Cadaver dogs & baby Chance investigation; Exclusive look at training

PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla.- A new arrest report details the tragic final hours of baby Chance Walsh’s life.

Authorities revealed Chance gasped for breath for hours after his father beat him, and eventually choked on a diaper wipe.

Chance’s parents, Kristen Bury and Joseph Walsh, are locked up in Sarasota County Jail, facing murder charges. The arrest report reveals, the couple buried their child’s body days after he died.

Cadaver dogs were used to sniff out clues near the couple’s North Port home, allowing authorities to obtain a warrant to search the house.

Peace River K9 Search and Rescue (PRSAR), a non-profit out of Charlotte County, allowed WINK News to take an inside look at cadaver dog training, telling us a dog’s nose is “about 300,000 times better than the human nose.”

A cadaver dog is a dog trained to pick up the scent of human remains. Trainers mix cadavers in different materials, like hot concrete, to help train their noses. A dog will lay down when he finds the cadaver.

In Chance’s case, cadaver dogs showed deputies someone had died in Walsh and Bury’s home, despite the investigation taking place many days later.

“We have worked graves almost up to 200 years old,” said Mike Hadsell, with PRSAR. “If it was there, they try to clean it up with Clorox, paint over it, the dogs will still find it. It’s very hard to get rid of the odor and destroy it completely.”

The dogs are even trained on the water. We watched as one dog found remains 12 inches under water. Another was taken out on a boat, leading us to the exact area of a cadaver.

“There’s a yellow marker in the water, and that’s where the source has been sunk. What the dog is doing, is finding the odor, once it breaks on the surface. When she gets close, she starts getting very agitated,she starts salivating and circling. We have to know where the current is, and what the wind is doing, to track back where the source is,” said Hadsell.

It doesn’t matter how big the area is, “just matters if the odor is escaping from where it is buried,” said Julie Starbuck, a volunteer. “Most circumstances, they work best if we just let them off lead and do their thing.”

Peace River Search and Rescue dogs were not used in the baby Chance investigation, but are trained the same way.