A knack for finding the dead

Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in The Guardian. Used with ­permission.

When Gene and Sandy Ralston returned to their truck after a day on the Beardsley reservoir in Northern California in March 2002, they discovered several handwritten notes taped to the doors and windscreen: "Call Lieutenant Lunney as soon as you get back to town. It's urgent."

The Ralstons, a married couple from rural Idaho, had been scientists until the late 1980s, when they began helping out on local search-and-rescue missions. By the winter of 2002, they had volunteered on more than a dozen searches for victims of drowning across the U.S. and had developed an uncanny ability to find bodies.

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As the notes instructed, the Ralstons drove to the nearby town of Sonora to meet Lunney. The next morning, the Ralstons were briefed by FBI agents on a series of kidnappings for ransom that had turned into murders. The families of four victims of abduction had wired more than $1.2 million between them to an account in New York, which then transferred the money to a bank in Dubai. But the bodies of the victims were now thought to be lying at the bottom of a reservoir just east of Yosemite National Park.

To get clear images using their specialized sonar system, Sandy pilots their boat over the area they are searching at no more than 2.5 mph, slower than walking on flat ground. The Ralstons call it "mowing the lawn" — towing their sonar equipment back and forth through the water, piloting their boat in slow, overlapping strips.

This was the Ralstons' first homicide case. Typically, a corpse descends through water with its chest facing the surface. When the feet hit the bottom, the knees buckle and the body spills onto its back, arms outstretched. That is the shape the Ralstons usually look for with their sonar. They knew a murder victim would look different, though. "We call it 'packaged' — tied up and weighted," Gene said.

It took them two weeks to find the four murder victims, who were, as suspected, lying at the bottom of the New Melones reservoir. In order to retrieve the bodies, the FBI had to fly in a small, unmanned submarine from the headquarters of its dive team in New York. When the bodies surfaced, agents could see that they had been bound to gym weights with cable ties.

An FBI agent and scuba diver named Tony Tindal was part of the team that met each of the bodies as the sub returned from the bottom. "I felt like someone needed to be with them," Tindal said. "They're brought up from their cold, chilly graves, all the way up to the surface, and now they're ready to tell their story."

That story revealed details about the awful way these people died and also hard evidence that directly implicated the perpetrators. Among other things, the same type of cable ties used to bind the victims' bodies to the weights were found at the home of one of the suspects. Six people were eventually sentenced for their participation in the plot, which included another kidnapping and murder in the autumn of 2001, and two of them are currently on death row.

The Ralstons are now in their 70s and spend most of every year traveling to search sites or on the water, looking for bodies. They have clocked more than 31,000 miles on their motor home in a single year. In almost two decades of searching, they have found 120 victims of drowning in lakes and rivers across the U.S. and Canada. They are considered among the best underwater search-and-recovery specialists in North America and have worked for agencies from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to NASA (hunting for the wreckage of the space shuttle Columbia).

When the Ralstons' home phone rings with a search request, though, it is usually a family member of a missing person — someone reaching out after an official search has been called off. By the time the Ralstons arrive at the scene of a disappearance, no one expects the missing person to be found alive. What Gene and Sandy offer is not the hope of rescue, but the solace of finality. They have spent years crisscrossing North America in the service of grief.

Drowning is surprisingly silent and swift. People fighting to avoid suffocating in water quickly exhibit what is known as the "instinctive drowning response," an involuntary physiological reaction that renders them unable to wave or yell for help. Every part of the bodily system is recruited for a single purpose: to keep the mouth above water. This effort can only be sustained for somewhere between 20 and 60 seconds before a person slips below the surface.

The bodies of the drowned sometimes surface on their own, but this depends on the qualities of the water. The putrefaction of flesh produces gases, primarily in the chest and gut, that inflate a corpse like a balloon. In warm, shallow water, decomposition works quickly, surfacing a corpse within two or three days. But cold water slows decay, and people who drown in deep lakes, 100 feet or below, may never surface. The weight of the water pins down their bodies.

There are scuba divers and underwater cameras, dogs trained to detect the gases released by a body underwater — but none of these are good at searching large areas or probing deep water, where suspended sediment makes it difficult to see with artificial light. The farthest down the Ralstons have found a body, though, is 570 feet — a 33-year-old man on the floor of François Lake in British Columbia. He had been missing for 29 years.

Most local authorities will only spend a week or two searching for a drowning victim. Then it is up to the family of the missing person. Some families spend thousands of dollars a day on commercial diving services. Others drag the bottoms of lakes with grappling hooks. Sometimes they chance upon the victim; often they work until their resources and spirits are spent.

Gene and Sandy are anomalies in the world of search and rescue. They pursue this work full-time, but they work for free, only charging travel expenses. A search can go for 10 hours a day and last for weeks. Successful underwater searches also require investigative acumen, and the Ralstons have become seasoned detectives. They are adept at interviewing witnesses and pinpointing search areas using whatever scant evidence is available.

Knowing where someone goes under, what search-and-rescue teams call the "point of last seen," is often crucial. The rule of thumb, the Ralstons said, is that a person will sink to the bottom of a lake within a radius equal to the depth of the water. Occasionally, the Ralstons feel as if they are operating under divine guidance. There have been several times when they lowered their equipment almost directly on top of a body. It happened twice in a single day in 2001, on Hayden Lake in Idaho, where they found the bodies of two men: one who had drowned 19 months earlier and one who had drowned the previous week.

"It was like picking a page out of a book somewhere and that page having the quote that you want," Gene said. Once, on a river in northern Canada, he woke at dawn, raised the curtain on their motor home window and spotted the body of a 19-year-old boy in a shallow only 15 feet from shore. "That blew our minds," he said.

The greatest number of bodies they have found in a single day is four, in Idaho's American Falls Lake, in August 2010. A man had got into trouble while swimming, and so someone jumped in the water to help. After the second man began to struggle, a third followed, and when he too ended up in distress, in jumped a fourth. All of them drowned. The only body the Ralstons ever found wearing a life jacket was that of a man trying to ride his modified motorcycle at night across Canyon Ferry Lake in Montana. The bike stalled halfway across and the rider became tangled. He sank with his bike.

For the families and friends of the drowned, coping with the loss of a loved one who has drowned without a trace is a special kind of pain. "The human brain can't let go unless there is evidence of transformation from life to death," says Pauline Boss, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota and a family therapist, who has spent the last half-century researching what it means to reunite families with the bodies of the deceased. Some people report catching glimpses of their lost loved ones in everyday situations — in the aisles of the supermarket, say — for years after they go missing. "You need to see that the person is no longer breathing," Boss said. "Or you need to see the bones."

To add to the cruelties of what Boss calls "ambiguous loss," the law, too, struggles to recognize death in the absence of a body. Courts, banks, insurance companies, and creditors need the corpse as proof. "That [situation] freezes the person who is missing, it freezes all of their assets, and it freezes all of their loved ones or anybody else who's depending upon them," says Robert Jarvis, a law professor at the Shepard Broad College of Law in Florida.

In December 2006, the Ralstons went looking for the body of a young man named Shane Pierce who had drowned in a boating accident on a Kentucky lake that September. Without a body, Shane's family hadn't been able to get a death certificate, and without a death certificate, they had to continue making the payments for their son's truck and for the mortgage on his house. "It almost sunk us," Shane's father, Roger Pierce, told me. The family also couldn't sell the boat their son was helming the day he drowned, because it was registered in his name.

"Man, that was tough," Roger said. "The boat stood out here in my driveway, and every time I looked at it, I'd think of Shane." At least five different search-and-rescue groups had tried to find Shane's body before the Ralstons showed up. "Gene and Sandy started their search and found Shane in six minutes," Pierce said. "If I hadn't hooked up with Gene and Sandy, I don't know what would have happened."

The Ralstons helped Gina Hoogendoorn find her father, Rick Herren, missing for 15 years. They found his body on the bottom of Wyoming's Flaming Gorge reservoir in 2012. Hoogendoorn was 18 when her father disappeared and local officials told her family they would have to get used to the idea of never finding him. She described the feeling of not knowing where her father was, of having nowhere to go to visit and remember him, as "an unbelievable hurt."

It wasn't until she was 33, when she happened to catch a TV show about a drowning victim whose body was recovered years after they went missing, that Hoogendoorn realized she could still try to find her father's body. She looked online and found the Ralstons. She called and described her story to Gene. "And he said, 'Yep. We'll be down. We'll be down at the end of the week.'"

Once the Ralstons were out on the reservoir it took them eight minutes to locate the body. Divers with the sheriff's office did the recovery a month later. "They brought him off the boat and set him down, and me and my brother and my mom just loved on him," Hoogendoorn said. The water was deep and cold, so his body was relatively well preserved. "He still had form to him and so I could feel his chest, and it felt like his chest," Hoogendoorn went on. "His shoulder felt like a shoulder, and it was very, very surreal to be able to hug him again. It was the most happy, saddest day of my life. We got to find him, then I had to say goodbye again."