By Amelia Heagerty

Jul 25 2007

Jim Griswold and his bloodhound Daisy were among the first to arrive at the home of missing Tacoma 12-year-old Zina Linnik after her disappearance on July 4.

Griswold, a search and rescue volunteer and owner of James Hair Design on Vashon, went into Linnik’s bedroom, accompanied by a detective and her family, and found a suitable item for the dog to smell — something with the girl’s scent and no one else’s.

The man and his hound then began the fruitless search for the girl, who nine days later was found dead in thick brush in east Pierce County. Daisy was the first hound on the case, but there were 11 dogs searching for Linnik before the man accused of her murder led officials to the girl’s body.

A simple device, however, would have gotten Griswold and his highly trained bloodhound on the trail a little more quickly — critical in an abduction, when every minute counts.

And now, thanks to an anonymous donation through the Vashon Island Rotary Foundation, local volunteers with Northwest Bloodhound Search and Rescue have ordered the only scent transfer unit on the market.

“It’s going to make our work so much easier and more concise,” Griswold said. “The scent transfer unit could save a life.”

The volunteer organization boasts six “mission-ready” bloodhounds and two hounds in training, he said.

White-haired, mild-mannered Griswold has been working with bloodhounds for 10 years. He became interested in working on search and rescue because his wife Charlene had a lifelong relationship with bloodhounds; her grandfather tracked down criminals with assistance from his bloodhounds.

Griswold has donated countless hours to searches, going as far north as the British Columbia border and as far south as the Oregon border in his treks. He spent 80 hours searching for Linnik alone.

Black-and-tan Daisy, whom Griswold jokingly calls his “second wife,” has been on the job for six years and in that time has found five live humans, called “live finds,” Griswold said. She bays from her backyard pen when an unfamiliar car arrives at the Griswold residence, and when she gets close to the stranger, her nose twitches as she takes in a deep draught of the newcomer’s distinctive odor.

Griswold said he trains Daisy rigorously, even taking her to search for a particular scent within a graveyard — a task he said can be immensely frustrating for some hounds, because they just can’t home in on one scent among so many others. But not Daisy, he said, who revels in any challenging olfactory task.

Griswold said some cases he has worked on were “gruesome” but that he continues the work because of the personal rewards. He has been able to reunite family members in several instances, which makes the grueling, often overnight searches worth his time.

“Jim Griswold has been my barber for more than 15 years,” said Rotary board member Craig Hanson, who solicited the donation from Rotary members. “But last week I had to reschedule my appointment because he had been out all night on a call from the Pierce County sheriff’s department, helping to search for a little girl abducted on the Fourth of July.”

Hanson sent e-mails to Rotary members, seeking donations to fund a scent transfer unit for the search and rescue organization after Griswold told him that neither law enforcement agencies or any of the organization’s volunteers had been able to pony up $1,000 for the device.

The unit “vacuums” scent onto a sterile piece of gauze in one minute, while transferring scent naturally can take up to 20 minutes, said Mike Craig, owner of Big T LLC, the device’s manufacturer.

Additionally, if multiple hounds are on the trail, it takes only a minute to create each additional scent pad.

Craig said the main benefit of the scent transfer unit to law enforcement and search and rescue personnel is the device’s speed, but also the way it allows for collection of scent without contaminating the item from which the scent is gathered.

“In the event of an abduction, which unfortunately in our day is very prevalent, if you use the old ways of scent collection, and if the kidnapper has touched the scent item, then you’re going to stick a dog’s nose on it,” Craig said. “(The scent transfer unit) doesn’t destroy any kind of DNA evidence. The man who invented this — his whole idea was not to destroy other evidence.”

Craig added that scent can be used as evidence in a court in most states, Washington among them. He said the FBI’s evidence response teams use scent transfer units in cases, and scent pads produced by the device have been known to last, when properly preserved, more than 10 years with scent intact.

Griswold said bloodhounds are very mellow, and trained to “trail,” or follow just one individual’s scent. Police K-9 four-legged officers, on the other hand, are trained to chase and find a suspect, and then keep the suspect from escaping. These dogs are trained to detain. Sometimes called “bite dogs,” they learn to chase and grab at an early age — and therefore only search for suspects, not missing people.

“We’d hate to bite the victims when we find them,” said King County sheriff’s Sgt. John Urquhart.

While searches with Daisy are one of Griswold’s passions, iron-working is another. A green iron gate, elegant in its detail and curvature, welcomes visitors to his home. In the backyard behind Daisy’s pen is Griswold’s workshop, full of iron rods, electric and pneumatic hammers, and, of course, his trusty 400-pound anvil.

Griswold learned to love working with orange-hot metal out of necessity, when shoeing his children’s horses became too expensive and he learned to make his own horseshoes. Now, any of his eight grandchildren are welcome to learn the trade from him, or just help around the shop, Griswold said.

He said another member of Northwest Bloodhound Search and Rescue will keep the device at his home in Roy, Wash., so the unit can be accessed easily, regardless of ferry schedules.