had come from a house where someone had died. None of the dog alerts in the Shannon Matthews case turned out to be related to the case.
Additionally, the proven error rate of sniffer dogs is significant and proves that it is not an exact science upon which we can rely to charge anyone with a serious crime.
Finally, it should be remembered that as medical doctors, both of the McCanns are likely to come into contact with corpses.
From The Daily Mail (4th October 2009):
Quote:
"Eddie the sniffer dog - the animal that had supposedly found the 'scent of death' in the Portuguese flat where Madeleine McCann disappeared - no longer had a licence for UK police forensic work when Harper started using him in Jersey. " |