This interview discusses crime scenes. There is also brief mention of suicide.

Listener discretion is advised.

This is the Fall Line.

We're back with more of our fascinating interview with Tracy, Trace Sargent, one of the nation's leading K9 search and rescue specialists.

Last time, Trace walked us through her entrance into the world of search and rescue, how she trained her first dog and some of the basics of cadaver dog training and how dogs alert in different situations.

This episode, we pick up on a subject that brought us together in the first place.

What are searches?

It was the disappearance of Brian Worley, who was last seen at his parent's lakefront home in Carrollton, Georgia in 2009 that introduced us to Trace and her team of working dogs.

She worked the scene and eventually took her dogs out onto Lake Carroll to further search for Brian.

In the next clip, we talk more about the ins and outs of water searches and how they differ from land searches.

In our episode covering the disappearance of Brian Worley, you told us about how water searches are conducted.

Can you talk to us about any other cases that have involved water and how that affected how the dogs interacted with scent?

We have worked a number of water cases over the years and there's two that actually three that really stick out for me.

One of them bombed a lake, one of them bombed a river, a large river, a rushing river, and the other one was actually a small creek.

Water itself in the way to best describe how dogs work these different environments is that when we're working on land, where a dog alerts, x marks the spot.

If it sits down where it sits, boring any significant terrain features such as going downhill or uphill or something like that, generally where the dog sits, that's where we need to investigate on land.

It's on water, it's much different. The dogs are still picking up scent and one of the questions I get often, well, can dogs find dead people in water? And the answer is yes.

How do they do that? Go back to what do dogs find? Dogs do not find bombs, bodies, or drugs. They find scent.

Well, when you look at water, the deeper you go, the colder it is. Whereas the surface, and you get to the surface of the water, it gets warmer and then it gets almost hot at the surface itself.

scent itself is pulled up from cold water to warm water. So the scent is coming up out of the water and the dogs pick that up and that's how they're able to find bodies underwater.

Now, the challenge is in a water environment where they alert is not essentially x marks the spot. It's more about an area. So I refer back to the lake.

This happened in North Georgia. It was a fisherman. They saw his boat and even his ball cap on the lake just floating, but he was nowhere to be found.

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