Eddie's trip to AmericaSpecialized K-9 to Aid in Ga. Search todaysthv.com Monika Rued
Updated: 14 September 2007
A dog trained to detect tiny bits of blood evidence has been brought to Georgia from the UK to help search for a missing woman.
The FBI, the GBI and Walker County, Georgia, Sheriff's investigators have some new and potentially powerful help in solving the seemingly unsolvable disappearance of Theresa Parker, the Walker County 911 dispatcher. A world-renowned police dog and his handler from England just arrived in Georgia.
The FBI considers them -- Martin Grime and his 7-year-old, English Springer Spaniel, Eddie -- two of the best in the law enforcement specialty of canine forensics, able to find evidence everyone else missed.
"Yes, hopefully we will find Theresa Parker. Yes, we will hopefully find evidence," Grime said at an afternoon news conference with Sheriff Steve Wilson in the Walker County Seat of Lafayette on Thursday afternoon.
Eddie's skill and training enable him to find microscopic evidence that others cannot, even when the evidence is hidden, or even when someone has tried to wash it away.
"A small amount of forensic evidence," for example, "may be under a board in a house, or under a large boulder, and things like that, where forensic evidence can't normally be recovered from. We'll use the dogs to try and locate it for us," Grime said.
Grime and Eddie are in high demand, world wide.
Getting them to Walker County from England to help solve Theresa Parker's disappearance is an indication of how high a priority her case is for the FBI, according to one FBI agent close to the case.
Eddie is a veteran of more than 200 homicide cases, working with Grime, who has 30 years' of law enforcement and military experience in conducting criminal investigations.
No one is officially calling Theresa Parker's case a homicide.
Parker disappeared nearly six months ago, on March 21.
Investigators in Walker County consider Parker's estranged husband, Sam Parker, to be a person of interest in her disappearance. So that's one line of inquiry they will pursue using Eddie's unique technique.
"It focuses on a particular line of inquiry so that we can either say, yes, we found Theresa and we found the guy who's done it or the lady that's done it, or, no," Grime said.
Earlier this year, in Portugal, for example, Martin Grime and Eddie were working the case of the missing 4-year-old English girl, Madeleine McCann.
And it was Eddie that detected what may have been Madeleine's blood in her parents' rental car.
That's one of the reasons investigators now consider Madeleine's parents to be suspects.
Grimes said Eddie is "no miracle machine," but the FBI, GBI and Walker County investigators are clearly hoping the team from England can help crack their case, a case that has confounded everyone.
This past Sunday, Theresa Parker's family and friends marked her 42nd birthday with prayers, saying they are still confident that investigators are doing all they can.
"We still have not given up hope," Sheriff Wilson said Thursday, "and we're still optimistic that she will be found, or that we can find the reason why she disappeared."
Sheriff Wilson is not saying how long Martin Grime and Eddie will be in Walker County, but Grime had already been consulting with investigators, long distance, from his home in the UK, before he arrived in Walker County, and will continue to do so after he returns home.
