How local mantrackers view crime scenes
May 1, 2012, 6:46 PM | Updated: May 2, 2012, 9:51 am
A footprint on a sidewalk. Broken twigs and torn leaves in a forest. Nearly invisible scuffmarks on a linoleum floor. Those clues tell specially-trained investigators a lot about a criminal suspect or missing person.
Police with those skills are called mantrackers, trackers, or sign cutters. They’re rare.
The King County Sheriff’s Department has three deputies who are certified trackers. Those deputies believe more police officers should be trained in the unique tracking method.
When Troy Chaffee and Kathy Decker look at a picture taken on a steep incline of Rattlesnake Mountain, they see something most of us would miss. Instead of mud and a few leaves, they see an “obvious” footprint.
“You can see there’s damage to the twigs, and broken twigs. Flower petals have been knocked off and stepped on,” says Deputy Chaffee.
In the photo to the right, I’ve added black circles to highlight the pink petals that caught their attention.
“You can see how life like they still are,” Deputy Decker says. “They’ve recently been kicked off the plant. They’re not wilted, they haven’t been rained on extensively, they haven’t been dried by the sun.”
That kind of detailed observation helped Chaffee, and another King County Sheriff’s tracker, realize they had a boot print from Peter Keller – the man suspected of murdering his family in North Bend.
Based on the condition of the plants that were disturbed, they knew Keller had been through the area Wednesday night. It was Thursday afternoon when Chaffee found the footprints that eventually led to the discovery of Keller’s bunker where the suspect killed himself.
“To learn to see this evidence, you first have to have an understanding and a belief that it exists, which is fairly simple if you think about it,” says Decker, King County’s first certified tracker. “When we move about our environment, when we walk across the ground surface we always leave evidence of our passage. Even if we’re standing around, not doing anything, there’s still information that we were there for a period of time.”
Mantracking is about training your eye to not only see the evidence, but to interpret it. Evidence can include footprints, scuffs, scrapes, and broken vegetation outdoors or carpet prints, scuff marks, paint scrapes and various clues inside. And that’s just the beginning.
Decker, who has been with the King County Sheriff’s Department for 26 years, first heard about mantracking in the 1990s from Joel Hardin.
The now retired U.S. Border Patrol agent runs a private training and consulting business where he teaches tracking, goes on search-and-rescue missions, and consults with prosecutors and defense lawyers as an expert in criminal cases.
“It involves a tremendous amount of patience and persistence,” Decker says. “This is not something you can learn to do overnight. This takes years and years and years of training with a constant need to update skills.”
Hardin has been somewhat controversial in the legal community.
He says he can tell a person’s country of origin, or race, through tracking. Hardin says, for example, Americans always have somewhere to go in a hurry and tend to take longer strides.
Decker admits when she first started mantracking she didn’t know how to “sell” the skill to her coworkers.
Her track record of successfully processing hundreds of crime scenes speaks for itself.
Chaffee’s first exposure to tracking was watching Decker investigate a mass murder scene in Carnation, Washington on December 24, 2007. The murders took place in the home of Wayne and Judy Anderson. Six people were killed.
“I was amazed at what came out of that. I was floored,” Chaffee says. “For years, even all the years I spent with Army CID (Criminal Investigation Department), I’ve been walking over evidence.”
Chaffee says becoming a tracker has helped him do a more effective job at crime scenes. He is also a bomb technician with the King County Sheriff’s Department and his dog is trained to find firearm evidence.
“When somebody goes out in the woods and takes a gun that they’ve used in a crime and tosses it hoping nobody finds it again, I’ll go out there with my dog and search,” he says. “Tracking narrows it down for me. If I can track someone to the point where they stopped and threw that gun, I now go down from searching five acres, to maybe 30 feet.”
Mantracking is more common in the military and with search and rescue teams than with police departments, in part because of the amount of time training and continuing education takes. Snohomish and Thurston Counties each have one officer certified in tracking.
By LINDA THOMAS