To Amaral:
Admittedly your colleague PJ Inspector Dias wrote these words after you had been removed. But he clearly drew on the same source material as was available to you and said:
Eddie, the dog with an advanced training to detect mortal victims (E.V.R.D.), searches and locates human remains and body fluids, including blood, in any environment or terrain. The initial training of the dog was done with human blood and decaying piglets that were born dead. The importance of this training is that the dog learnt to identify the odour of a decaying body that is not food. This guaranties that the dog ignores the 'bacon sandwich' and the 'kebab', etc. that are always present in the environment. Besides that the dog will not alert to a meal prepared at home or on any other place. For instance, the dog will be efficient on searching a cadaver in café where the clients can be seated eating a bacon sandwich. As a complement of this training, the dog receives an additional training in the USA, in association with the FBI, in which will be used exclusively human remains' (sic) (page 2493 and 2494).
This summarized description raises a question that we would like to see answered: could the dog be 'marking' not the odours emanated from a cadaver, directly or indirectly (by contagious), but from blood in putrefaction'
These dogs are means for obtaining proof but they cannot be used as proof. They must be taken as instruments. Any vestige, even invisible to the eye, recovered with the use of these dogs, has to be subjected to forensic exam on a credited laboratory.
It is the same Martin Grime that, at pages 2271, refers on his report: 'Although it cannot constitute proof admissible to court, it can help on the recovery of intelligence for the investigation of serious crimes'.
In this case the dogs signalled several places. The technicians of the Scientific Police Laboratory recovered those vestiges ' vestiges that that on it's majority were not visible to the eye ' and sent them to the laboratories for the necessary forensic exams, in order to recover and identify the DNA profiles, that might be extracted from them.
From the screening of the videos, referred previously, done when the dogs were working, some doubts arise. We don't want and we can't take the place of the trainer, we only wish to alert, with this paragraph, to some facts, that according to us, need further clarification.
If the dog is trained to react when he detects what he is looking for, why, in most of the cases, we see the dog passing more than once by that place in an uninterested way, until he finally signals the place where he had already passed several times'
On one of the films, it's possible to see that 'Eddie' sniffs Madeleine's cuddle cat, more than once, bites it, throws it into the air and only after the toy is hidden does he 'mark' it (page 2099). Whys didn't he signal it when he sniffs it on the first time'
Apart from all that was said about the dogs, we must also take into attention the results of the forensic analysis that was performed by the experts on the Scientific Police Laboratory on the day immediately after the facts, and already mentioned where no vestige of blood was found.
Inspector Dias clearly understood what he read.
Why didn't you?
