Everything looked perfect and orderly at the neat, raised-level, shingle-sided ranch house in Monroe, Connecticut. It had a manicured lawn, a round swimming pool in the backyard, and a new patio next to the pool. Robin Oppel, twenty-eight, had disappeared. Her husband, Kent Oppel, a twenty-nine-year-old self-employed businessman, had given the police permission to search the premises without a warrant.
Robin's car had been found abandoned twenty-five miles away nearly a month after she disappeared. Inside the car was a broken-off portion of an owl key ring but no sign of Robin. She was seen last on September 19, 1980. At first Andy thought he might start one of his bloodhounds to see if the dog, even after all that time, could pick up a trail and give them a direction of travel. That was a stretch, and he knew it. By then, detectives working the case had a hypothesis.
Rufus had been working as a body dog for three years when he and Andy arrived at the Monroe house to search. While Kent Oppel watched, Andy started Rufus on the front lawn, then down the side of the house and to the rear of the lawn. Rufus walked along the fence toward the swimming pool, stuck his nose in the dirt next to the newly laid concrete patio, and started digging. That was it. Andy walked him away and shrugged casually. He could hear Oppel telling bystanders that the dog obviously hadn't found a thing.
For long terrifying minutes, Andy thought perhaps Rufus had screwed up. Investigators jackhammered the concrete next to where Rufus had indicated, dug down a foot, and ran into electrical wires. Andy brought the dog's nose back in. Rufus, Andy recalled, started “digging to China.” Investigators kept shoveling. Just a little farther down, they saw a small object in the hole: the other half of the plastic owl key ring found in Robin's abandoned car. They kept going. Robin was four and a half feet down, under the concrete, beneath a layer of lime powder.
Because the body dog represented a new and fascinating canine career, sometimes journalists got the terminology wrong. Rufus, one newspaper reporter noted with great sincerity and inaccuracy, was “one of eight ‘dead dogs' in the country; the only one in New England.” Such reports of Rufus's death were premature. He recovered twenty-six bodies in his career.
What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs
