by Jim Gorant
The brown dog burrows as far into the corner of her pen as she can—as if she is literally trying to become Sussex 2602—and attempting to pretend nothing else around her really exists.
Things are worse at the Surry County shelter. Some of the dogs originally placed there are moving, but not all of them. Thirteen dogs have started out in the small beige building, but only eleven are leaving. Two dogs die during the three months they are held there. The deaths are somewhat mysterious. No official word of the incidents or explanation for them is ever released. Rumors circulate.
The kennels are secured with the kind of U-shaped latches that lift to open. One theory has it that a few of the dogs figured out how to open the latches and, when no one was around, they let themselves out and fought. Another posits that one dog accidently released the latch while jumping in its cage; the gate swung open and the dog attacked another dog that had been tethered to the wall while its pen was being cleaned, and in the aftermath both dogs—the injured and the attacker—were put down. Some worry that something far worse is going on: That somehow, someone is getting into the shelter and forcing the dogs to fight.
The truth remains unknown but the reality is certain—after months of confinement eleven dogs find themselves inside a truck heading for Hanover County Animal Shelter. Many stand and bark at the beginning, but as the truck turns onto the highway, the straight-line ride and steady hum eventually calm them. They settle into their little pens and blink into the afternoon light.
When the truck stops, they can sense something new and different. It smells different; it sounds different. Different could be bad. So many painful and scary things have happened to them when they’ve been taken from a familiar place to someplace new. But after so many weeks in Surry County, staring at the same walls, bouncing off the same wire fencing, watching the clouds through the same tiny windows, different is exciting.
The truck opens and light pours in. One by one the dogs are carried into a new building, this one bigger and brighter. There are fifty kennels on two levels. Some hold new, different dogs; dogs that have never even seen the clearing or black sheds or Moonlight Road. There are still fans spinning overhead and small windows, but there are now soft, sturdy beds in the kennels. A washer and dryer make interesting noises all day and people come and go through the back section of the building regularly. More people parade through the front, the adoption area, and the dogs can hear those people talking and cooing and whistling.
There is still barking, incessant barking, and long hours with nothing to do, but at least there are new things to look at and listen to. Little curiosities and mysteries to explore that provide the slightest bit of stimulation.
These things help because even the most stable dogs in the group are growing less and less sure of themselves every day. All their instincts and desires are blunted by a four-by-six chain-link enclosure. They don’t hunt, they don’t chase, they don’t explore or mate. They have no pack and what they thought were dens have become nothing but traps. They are no longer kinetic, but each is simply potential energy now, a possibility, a hope, a dog waiting to happen.
Many are still afraid every time the people come to open their gates. But some want to be a part of whatever team those people are leading, and their excitement gets the better of their anxiety, allowing them to wag and lick and follow along. Others can not deal; they whine and bark or crouch and crawl across the room when they are taken out. These are the ones that hide in the backs of their pens and flatten to the ground when anyone comes near.
For the strong ones, those that can muster the courage to walk across the shelter and out the back door, there is great reward. These dogs are taken to a large fenced-in area. The ground is covered with concrete, but they can see and smell trees and grass and birds and squirrels. The people who take them out will drop the leash and suddenly these dogs are free in a space big enough to run and jump. Some of them stand bewildered, unsure what to do; some just amble around, sniffing and gazing; but a few take off. They bolt in one direction, skid to a stop, nails scraping against the concrete, then sprint back across the space. Their muscles pump and burn, their hearts pound, their ears fly back in the wind.
14
AS MELINDA MERCK SURVEYED the beer options at the Capital Ale House, the prevailing mood around her was almost giddy. With her were Mike Gill, Jim Knorr, and Bill Brinkman, sipping his Miller Lite from a mug. They were part of a group of about ten, which included various federal agents and some people from the U.S. attorney’s office.
It had been a big week for the good guys. On June 28 Tony Taylor officially flipped. He came into the office and told everything. He had dates, places, names of dogs, and details of specific fights, including amounts of money bet and results. Best of all, Taylor’s information corroborated what the investigation’s other sources had said. And he gave them the name of Oscar Allen, a retired New York City transit worker known as Virginia O. Allen had been fighting dogs up and down the East Coast for years and had served as an advisor to the Bad Newz operation. The authorities quickly moved in on Allen, who agreed to cooperate with the investigation.
The team followed that up with a July 2 forfeiture filing that would allow the federal government to officially take ownership of the dogs. Knorr had been right. The Animal Welfare Act did allow such a transfer and one of the attorneys had also found a provision that allowed the feds to pay for the upkeep out of a fund that held the auction proceeds of all the items seized in federal cases—all the houses, cars, boats, jewelry, etc. taken from drug dealers and corporate cheaters and others who run afoul of the law—so it wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime.
Now it was July 5, the eve of the second federal search. Merck had come in that morning from Atlanta to attend the final planning meeting. From the start she had been blown away, if not nearly overwhelmed, by the level of detail in the planning. Now she had a front-row seat for the final ministrations.
She was also impressed by Gill. For every move he made he considered all the possible outcomes and potential countermoves a defense attorney might attempt. As the case built, Merck could see Gill slowly but surely backing the suspects into a corner. With each search, with each expert, the prospect of evading the charges became a lesser possibility. He wasn’t one step ahead, but three or four.
She thought she’d been keeping up with his thinking, but he had a surprise for her, too. When the entire team met face-to-face in a conference room at Gill’s Richmond office, Merck took a seat in the middle of the table and got ready to listen, thinking she was just one more member of the team. But when the meeting began, Gill looked directly at her and said, “Okay, tell us how you want this to go.” For the first time, Merck realized that she was not simply riding along in an advisory role; she was in charge. Suddenly, she felt a lot of pressure.
The next morning Merck was up at 5:00 A.M. for the ride down to Vick’s place. She hopped in Jim Knorr’s car and they spent the two-hour drive talking about the case, telling dog stories and gossiping. When they reached Surry County the scene was almost jokingly familiar for Jim Knorr. The team assembled in the boat launch parking lot. They made the twisting drive down Moonlight Road. The SWAT team busted down the door and once again secured an empty house.
The heat was similar, too. By 7:00 A.M. the site had been fully secured, and it was already 75 degrees. At least it was dry, making the ground harder but lighter. The procedure was much different this time. For starters, the USDA’s emergency response team, which had just received forensics training, would do the digging. There would also be a few FBI agents along to help out.
Before digging, the agents tested the ground by inserting metal rods into the dirt. Ground that has been dug up will not be compacted in the same way as undisturbed soil. Even years later, the area will be softer. Using the probes, the agents were able to map out not only the area they’d dug up earlier but the full area of the original burial site.
Once that was done a few of the FBI agents took the
probes off to check other parts of the property for additional burial sites. Meanwhile the USDA team began removing the dirt from the dig site one six-inch layer at a time. They were looking for more than just dogs. Merck instructed them to keep an eye out for footprints, which could be used for identification, and shovel marks from earlier digs, which often helped define the boundaries of the excavation area.
On top of that, they carefully preserved any plant life, since the depth of the roots could give clues about how long it had been since the ground was disturbed. And each shovelful went through a sifter to separate out bone fragments, bullet casings, and bugs. Not just any bugs, but developing flies. The various stages—larval, maggot, adult flies—grow at prescribed rates, so they too can be used to establish a timeline.
Barely a half hour after they had begun to dig, one of the agents checked his BlackBerry and found an e-mail from a friend: “I can see you on TV.” A helicopter had been passing overhead, but Merck and the others had hoped that the trees provided enough cover to hide them. Now, they stopped work for a few minutes to construct a portable canopy over the dig site to give themselves some privacy. Knorr later learned that several media outlets had paid off the neighbors to call as soon as they heard or saw anything going on at the house.
Under the canopy, progress was slow, a situation made worse by the heat, which climbed to 91 degrees with 88 percent humidity. The temperature contributed to another disturbing factor: Long before the excavation reached the depth of the dogs the agents were hit with an even more powerful odor than they had endured last time out. Decomposition begins the moment any animal dies, but when it is encased in the ground the process slows considerably. The previous dig had exposed the dogs to the air and that had accelerated the decay. Jim Knorr tried not to think about what the bodies would look like once they were uncovered.
Merck was used to the smell and unbothered, but as the morning wore on she fielded more and more requests for nose plugs. As lunchtime came and went Merck noticed that no one had much appetite, but the state police had brought coolers full of water and everyone drank to fight the heat. Knorr once again kept his distance, pacing the grounds and talking on his cell phone. There was plenty going on away from the main dig.
He escorted Merck around the Bad Newz compound. She noticed things others had not. The original investigation had found canine blood in and around the pit on the second floor of the biggest shed, but Merck noticed that there were little starbursts of blood on the wall next to the stairs, right about the height a dog’s head would pass if it was being carried down the stairs and it sneezed or coughed up a gob of blood.
She also oversaw some digging that was going on at two other areas away from the main site. The FBI agents had found a few promising spots with their metal rods and they had been working those patches of ground. They had found several bullet casings, bone fragments, and a canine skull with what appeared to be a bullet hole in it, but no full bodies. Eventually, with Merck’s okay, they put aside the probes and shovels and explored using a backhoe.
Finally, the bodies emerged from the dirt. They looked far different than they had the first time. There was significant decomposition. So much that in some places it was hard to tell which parts went with which dogs. Merck helped unravel the mysteries, gridding out the site and making a sketch to show how the dogs were oriented.
The bodies, or what was left of them, were very fragile and the team feared that they would come apart if they tried to lift them out of the ground. Merck showed the others how to make slings out of plastic bags, then to slide them under each dog and safely lift it out.
One by one the eight dogs they had found a month earlier were slipped inside two plastic bags each, loaded into large white coolers that were packed with ice, and slid onto a rental truck. But there was one addition. This time the more careful approach had led to a wider, deeper dig that revealed an additional chamber off one of the graves that had gone undetected previously. In it lay one more body. It was a small red dog.
On Monday morning, Melinda Merck prepared for work. Fair-skinned with light blue eyes and an aquiline nose, Merck pulled her wavy hair back, removed her silver pinky ring, and slipped into a set of scrubs. She snapped on the rubber gloves and pulled on a cap so she would know for sure that she hadn’t done anything to contaminate the evidence.
She had long ago learned to put aside her sentimentality and compassion so that she could focus on the science of her job. She was helped by the knowledge that what she discovered would help deliver justice to the people who were cruel to animals and save other creatures from the same fate.
After the raid, the dead dogs that were recovered had been loaded into the van, and two USDA agents drove them to Merck’s offices in Atlanta, so they were never out of direct custody. By the time they completed the fourteen-hour trek, Merck was there in her lab waiting for them.
The Vick dogs presented a daunting challenge. Ideally, she would have been on scene at the original raid to document everything from where each dog was kept to the condition of the water in the bowls to the temperature. Had she been present then, she would have carefully sketched, photographed, and charted the entire scene. She would have combed the fur for evidence and examined the bodies inside and out for damage. Instead, she was faced with one dog that had never been uncovered and eight that had already been dug up once, which disturbed the purity of the site and the bodies, and accelerated the decomposition process.
Her initial examination of the bodies confirmed what she had expected to be the case: only three dogs had enough flesh remaining to perform an external examination. For the rest she could do only a skeletal analysis. A dog has 321 bones in its body, and each bone would need to be labeled, catalogued, and studied under a microscope, a process that would likely take weeks. Time was running short.
NFL training camps were only a few weeks away. In private meetings Vick had assured league commissioner Roger Goodell and Falcons owner Arthur Blank that he had not been involved in whatever was going on at the house. They had taken him at his word, but for the rest of the world there was an urgency to know if Vick would be there when the season began. For some Falcons fans it was unthinkable that he would not be, but for animal lovers and those who suspected the worst, the idea of Michael Vick out on the field being cheered by thousands of people while collecting millions of dollars was repulsive.
Merck was aware of the controversy, so she did the only thing she could. One by one, she lowered each carcass into a vat of hot water that reduced it to nothing more than a pile of bones.
15
AS JULY STRETCHED ON and the investigation moved toward its pinnacle, Jim Knorr and Bill Brinkman realized they had a dog problem. Or was it a man problem? Brownie continued to be a thorn in Knorr’s side. He called too much; he didn’t call at all. He showed up where he wasn’t supposed to; he disappeared. Brinkman and Knorr were constantly dealing with Brownie. Driving him back to Virginia Beach, moving him from one hotel to another, scraping together money out of their own pockets to keep him full of McDonald’s and Wendy’s. Now, as things were getting serious, Knorr planned to send Brownie to a safe house in Florida.
The thought of a trip to the Sunshine State didn’t do much for Brownie. He remained irascible. He did what he wanted, which kept Knorr up at night as much as the phone calls. Among the things Brownie wanted was his pooch. One of the dogs in Vick’s compound, a giant male presa canario, belonged to him, but it had been taken away with the rest. Knorr thought if he could get the man’s dog back, maybe Brownie would be so grateful that he’d be more cooperative.
Finally, after months of trying to spring the dog through legal channels, Brinkman and Knorr took matters into their own hands. They finagled some paperwork and showed up at the shelter where the dog was being kept, flashed their badges and the letter, and walked out with the dog. Problem solved. At least for one dog.
The forty-nine pit bulls that were now the property of the federal government were a diffe
rent story. The forfeiture statutes that had been used to seize the dogs gave the court a role in deciding what would become of them. Gill and the other attorneys knew that judges preferred to receive some sort of guidance or suggestion about how to rule when odd things like this popped up. The natural inclination is to look at what has been done in the past and use that as a precedent, but since dogs from fight busts are usually put down, that was a bleak alternative.
To the surprise of many, this was exactly the course prescribed by some of the loudest voices in animal welfare. Wayne Pacelle, the president and chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, told the New York Times he thought the dogs would and should be destroyed. “Officials from our organization have examined some of these dogs and, generally speaking, they are some of the most aggressively trained pit bulls in the country. Hundreds of thousands of less-violent pit bulls, who are better candidates to be rehabilitated, are being put down. The fate of these dogs will be up to the government, but we have recommended to them, and believe they will eventually be put down.”
PETA took an equally dim view. “These dogs are a ticking time bomb,” a spokesperson for the organization said. “Rehabilitating fighting dogs is not in the cards. It’s widely accepted that euthanasia is the most humane thing for them.”
The assistant district attorneys in the office of the Eastern District of Virginia weren’t sure they agreed. Gill brought it up one day in a conversation with Merck and she got the sense that he was not terribly concerned about what had been done in the past or what outside forces thought should happen. He seemed to feel that a lot of those experts were more interested in getting their names in front of the public to spur donations than they were in the welfare of the dogs.
