A Killer's Touch. Michael Benson
and johnboats to navigate canals and survey large ponds. Nothing. Police chased down twenty-five leads. The first twenty-four were false alarms.
Then came number twenty-five.
CHAPTER 4
CANINE SEKOU
Tami Treadway was a SCSO Animal Services supervisor, a civilian employee, who trained dogs to conduct search-and-rescue missions. The dogs, once trained, could no longer live in a normal home, and they needed to be placed with a search-and-rescue specialist or a member of law enforcement. She made sure everyone was trained properly—humans and dogs alike—and safeguarded the dogs’ health.
She had her own dog, of course. Canine Sekou was his formal name; he was a golden retriever she’d handled for six years. Sekou was a South African word for “great warrior” or “learned one.”
“He was my husband’s dog,” Treadway later said. “He got him from his nephew in New Orleans, where my husband is from. We weren’t together at the time, although we were both members of the team. He got Sekou to be a search dog, and trained him initially in wilderness searches. We got together when Sekou was young.”
When her husband went to school to become a firefighter and a paramedic, Tami Treadway took over Sekou’s training. The dog was trained in human remains detection, and Treadway had been his handler since.
“He’s still my husband’s dog in the family sense, but I’m the one who has worked him,” she noted.
Treadway and Sekou were a team, she and that dog, two halves of a whole. She could read his body language like a book, and he “told” in a million ways just what he was doing and thinking. He was her partner. They lived together. They slept together.
Golden retrievers made great search dogs, but they were by no means the only breed capable of doing the work. German shepherds, Labs, Australian cattle dogs, and even mixed breeds were also suitable. Aptitude varied more from dog to dog than from breed to breed.
A dog trained in human remains detection followed the scent of decaying human body parts, so Sekou’s searches almost never had a happy ending. Most were just flat-out heartbreaking.
“The one that sticks out in my mind was a case in Tampa, to the north of us. They had some intelligence that a girl might have had something bad happen to her with a guy who lived in the house, and they wanted us to search this empty house. Stripped-to-the-walls empty. It had a concrete floor, and they thought he might have buried her under the concrete.” They never went in with just one dog, always with three or four, because a “dog will be a dog” and they don’t have 100 percent success. All three dogs in this case came up with nothing in the house. In fact, they didn’t even want to be in the house. They kept trying to go outside. So they moved the search to the backyard, and the dogs hit on a spot near a shed. There, about six feet down, they found the girl’s body.
The girl’s name? Treadway didn’t know. She might never know. “We try to be disconnected,” she said.
But there was no way to be disconnected in this case. She lived in North Port and the search for the missing Denise Lee was all over the local news, even before she and Sekou took up the search.
Even if you weren’t watching TV, you knew something was up, with so many roads closed by police. To make it even more personal, Denise was the same age as Treadway’s daughter; and her daughter had two little boys, just like Denise.
The dogs don’t know, of course. They are just happy that they got their toy or their reward for a successful search. Sekou had a clownish personality, and that didn’t change just because he was searching for a cadaver. He never picked up on the grimness of the task.
On January 18, 2008, Treadway and Sekou were called in to assist with the search for Denise Lee. She was given her orders by the sheriff, and they were one of six-to-eight canine teams involved in that day’s desperate activities.
The initial plan was to search a wide variety of areas, in the vicinity of the Lees’ house, around King’s house, and the area around Harold Muxlow’s home.
But Trooper Pope said their best bet was to search in the area of King’s arrest, and that was where Sekou and Treadway were happily doing their thing.
CHAPTER 5
THE DISTURBED EARTH
The search continued into the early-morning hours. Tami Treadway and Sekou strode with purpose into a remote swampy section off an unfinished road. The dog was particularly curious around a large pile of sand, the grains of which resembled those found in the Camaro and on the suspect.
There was an unfinished development off Toledo Blade, and the site was part of that. Construction had stopped in the middle when the economy fell; this part of the road had gone undeveloped. The location was just off Cranberry Boulevard.
The search was interrupted briefly when a fire chief on the scene called it a night and ordered the search resumed in the morning. Many searchers, including Pope, left, but Treadway remained on the scene. She and Sekou returned to the area near the large pile of sand.
Sekou wandered into the wooded area and then came back out. He went back in; this time, Treadway followed him.
“Whatcha got, boy?”
There were pine trees and a gully. At one point, both woman and dog had to go under a fence to proceed. Treadway saw a spot where pine needles had fallen, where perhaps there had been standing water, where the ground was darker. It was a sandy area, and it was a spot where the vegetation differed from the surrounding area. There was clay mixed in with the sand at that spot, indicating the surface was recently tilled.
Plus, it was this spot that had Sekou reacting. A barbed-wire fence bordered the scene at its rear. Without touching anything, Treadway set out to call law enforcement to the scene, which was taped off and slowly excavated.
No, it wasn’t that easy. The first police officer she encountered out on the street paid no mind to her. “He wasn’t interested and left,” Treadway later recalled with frustration in her voice.
Luckily, there were other officers in the area, and eventually the area was sealed off. Looking at the ground at that spot carefully, armed with flashlights, police saw what appeared to be blood in the sand. The large sand pile nearby was missing shovelsful of sand on one side. The sand was very light, the kind Floridians called “sugar sand.” On the ground between the pile and the disturbed earth, there was bloody sand in two dinner plate–sized piles. It hadn’t been caused by someone bleeding over a sandy spot. The sand was on top of the blood, placed to hide the blood. The blood had already been there, pooled in spots.
SCSO crime scene technician Lisa Lanham arrived on the scene. First order of business for her was to preserve the evidence. A tent was erected over the site to accomplish that. Because the ground was wet and sloped, sandbags were piled up on one side of the suspicious location, to help prevent water from seeping in.
All of this was starting to paint a picture. The disturbed earth was now being referred to as the “potential grave site.” Lanham bagged blood, sand, and sandy blood. She noticed that there were some blades of grass in the area that were naturally red. Back at the lab, they would determine what was and wasn’t blood. Excavation would begin the following morning, under natural light. Lanham left the site and reported to another emergency; then she returned to the white tent on the morning of January 19.
CHAPTER 6
JANUARY 19, 2008
On Saturday morning, Jane Kowalski again called the hotline number. The reaction was still lukewarm.
“We probably need to talk to you,” the operator said. “We’ll have someone call you back.”
“Okay, I’ll be home all day,” Jane said.
She never went far from her phone, but again the authorities didn’t call.