The dogs who bring the fallen home

Booze, a 4-year-old black labrador-bloodhound mix, is playing quietly on the side of the red boat when suddenly he sniffs hard and leans over, clearly frustrated to be above rather than in the water. He paws at the side of the boat and stares down intently.
Marie Ginman, his owner, knows exactly what the dog is doing.
Her husband, Dee Dillman, is working his two dogs from the shore: a pair of Majestic Tree Hound-Catahoula mix brothers, age 9. Coke starts swimming toward the boat, seemingly aiming for the spot that Booze pawed. Rhum stays on solid ground, but indicates he, too, has picked up a scent. He’s not a swimmer.
“Stop the boat,” Ginman tells the driver. “He’s down there. Get the divers.”
They are looking for the body of a man who drowned.
She gets off the boat near the shore with Booze, who swims to the spot that caught his interest just moments before and barks — his signal to tell Ginman he’s found what he’s been seeking. The dog only swims if he detects the scent of a dead body.
Search and rescue teams have been looking fruitlessly in this vast expanse of water for a man who disappeared under the surface a few days ago and never came up. Booze can tell he’s right there, somewhere many feet below the surface.
These are cadaver dogs, trained to find dead bodies. Because of that training, the man’s family will, against what seemed like very long odds, be able to bring his body home.
More than 600,000 people go missing in the United States each year, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons database, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice. Often, officials know what happened to them, like the man who drowned but whose body had not yet been located, or they can figure it out. But people also get lost in nature, get sucked away in hurricanes to be buried in debris, die in wildfires or suffer debilitating accidents. Some just wander off or take their own lives. Others are victims of crime or perpetrators who disappear trying to elude justice. The vast majority of the missing are found, some alive, some dead. There are also about 4,400 unidentified bodies recovered in the U.S. each year.
Such stories have layers of tragedy. And sometimes, solving the where and why of how someone disappeared requires extra help. So cadaver dogs like Booze, Rhum and Coke, trained to seek the dead, join the search for answers.
Ginman, 62, was born in Sweden and met Dillman, who’s 65, while they were on separate travels in South America. Within months, they married and returned to his native Utah. They have a daughter and two sons, all in their 20s now.
Married for 32 years, Dillman and Ginman didn’t set out to find those who are missing. They still have jobs that pay — she works in real estate and has an online business, he has rental properties and is a skilled handyman who maintains them. But they are dog lovers and nearly two decades ago happened onto a striking breed called Louisiana Catahoula leopard dogs. The dogs were both delightful and destructive — an energetic set that needed lots to do or they’d get into major mischief. Ginman and Dillman started looking for hobbies for the dogs and someone said they’d be great at search and rescue.
The idea of helping others while working with their dogs had definite appeal. As a bonus, Dillman and Ginman love being outdoors.
Fast forward years and many search and rescue efforts later, and the two will tell you that the quest has ignited a passion, though some things haven’t changed.
They are still volunteers, devoting time and effort because they want to, without earning a dime for the searches. That’s true of most search and rescue teams that are not attached to a specific police agency as part of their employment. The two still have their other jobs. But they also now understand better what it means to help fill the person-shaped hole that has been carved by tragedy in too many families. They long to find what — or rather who — has been lost.
In what can be a world of pain, this is the bit of comfort the couple can offer. So they do.
Over time, their search and rescue efforts evolved to focus more often on finding bodies, rather than people who are merely lost. That’s a different training process, they said.
Most people know vaguely about cadaver dogs, whether they’re called that or not. But they don’t think too deeply about what that means or what these special dogs can do. Or how they learn to do it.
When a hurricane tore through a community, a roadway collapsed or an apartment tower fell, when an island in Hawaii caught fire, search and rescue dogs became an essential part of the aftermath. Most dogs search for survivors, but at some point there’s also a need for a dog that can locate those who died. Search and rescue becomes a recovery process. That became important again recently for families as first responders accounted for the toll of Hurricane Helene or Milton.
Some rare dogs are cross-trained to find both the living and the dead. Booze, Rhum and Coke are among those, but Ginman said the practice is controversial. Many dog trainers think dogs, to be consistent, need to search either for survivors or search for the dead. Jäger, the youngest of the Dillman/Ginman crew at a year old, will also be cross-trained.
It’s hard to explain how important a cadaver dog’s work is. But families who can’t find a loved one’s body can articulate it with heartbreaking clarity. Utahns like Suzanne Jeppson Tate of Bountiful or Richard and Tamara Davis of Spanish Fork.
Reed Jeppson, Tate’s younger brother, would be 75 had he been allowed to grow up. To his siblings, he’s 15 and cheerfully heading out the door to feed his two dogs while she puts the finishing touches on dinner for the then-boisterous Jeppson family. The date he disappeared was Oct. 11, 1964; he’s perhaps Utah’s oldest active missing person case. Dr. Edward Jeppson and his wife Elizabeth had 13 kids; one of them had died earlier of SIDS. Reed was in the middle of the flock, their ages ranging then from 7 to 29.
Be right back, he told her, then walked out the door and disappeared.
Sixty years later, the family thinks they know what happened to him. After many decades of looking into it, police are convinced he was kidnapped, assaulted and murdered. But his body has never been found, though they’ve searched sometimes desperately through the intervening decades. Some of Reed’s siblings are also gone now, as are his parents. His remaining siblings still long to bring his body home.
For nearly three decades, mystery also shrouded the disappearance of Kiplyn Davis, who was coincidentally also 15 when she went to school and never came home on May 2, 1995. Officials, family and friends know that someone harmed her. One of her classmates was eventually convicted of manslaughter and is in prison. Others faced related crimes like perjury; it’s believed whoever hid her body might have had help.
She has never been found, which has broken the hearts of her mom and dad, Tamara and Richard M. Davis.
They’ve been married 52 years and their other children are middle-aged now. Kiplyn would be 45, had she lived. “In our hearts, we know she’s OK but we need that body back. It feels like she’s not in the right place,” Richard Davis said.
They’ve never turned the porch light off in the 29 years she’s been gone. “It will always stay on until she comes home. We will never give up,” he said.
He wrote a book about Kiplyn called “When an Angel Leaves Your Life,” the proceeds all donated to a scholarship fund for students at Spanish Fork High, where she was enrolled when she disappeared. The foundation named in her honor has funded 38 scholarships so far.
“If they would tell me where she is, I would be their mercy,” Richard Davis said recently of whoever hid her body. “I would seek justice, but also mercy. I would beg on their behalf and the judge would listen to me.”
It deeply hurts her parents that Kiplyn’s body is where someone who hurt her decided her remains should rest. They’ve tried everything they can think of to bring her home, where Richard Davis believes at least her remains would finally be safe.
There are dozens of teams of search and rescue dogs — cadaver dogs also bear that title — in Utah and many more in the West. A few are attached to specific law enforcement units, but most are, like Ginman and Dillman, volunteers. The husband and wife are certified by the National Association for Search and Rescue and also Tri-State-K9 and are sometimes called out to help with their searches. They also help train and certify others for the organizations. These days, they have their own operation, called Dogs at Work Search and Rescue, though they often partner with the other teams and groups.
They won’t go searching without an invitation from law enforcement. If your uncle goes missing, you have to call the police. If you hope that dogs will join the search, you have to convince law enforcement to invite them. But in her years of searching for those who are lost, Ginman said she’s only been unable to at least try to help out about three times. She always responds to official requests.
Often, on weekends and evenings, with or without her husband, she takes her dog out to search. And when they’re not on an official search, they often go out to train. When she’s too busy, he searches or trains without her, too.
They don’t always find the person they’re looking for, but she and her canine partners have found more than a dozen people over the years, and her husband’s close behind.
They sometimes call in other searchers they’ve worked with, too — especially if they know the handler-dog teams have specific helpful skills that could make things easier as they search for a body.
Google Earth — something Dillman uses very well — can create maps to help them consider terrain and figure out who or what will be needed to craft a successful search.
Just as you’d use drugs to train a drug-sniffing dog, to train a dog to find someone who’s dead, you have to have dead human tissue. But where do you get it? Even medical schools, which rely on cadavers to teach about anatomy and disease, use bodies that have been cleaned up. Cadaver dogs need to smell bodies in their natural, sometimes messy state.
Ginman is a petite blonde, so it’s hard to picture the origin story she tells for the human tissue on which she and Dillman train their dogs. “I used to be a very, very heavy person. I lost half my body weight and I had loose skin everywhere. I said, I have not lost all this weight and done all this work” for that.
One plastic surgery at a time she had the extra skin removed from her stomach and her neck and arms. She told her cosmetic surgeon, Dr. Bryan Sonntag, that she was doing search and rescue and wondered if she could have her “leftovers.”
He had no problem with that, he told Deseret News. It was just going to be destroyed as biohazardous waste. Why wouldn’t he want to contribute in this way to helping find someone who was missing and missed?
She couldn’t train her dogs on her own flesh. So Ginman gave it to someone else who was training a cadaver dog. Since then, other people have donated their medical scraps, including a relative who asked his orthopedic surgeon for the bone removed when he got a shiny new artificial knee. Now she gets calls from plastic surgeons, dentists and others who provide teeth, bones, tissue, blood and other salvaged body parts that can be used to train the dogs to find bodies.
“When they have surgeries, they just call and I drive down to Draper or South Jordan or wherever and go pick it up. I have a little cooler.” She transports it home, to a dedicated freezer she and Dillman keep where they can mark the date on the package and store the scraps until they’re ready to hide it for the dogs to find.
If that sounds macabre, it’s not. When it’s time to train, they use the body scraps, in various states of decomposition. They hide the material, which has “ripened” in ammo cases so it won’t stink until it’s out in nature, in every conceivable place a body might be, from deep underwater to high in the hills, buried, out in the open, up in trees. Then they task their dogs with finding it.
For the dogs, it’s great fun. “They absolutely love it.” The gravity of the discoveries are not lost, however, on their human handlers, who recognize the loss of life and that families are hurting. But bringing them home, for Dillman and Ginman, is part of the gift to families that are bereft.
They might put a tummy tuck’s extra flesh in a metal cage and hang it from a tree in some obscure location, or bury decomposing flesh at least 5 feet deep. The ammo boxes seal so well they can drive with them in the car without having their eyes water or their neighbors complain during the decomposition process.
The dogs must be able to find bodies in any physical state, from bones picked clean by wild animals to freshly deceased.
There are other ways to get training material for search and rescue teams, all from legitimate sources with consent. And they sometimes share supplies with other teams. “We are allowed to have body parts for certain rescue training of dogs.”
One Christmas, Dillman gave Ginman a skull. “He’s sweet like that,” she said demurely.
Can you just contact the medical examiner and do the paperwork before you die so your body can be gifted to this task? Maybe. Different states and jurisdictions have different processes and rules, she said, though she hasn’t heard of it happening that way in Utah.
Surgery scraps are taken as is. So are teeth, the blood and tissue included. That’s important.
It’s an interesting fact that a well-trained cadaver dog with an excellent nose can find a body buried 10 feet underground, or pick up scent from deep in the water, as Booze did after the man drowned. Ginman’s old dog, Batman, who died a couple of years ago after an excellent search and rescue career, once helped locate the body of a fugitive who’d frozen to death high in the mountains. Because he was encased in ice, several dogs walked right past him. Batman started making loops, like he was picking up a hint of something. But Ginman actually found the body. She started scanning the area slowly because her dog was clearly detecting something nearby. She spotted a bit of the missing man’s clothing.
The man had been gone a week, but had been dead a few days, at most. There was little odor. If she hadn’t noticed Batman’s behavior, they’d have gone right past, too.
Searches can be very frustrating. A very recent one, for instance, involved a huge area that was hard to reach, because it has many drainage areas. There are pockets in the hillsides and it’s hard to even get into, Ginman said. Plus, there’s no cell service. Dogs are the perfect seekers because they can use their super-sensitive, well-trained noses. But when you find something, you can’t just make a phone call or ask an ATV to pick you up because you’re done searching for the day. It’s arduous.
They’ve investigated when someone got lost in a slot canyon or had an accident. They’ve looked for criminal cases — including cold cases. They were on the search not too long ago for a person missing at least 10 years. It’s very important that you train the dogs for all the different scenarios, they said.
Recently, they found a body in a very mountainous area that teams of human searchers had scoured with no success. The dogs’ noses are extremely sensitive and the creatures can move quickly. Law enforcement knows that.
When the couple first started out, Ginman never looked at the bodies they found. Now she said she can, but she’s far from indifferent to what the bodies represent. The search itself is a way of returning at least a bit of all that’s been taken or lost from loved ones who long to know where someone is.
Often, the searchers know little about the circumstances that led to the search. They may piece the story together later from the news. But complicating the mix of emotions that burble with each search is the need to seem excited for the sake of the dogs, so they’ll keep doing their job. The most heart-breaking discovery must be greeted with happy praise, but it doesn’t quell the ache, Ginman said.
The Tooele County Sheriff’s Office doesn’t have its own search and rescue dog team. When they need dogs, they reach out to a local certified volunteer dog handler group, said Lt. Eli Wayman. They’ve had both successes and failures looking for people, but search dogs are a great way to cover a lot of country quickly, he said.
“They’re definitely an asset for us.”
Others think so, too. In 2023, the West Valley Police Department and West Valley City Honorary Colonels Association named Dillman and his dogs Rhum and Coke, and Ginman and her dog Booze as “citizens of the year,” for work solving a missing person case that was part of a suspected crime. They searched a remote mountainous area in Utah’s west desert, where their dogs signaled a find. They called officials and waited outside the scene as investigators confirmed they’d located human remains in what turned out to be a crime scene.
Suzanne Tate got to see cadaver dogs at work during a search for her brother Reed, though he wasn’t found. It wasn’t too surprising; neither family nor law enforcement have any clue where to search. Instead, they have been eliminating areas where he might have been left, looking at a gully behind a neighborhood church and in the area between where he disappeared and the suspect lived those many years ago. “We really have never known where to look. But every shovel of dirt turned over had us hoping: Will this be the one?” she said.
Tate said watching the dogs work is a “strange and heartbreaking process,” full of hope and, in their case, ultimately deep disappointment.
There’s art and heart in every search, said Ginman. You have to know your dog and his signals really, really well. You have to be willing to hike and exert to cover ground. If the dog finds something, you alert authorities and then keep the dog away so it doesn’t mess up the scene, which is always treated like a crime scene until it’s proven otherwise. You must be willing to stop and play a bit with the dog, so it keeps working.
The need for cadaver searches is sporadic, said Ginman, who notes there are sometimes long stretches without one. But that hasn’t been true recently. They’ve had at least a couple of searches a month and each one can last a day or be much, much longer. They sometimes spend several days a month looking for bodies and even longer than that training the dogs, which is an ongoing process. It seems they’re always out in the field.
“We have trained on water a lot. We also do a lot of training with other teams on finding bodies in water,” Ginman said. Law enforcement usually calls in divers and often doesn’t think about calling in dogs for water work. “The advantage with having a dog before the diver is that then you can tell the diver where to dive. If you have a huge body of water and you can narrow it down, that’s good.”
Searches have taken them all over the western states and as far away as South Dakota. When they certify someone, it’s after training with them a little to be sure the dog’s skill is true and that the dog and handler communicate and work well as a team. “You don’t want to certify a dog and handler who lucked into finding something,” she said.
Their own dogs require a lot of work. As with human professionals, continuing education keeps skills sharp. Their dogs are all, by the way, comfortable flying in helicopters or working around ATVs. Not long ago, in a search covering a huge area of land, ATVs were essential. They just moved very slowly.
Booze, Rhum and Coke are well trained and have been working in real situations for a while. Little Jäger needs training almost daily. He’s a work in progress. “You do a few little things every day and then weekly, you do bigger things with them — bigger trainings, harder problems — and we still train pretty much weekly with our older dogs because it forms a really good relationship with the dogs,” Ginman explained.
When trailing, the dog gets to smell an object that belongs to the missing person and follows the ground scent, but not just footstep to footstep. That’s tracking, like police work. In trailing, dogs use the ground disturbance but also wind-drifted scent. They catch a whiff and off they go. That’s live scent — or at least live when the person went that way. The other is air scent, which can be from whoever’s sought, dead or alive.
When the wind is coming from the south, you might work the dog from the north and grid into the area where you think the person is or choose to have the wind at your back. Because wind changes direction, the contour of the search area matters much more. Being able to adapt and change approach depending on the dog’s behavior, any obstacles that you encounter or clues that you find is vital. That can be footprints, articles of clothes, other things. A good handler uses all their own senses as well as the dog’s.
They once searched an area for several months because it was so big, going out with the dogs several times a week. Finally they found their subject, once snow had melted somewhat.
Usually their searches are overseen directly by law enforcement, which makes sure everything’s handled properly to preserve evidence, but for this particular search, the lead detective wanted them to please keep looking even when he and other officials couldn’t be there all the time. They called him the second they found human remains, then moved out of the area to preserve the scene so the medical examiner and police could do their work.
It’s not easy to train for every version of a death. The couple suspect that what’s most lacking in search and rescue is realistic training for bodies that are either buried or burned. They train for those hard. “I actually put some of the training material in buckets and paint cans and burn it” to different levels, she said. They sometimes burn other things, like a deer bone, to be sure the dogs are not being trained to respond to forestry. They may use decoys, like dead animals.
A cadaver dog is only useful if it finds human remains.
Because those remains may be buried deep when someone doesn’t want them found, they have to bury the training material deep, as well. They also wait for some time after that so the scent of the burial itself and the person who did it is gone, “so the dogs can’t just follow our scent to it, because they are smart. They know somebody put something there, so they follow the scent,” Ginman said.
Jeppson’s family and the Davis clan are still searching. It is a painful, hopeful process that depletes them at times.
Said Tate, “There’s always hope that you can bring them home. It’s just so warming inside to know that they’re near you and that they’re back where they belong. We were never able to do that.”
She wanted her little brother to have a headstone, so they got one. She worried that as they all got older, he’d be forgotten. It won’t happen. On visits to the cemetery, where other loved ones are also buried, the adults tell the children in the family about Reed and the fun, loving man-child he was. He is alive in their memories and they fan that and pass it on.
Not finding him hurts. But the failed searches have also told them where Reed isn’t. So they move on to new locations.
Tate will talk about and pine for Reed until she dies, hoping to keep the search alive. “Every shovel, you hope there’ll be something to take hold of, to give us another hint.” Every time a crime program comes up — Reed’s case was featured on the “Crime Junkies” podcast, for instance — “you hope it’s going to wake up somebody who has a little information. As they get older, maybe their heart is softening,” she said.
“We’re so desperate to get an answer. Anything that might get his name out there. Maybe it will stir somebody’s imagination or desire to tell something that they know.”
After 60 years, she still sounds broken-hearted when she speaks of Reed. It hurts when someone asks why he left. He didn’t. Police are absolutely convinced he was murdered and are sure they know who did it, though the suspect, too, is dead now.
Like the Davises, they’ve also had attention-seekers over the years, including psychics who’ve had no better luck than law enforcement at finding where Reed or Kiplyn now lie.
The Davises never turn away anyone who wants to help. Searches for her body have involved hundreds of people, dogs, machinery, you name it. They are fairly sure they know where she was killed, but where her body was placed is a mystery still. Rumors have been rampant: She’s under the high school, in the mouth of the canyon under concrete, in Utah Lake. The person convicted of manslaughter has not led them to her body.
“He claims he told us where she is, but we didn’t find her there,” said Kiplyn’s mom, Tamara.
Kiplyn’s death has brought the family closer, while breaking all their hearts, Richard Davis said. “We took life for granted. We don’t now. We serve more. So many people have tried to help us in our community and there’s no way to pay them back. I am more spiritually active than I was a long time ago. I treat people nicer, love people more, am a better friend. I want to live like Kiplyn, a friend to everybody.”
Searches are hard for Ginman and Dillman, too. They say they’re glad they are in it together so they can comfort each other. When they’re looking for someone the age of their children, it’s really poignant. It’s hard not to project their kids’ faces and hoped-for futures on those who’ve been lost. Ginman’s noticeably emotional as she recounts some of the stories of people they’ve recovered. A child’s death is always hard. And deaths because of a crime seem like such a waste — the murder of not just a human, but of hope and potential.
Some missing people are never found. Ginman and Dillman understand that. That doesn’t keep them from looking.
One wonders: Why would they get up before dawn and drive 100 miles to search in hot or freezing temperatures or rainstorms?
“Sometimes I don’t actually know myself,” Ginman said. Like her dogs, she said she is a hunter to her soul, and this is a way to contribute that is really, really hard but also very meaningful. She shrugs. “We don’t want to leave something unsolved. We keep going.”
They charge their cellphones on the drive home from each search, then throw their uniforms and dog vests in the laundry, replace GPS batteries, charge up the dogs’ GPS tracking collars and radios and restock fresh water. They gather all the gear that isn’t already in their trucks, where the dog kennels stay. They can be out the door in 10 minutes.
It won’t be long before they get a text or urgent phone call that their combined human and canine skills are needed.
They’re ready.