Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
Her Famous Cadaver Dog Was Fake - The Sandra Anderson story
04 Feb 2025
This is the story of Sandra Anderson and her cadaver sniffing dog Eagle.
Full Episode
So this woman and this dog, they get famous by pulling one of the craziest scams I've ever talked about. And there are a whole lot of dead bodies involved in this scheme. Now the woman, her name's Sandra. And Sandra is a dog trainer. And one day, she adopts this Doberman crossbreed from the pound. And his name is Eagle.
So Sandra starts training Eagle to become a cadaver sniffing dog, which is one of those dogs that helps police solve cold cases by sniffing out human remains. So she trains Eagle and Eagle happens to be really good at cadaver sniffing. He goes out and he starts sniffing around and he helps police solve case after case after case. And he starts getting known as one of the best in the business.
In fact, he's so good at it that Sandra and Eagle start getting invited to speak at conferences. They get invited to do work in Bosnia and Panama to look for victims of political violence that happened there. They get invited to Ground Zero in New York City to help look for missing people after the September 11th attacks. They even get featured on an episode of the TV show Unsolved Mysteries.
His name is Eagle. He is a Doberman Pinscher and one of a rare breed of specialists known as cadaver dogs.
And so pretty quickly, people are looking at Eagle like, damn, he's really good at this. How'd he do that? He must have had a really talented trainer. Until... So 10 years go by, and Sandra and Eagle are still at the top of their game, solving cold cases left and right. But then one day, the FBI and local police, they asked Sandra and Eagle to help them solve a murder that had gone cold.
And this particular murder case is a cold case where they've been looking through a large area of the woods for over 20 years, trying to find remains of this missing woman, who they suspect had been unalived and dumped there. So Sandra and Eagle and everyone working on this case, they all get together and they start searching through these woods.
And pretty quickly, Eagle, boom, he sniffs out some bones. And everyone's all excited like, oh, the dog found some bones. This could be a lead. So they stop the search for a few months and they go and they forensic test the bones. But unfortunately, those DNA tests find that the bones belong to not the victim of the crime they're investigating, but they belong to three other random people.
People not involved in this case at all. So police are like, well, that's weird. Why are multiple random strangers bones out here? Did we just discover the dumping grounds of a serial killer? So then they resume the search. Now, one of the officers working on this case is this guy, Mark David.
And Mark David has been personally trying to solve this murder for 20 years and he is super invested in it. And on the first day they go back to searching, he's out there in the forest with the search crew and he's searching his ass off and he can't find anything.
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