Gene and Sandy Ralston are a married couple in their 70s, who also happen to be among North America's leading experts at searching for the dead. By
When Gene and Sandy Ralston returned to their truck after a day on the Beardsley reservoir in northern California in March 2002, they discovered several handwritten notes taped to the doors and windscreen: "Call Lieutenant Lunney as soon as you get back to town. It's urgent."
The Ralstons, a married couple from rural Idaho, had been scientists until the late 1980s, when they began helping out on local search and rescue missions. By the winter of 2002, they had volunteered on more than a dozen searches for victims of drowning across the US, and had developed an uncanny ability to find bodies. They had just helped Lt Lunney's sheriff's department locate the remains of a man who had drowned in the reservoir three-and-a-half years earlier, after falling off his boat while fishing. Divers had brought him back to the surface that afternoon.
As the notes instructed, the Ralstons drove to the nearby town of Sonora to meet Lunney. Their expertise was needed by some other folks, he said, although he wasn't allowed to tell them who. The next morning, the Ralstons were briefed by FBI agents on a series of kidnappings for ransom that had turned into murders. The families of four victims of abduction had wired more than $1.2m between them to an account in New York, which then transferred the money to a bank in Dubai. But the bodies of the victims were now thought to be lying at the bottom of a reservoir just east of Yosemite national park. The killers, the FBI said, were possibly connected to the Russian mafia.
This was the Ralstons' first homicide case. Until this moment, they had only used their specialised sonar system to scour the lake- and riverbeds for victims of accidents or suicides. Before they agreed to help find the bodies, Gene called his cousin, a recently retired FBI agent, for advice. "He said the Russians weren't really into murdering people," Gene told me. "So we didn't really have to worry about them doing any retaliation if we went ahead with the search."
Gene and Sandy are modest, unassuming people, but bring a relentlessness to their often monotonous work. They call it "mowing the lawn" – towing their sonar equipment back and forth through the water, piloting their boat in slow, overlapping strips. Typically, a corpse descends through water with its chest facing the surface. When the feet hit the bottom, the knees buckle and the body spills on to its back, arms outstretched. That is the shape the Ralstons usually look for with their sonar. They knew a murder victim would look different, though. "We call it 'packaged' – tied up and weighted," Gene said.
It took them two weeks to find the four murder victims, who were, as suspected, lying at the bottom of the New Melones reservoir. "Gene and Sandy got up early, went out and located the first body on their own," James Davidson, one of the FBI's primary investigators on the case, told me. "That's how determined they were."
TV police dramas have popularised the image of a diver in a scuba suit emerging from a pond with a crucial piece of evidence. But the New Melones reservoir is more than 90 metres deep in some places, far beyond what is considered a safe depth for non-specialist divers. In order to retrieve the bodies, the FBI had to fly in a small, unmanned submarine – known as a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV – from the headquarters of its dive team in New York. The ROV had a mechanical arm that hooked the bodies and brought them within nine metres of the surface, where they were met by a team of divers. When the bodies surfaced, agents could see that they had been bound to gym weights with cable ties.
The last recovery proved the hardest. All sorts of rubbish had been dumped into the water from a bridge and it was tricky to sort through the sonar images of fridges and washing machines strewn across the bottom of the reservoir. When Gene and Sandy finally found something that looked like a body, the ROV operator dismissed it as a rock. Gene told him to nudge it gently. "It was like bumping into a beehive," Gene said. "All kinds of little bugs took off. Why are the bugs there? Because it's a food source."
