On Q Professional Investigations

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Police say an FBI cadaver dog reacted to the scent of a dead person inside the Kansas City home where a baby girl disappeared nearly three weeks ago, and investigators discovered soil in the backyard that had been “recently disturbed or overturned,” according to a released court document.

The affidavit, released Friday after being filed earlier this week in support of a search warrant targeting the family’s home, also stated that the girl’s mother, Deborah Bradley, “made the statement she did not initially look for her baby behind the house because she `was afraid of what she might find.’”

Those details and others in the affidavit, publicly released for the first time Friday, led to a daylong search Wednesday of the family’s home, where the parents say then-10-month-old Lisa Irwin must have been snatched in the middle of the night as the mother and two other boys slept. Bradley and the baby’s father, Jeremy Irwin, reported the girl missing on Oct. 4 and have denied any role in the disappearance while insisting police have pointed the finger at them.

The affidavit stated that an FBI cadaver dog taken into the house Monday indicated a “positive `hit’ for the scent of a deceased human in an area of the floor of Bradley’s bedroom near the bed.”

The FBI dogs, which often are used at both disaster and crime scenes, are trained “specially to recognize the scent of decaying, decomposing human flesh,” retired FBI special agent Jeff Lanza said Friday.

“That can be the scent of an actual body decomposing, or residual scents after the body is no longer there,” Lanza said.

Dr. Edward David, a deputy chief medical examiner for the state of Maine and co-author of the “Cadaver Dog Handbook,” said that when a body is left in one spot for several hours, cells are left behind. They continue to decompose and create an odor, giving the dog scents to detect.

He said that while trained dogs may fail to detect the smell of human decomposition about 30 percent of the time, they generally don’t alert when nothing is there. One exception is when human waste is present.

Joe Tacopina, a New York lawyer hired by a benefactor he has not identified to represent Bradley and Irwin, said the dog could have detected “a dirty diaper or 10 other non-human-remains items.”

But granting that cadaver dogs are trained chiefly to detect decomposing flesh, “There’s really no scenario where this baby, God forbid she was dead, would have decomposed in that short a period of time,” Tacopina told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Friday night.

The court document also indicated police felt they needed handheld digging tools after an investigator noticed dirt in a garden area behind the home appeared to have been “recently disturbed or overturned.” During Wednesday’s search, investigators could be seen digging behind a shed in the backyard. Among other revelations in the affidavit:

— Officers searched all rooms in the house and the basement after being called to the home Oct. 4. Officers sought evidence but because the parents said the baby had been abducted, the only areas extensively processed for DNA and fingerprints were the baby’s bedroom and possible entry points.

— The parents had told police that three cell phones were missing. The affidavit said a phone had since been found in a desk drawer, but that phone wasn’t one of those reported missing. The missing phones haven’t been found.

— Interviews with people involved in the case revealed “conflicting information for clear direction in the investigation.”

Another document released Friday revealed some of what police recovered from the home during Wednesday’s search: a comforter and blanket, some clothes, rolls of tape and a tape dispenser. The family’s local lawyer, Cynthia Short, did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment on the documents, and police declined to discuss what they found.

But before the affidavit was released, a statement issued by Short’s office insisted the parents had no role in the disappearance and disputed claims that the parents aren’t cooperating with police. The statement said the parents have consented to “unfettered access” to their property and allowed police to take hair and other samples.

“They have taken all calls from detectives, and answered questions posed again and again,” the statement read. “In the initial hours of the investigation, they tolerated accusations, volunteered to take polygraph examinations; continued to work with detectives even after the interviews turned into pointed accusations.”

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Authorities in Kansas City conducted another search Tuesday for a 10-month-old girl who went missing more than a week ago in a suspected kidnapping.

The latest search effort was focused on an abandoned home about a half mile from Lisa Irwin’s home, and included an inspection of a well in the backyard of the property, Kansas City fire officials told CNN.

The search did not yield any evidence, police said. Authorities had previously combed a nearby landfill and creek.

Lisa was last seen around 10:30 p.m. October 3, asleep in her crib, police said. Authorities were called to the home about 4 a.m. October 4.

“It appears the suspect entered/exited through a bedroom window,” authorities said in a statement. “Evidence at the scene leads police to believe the child has been abducted.”

Lisa’s father, Jeremy Irwin, told reporters that he discovered the girl was missing when he got home from work. “The front door was unlocked,” he said last week. “Most of the lights were on in the house, and the window in front was open — all very unusual.”

Three cell phones were also reported missing at the home, according to police Capt. Steve Young.

Police had expressed frustration recently after Lisa’s parents had stopped cooperating with investigators, Young said. However, a family spokeswoman for Deborah Bradley and Jeremy Irwin attributed the frustration to “miscommunication,” and a subsequent meeting with the parents was held Saturday.

Police, who were joined in their search effort by federal authorities last week, have said they have no suspects or solid leads in Lisa’s disappearance.

Lisa is described as 30 inches tall with blue eyes and blond hair, police said. She weighs between 26 and 30 pounds and was last seen wearing purple shorts and a purple shirt with white kittens on it.

The missing girl has two bottom teeth, a small bug bite under her left ear and a “beauty mark” on her right outer thigh. She had a cold with a cough, police said.

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I hesitated to include this article since cell phone pings has always been something of an urban legend among the private investigation and bail enforcement communities. However, I do know for certain that it is absolutely possible and that many fugitives and abducted children have been recovered through the use of cell phone pinging by various State and Federal law enforcement agencies. Do you remember when President Bush went to the Middle East on a surprise visit to the troops not too long ago? The media made a big deal about the fact that the Secret Service made everyone onboard Air Force One, including the President, take the battery out of their cell phones so that the “real bad guys” didn’t know of their location. Voila! (Cell phone pinging has gotten someone’s attention.) I was convinced to include the article because a trusted peer indicated that he too had luck with a locate at one time and anyone interested in locating another person may at least have the need to understand the technology and the process of locating cellular phones.

There are two ways a cellular network provider can locate a phone connected to their network, either through pinging or triangulation. Pinging is a digital process and triangulation is an analog process.

A cell phone “ping” is quite simply the process of determining the location, with reasonable accuracy, of a cell phone at any given point in time by utilizing the phone GPS location aware capabilities, it is very similar to GPS vehicle tracking systems. To “ping” in this context means to send a signal to a particular cell phone and have it respond with the requested data. The term is derived from SONAR and echolocation when a technician would send out a sound wave, or ping, and wait for its return to locate another object. New generation cell phones and mobile service providers are required by federal mandate, via the “E-911” program, to be or become GPS capable so that 911 operators will be able to determine the location of a caller who is making an emergency phone call. When a new digital cell phone is pinged, it determines its latitude and longitude via GPS and sends these coordinates back via the SMS system (the same system used to send text messages). This means that in instances where a fugitive or other missing person has a GPS enabled cell phone (and that the phone has power when being polled, or pinged) that the cell phone can be located within a reasonable geographic area- some say within several feet of the cell phone.

With the older style analog cellular phones and digital mobile phones that are not GPS capable the cellular network provider can determine where the phone is to within a hundred feet or so using “triangulation” because at any one time, the phone is usually able to communicate with more than one of the aerial arrays provided by the phone network. The cell towers are typically 6 to 12 miles apart (less in cities) and a phone is usually within range of at least three of them. By comparing the signal strength and time lag for the phone’s carrier signal to reach at each tower, the network provider can triangulate the phone’s approximate position.

Similar technology is used to track down lost aircraft and yachts through their radio beacons. It’s not identical because most radio beacons use satellites and older cell phones use land-based aerial arrays but the principle is the same.

Not surprisingly, the phone network companies are shy about admitting they have this ability. The triangulation and pinging capability of mobile phone network companies varies according to the age of their equipment. A few can only do it manually with a big drain on skilled manpower. But these days most companies can generate the information automatically, which makes it cheap enough to sell.

Some nefarious service providers have indicated that they have either developed sources within mobile telephone service providers to be able to get this information upon request or have access to the software interfaces to accomplish this on their own (or some variant thereof). I highly suspect that these “cell phone ping service providers” I see advertising from time to time are actually using a good ol’ fashioned pretext to obtain the location of a cell phone rather than using an actual ping. If you do come across a real provider, please let me know.

There you have it- the short course regarding the technical capability of locating cell phones and those who possess them either through pinging or triangulation. Again, I cannot speak to the commercial availability of such a service but like anything else in the investigative business; for now I believe that mobile-phone pinging is largely urban myth among private investigators, fugitive recovery investigators and skip tracers.

New York (CNN) — A man authorities say was part of a Brooklyn husband-and-wife identity theft team has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for the deaths of three identity theft victims, prosecutors said Thursday.

A federal jury in March found Dmitriy Yakovlev, 43, guilty of the deaths and identity thefts of Irina Malezhik and Viktor Alekseyev.

The remains of Malezhik, a Russian-language translator who lived in Brooklyn and worked in the federal courts, were never found; Alekseyev disappeared in December 2005, and his body was found in New Jersey in 2006.

Yakovlev was also found guilty of stealing the identity of a third Brooklyn resident, Michael Klein, who disappeared in November 2003.

In addition to the killings, Yakovlev was also found guilty of bank fraud and bank fraud conspiracy charges in connection with the stealing of his victims’ identities, a press release said.

At sentencing Thursday, U.S. District Judge I. Leo Glasser found Yakovlev was also responsible for Klein’s death.

In addition to the defendant’s 30-year sentence, Glasser ordered the defendant to forfeit $432,050, representing the proceeds of the fraud.

Yakovlev faced a possible sentence of life in prison, but U.S. Attorney Loretta E. Lynch said, “Today’s sentence ensures that this defendant will never again have the opportunity to murder or otherwise victimize innocent victims.”

Yakovlev’s wife, Julie Yakovlev, pleaded guilty in February to identity theft and credit card fraud for her participation in the plot to steal Malezhik’s identity said Robert Nardoza, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office. She was sentenced on August 29 to 36 months in prison.

She was not charged in connection with the slayings.

The couple was originally charged in August 2009 with illegally using the identities of three people between 2003 and 2007.

Yakovlev’s attorneys did not return phone calls Friday seeking comment.

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NamUs.gov exceeds a combined 15,000 missing and unidentified persons cases — user number surpasses 10,000

Last month the number of cases in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System’s (NamUs.gov) two databases reached a combined total of more than 15,000 and the number of registered users has grown to 10,000. To date, NamUs is credited with resolving 120 of the missing and unidentified person cases in its databases. What’s most impressive about these numbers is that this has all happened in a little more than two years.

The exponential growth of NamUs since its launch in January 2009 illustrates the true potential of this system. In 2009, the number of missing person cases in the system doubled, and last year they nearly tripled. This continued growth is critical because with more cases in the system, more cases can be solved and more families can get the resolutions they have been seeking for so long.

NamUs is a national repository for information about missing and unidentified persons. The public may register to search and report information in the missing person database and may search, but not add, information about unidentified persons. Law enforcement officers, coroners, and medical examiners and other professionals may register to search and report information to the missing person database and the unidentified persons database.

More than two-thirds of the 10,000 registered NamUs users are members of the general public. The balance are death investigation professionals such as coroners, medical examiners and law enforcement officers. The missing persons database contains 7,557 entries and the unidentified persons database has 7,938 records.

Two cases illustrate how NamUs can aid investigators

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Ruth ‘Rudy’ Carter, 21, went missing from Loyola University in Louisiana on May 28 and made no contact with anyone until she was discovered by a private investigator. Surveillance video showed her leaving the campus carrying a large box and backpack after returning to her dormitory following a local party.

After she was reported missing, she did not make any attempts to contact family or friends, which was out of character for her, according to her mother. Since she went missing, and her mother Nicci Carter said disappearing without notice was out of character.

Her family put up a $5,000 reward and hired a private investigator. The private investigator located Ms. Carter in a hotel in Mississippi in safe condition. No information was given regarding the reason for her disappearance.

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