Brian Paulsen is assistant police chief in Sturgis, South Dakota. He co-wrote a chapter in Forensic Archaeology based on his Master’s thesis about landfill searches in the United States.

In this episode we talk about:

More information about the Nebraska landfill search can be found here:

Notes from the start:

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Transcript, Part 1

Yvonne Kjorlien: all right, so I’m gonna get you to say your name and who you are and where you’re at.

Brian Paulsen: So I am Brian Paulsen. I am the assistant police chief here in Sturgis, South Dakota. I’m sorry, what was the third one? Where I’m at. Sturgis, South Dakota. Sorry combine those two.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right Sturgis, South Dakota. For any international listeners, that is in America, the United States of America. Because we do have some international listeners, so I just want to make sure everybody knows where we’re all at. So the reason, Brian, I wanted to reach out to you is because you had written a chapter in a textbook, “Forensic Archeology” with Kimberlee Moran all about landfill searchers. And so I greatly appreciate your time and insights on this. Let’s go back to the beginning about what started you on the path to doing the research? Because you had a case involving a landfall search, correct?

Brian Paulsen: Yes, we had a young man, a four and a half year old boy, that was murdered by his father in January. And then it’s reported to us late May early, June — excuse me — late June that he had put him in a dumpster and that dumpster was taken to the landfill. So about five months after the murder we were able to determine the location of the body in the landfill in a neighboring jurisdiction. So that started the landfill search for my department in early July. And then we went through, we had manpower in the landfill probably middle of June, actually, we started the physical hands-on search of that landfill in July and ended about 30 days, 29 days later, end of July.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Did you know prior to searching the landfill that waste management had kept, keeps meticulous record and they knew approximately where that truck had dumped that dumpster’s waste?

Brian Paulsen: Yes, absolutely. Oh, I did not know prior to the landfill search. No.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Brian Paulsen: No, it was a learning experience for me, on just the amount of information they had. We know as a fact the truck that carried the body in from that dumpster, the dumpster was the last pickup of the truck route, and then that truck was, I believe, four tons (8,000 pounds) overweight and it was the first truck into the landfill the morning that it delivered.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, and we were able to talk to the manager. Once the location was disclosed that the boy had been put in the dumpster, the next day we met with the manager of the landfill who took us out and said this is where we would start looking but we’re going to have to go about 30 foot down because that January date would have been the bottom of the landfill. We would have started a new phase in our landfill. So the landfill has a liner — 12 inches of sand — and then that January trash came in on top of that sand. So it was layered in that landfill. It was an approximate location. That particular day, when that truck came in, the GPS monitor had dead batteries, and they didn’t have time to go get new batteries. So they just eyeballed it. And quite honestly it was my fence posts. The landfill is surrounded by a six foot high chain link fence. So they just said it’s this many poles in from the, it would have been the south and then on the west side, and that was where they started taking what is called the overburden trash that we were not interested in, they removed that before we ever entered the landfill for the search.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, so had a really good idea, and you were on with it within days, it sounds like. You could get in there quickly and have pretty good idea of where to start searching.

Brian Paulsen: Yep, they keep very meticulous records. I was again shocked to learn how much information they collect when they’re placing trash into that landfill. We were somewhat suspicious of the body going into the trash anyway because the night — the little boy was murdered about 5:30 in the morning — that next night at about midnight, 11 o’clock, midnight, we found a bunch of blood in a trash can. Totally unrelated to the murder, but we stopped the trash immediately at that time. We had reached out to the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and they were able to assist us by bringing in their evidence response team. And they split them up into two — in Plattsmouth, Nebraska where this occurred — the trash went into Mills County, Iowa and then it also went into the Sarpy County landfill, which is the landfill we searched. So there are two bordering counties: one to our east and one to our north. And we went into the Sarpy County landfill. But they had split it up, their evidence recovery team. They had placed fresh dirt at the bottom of the landfill and we’re searching trash as it came in. Unfortunately, there were searching the trash that came in from Plattsmouth when the trash coming in from the neighboring county went around and dumped.

If they have a low spot within a landfill, at that time they would push trash to kind of even out the trash. We believe that’s what happened with that first truck. It was used to even out that bottom layer in the landfill. During our search in July, we found that pad of fresh dirt that was in the bottom of the landfill. So we knew that we were really close to where the trash that came in on that Friday morning.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. You had a lot of valuable information right from the get-go that really aided in your search.

Brian Paulsen: It did, and that’s one of the, with all that information, that’s probably the paramount factor in whether we even attempt it or not. With all that information available to us, we said we’ve got to take a shot at finding this young man.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And what were some considerations — because you knew you were probably gonna be searching a landfill — so were there any considerations about the challenges that you would have or the barriers about searching this landfill?

Brian Paulsen: Definitely some challenges and some political implications as well. We’re going into a neighboring jurisdiction, for one. We did not have — our governing body communicated with them, but it was mostly them allowing us to go. They also had representatives from their prosecutor’s office in the landfill with us. But we knew the method of death of the young boy was killed. So we initially opened it, or restricted our searchers to first responders — those that had probably had some of a, witnessed some type of a number of trauma events that it occurred — in there, volunteer or whether they were paid. So we spent our first four or five days with just first responders, which was a very small group. Because they were coming in on days off. There was a few that were signed out there being paid by their agencies. But the most part they were coming in after days off. We realized quickly that that small contingency of searchers was not going to be enough and we made a decision to open it up to the general public. And that first day of opening it up to the general public, we probably increased, we went from about 20 searchers to over a hundred. So quite a large group or large increase in physically searching that landfill. With that increase in numbers, also increased how we took care of them because we knew, mentally, that they were not probably prepared to see or recover that body in the condition it was going to be in. As well as equipment, we needed to make sure that the temperatures were in the 90s — I think it hit a hundred a couple days — but we had to worry about that. So there were tents, there were watering. Food needed to be, so they were out there. We didn’t want to send them out for an hour and then have to gather them all back. So we provided the food offsite — it was in the landfill property, but it was not at the landfill — we took them out. We had a number of our, like our watering district brought in a mobile hand washing station. So we took care, we have everything worked through and taking care for those folks.

We had discussed on the phone: we were worried about the mental health not only of the first responders, but obviously of the general public. So we had mental health professionals on site in the case that we recover the body, but also if somebody was really struggling with the search and knowing how the boy was killed. That’s one factor we did not give to anybody in the general public right away, the first day or two.  We met with the mental health professionals and they encouraged us to give that information out. They basically had told us if they discover this boy in the condition he’s gonna be found, you should probably let them know a little bit ahead of time so that it’s not a complete shock. It would help them kind of process up to the point, if we found the body. So we, probably about day two of the general public helping us, we opened it up and said this is how the boy was killed, this is what we’re looking for specifically. And the response from them was “thank you for telling us that.” It was kept very confidential. They understood the confidentiality of it as well. So we have very little problems with our general public.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So you mentioned the decision to go from the first responders, within that first week, to the general public. What were you considering? Was it not enough people? Did you discover that the size might be a little bit more than you originally anticipated? What was involved in that decision? What made you switch or open it up?

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, was you’ve touched on a couple of them. That we didn’t have enough. We were going too slow. With 20 of us searching — we had probably two, we actually had three down in what we call the hole down towards the floor of the landfill, the rest of us were up on the top pad with that clean dirt so that it wasn’t contaminated — but it was taking us a long time to use rakes, shovels, hoes, potato forks, a number of different pieces of equipment that we would hand search real quick. And then the bulldozers would come in and they, just basically two bulldozers and they’d sweep that pad. We’d come up, we’ve dump more trash out of the trash, dump trucks that were going down picking up. And we found that it was not efficient because the trucks were waiting for us to search. So we said we have to have more people. And then it quickly grew from there.

The area actually increased as well. Because initially we didn’t find that pad. It was probably day four or five, I believe, that we finally found that pad that would have been placed in their January by the FBI when they were searching. Once we hadn’t found a little boy at that point, we said we’ve got to expand this out. And again, the landfill manager said the only way it could have been was to the north into the west. So we expanded that dig of the actual trash out to probably 30, 32, 36 feet to the west and then to the north. Probably at least that. So it was a rather large, large hole that we had put in there.

The operation was set up that the dump trucks, they actually built a driveway coming in out of the northeast corner of the pit, driving in, being loaded with excavators, and then they would go out the southwest corner of the landfill of the pit and then they would immediately turn left. That’s where the pad was and they go along and they dump the trash, as they were going to the east. And then we would step in, we would search and then, once we were confident — my assistant chief or I were up, excuse me on the top — and once we were certain that we had searched the thoroughly, we would give the signal for the bulldozers. They scrape it and we’d start the whole thing.

And we didn’t want that downtime. We wanted to be somewhat continuous. Obviously we had to spend 5, 10, 15 minutes searching that trash, but that trash was spread pretty thin once it was done by those trucks. They would dump it, try to thin it as much, but we had an excavator up there a small excavator that will come in and spread that trash out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right so I want just want to understand the method that you used: so you had excavators load the trash into trucks, the trucks took the trash outside of the landfill, then the truck spread it out, and then you searched trash that was spread out. Is that correct?

Brian Paulsen: That is correct.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. Okay. So, just because, for context for listeners, so I was involved with the Robert Pickton investigation in Vancouver, BC and in that we used conveyor belts. So, instead of taking the trash outside the landfill and spreading it out, like you did for your team, Brian, the conveyor belts were inside the search area. Then the material was dumped onto conveyor belts and we looked out over conveyor belts. So a little different method but still very similar type of method.

Brian Paulsen: Yes, yep, yep, moving that trash and making it thin enough to be searched quickly.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, right, okay. So you said you searched for about 30 days.

Brian Paulsen: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And did you, did you have everybody searching in that place where the trash was spread, or did you have different teams doing different things looking differently? Tell me a bit about your team and what you were doing.

Brian Paulsen: There, you know, we would search at the excavator operators, a good point to know is the excavator operators were fully aware where we’re looking for. A bed comforter that would be thick enough that the suspect — the father — had told us that he killed him on top of this comforter quilt knowing that’d be a lot of blood so he had purchased those two nights before the murder. Then put the body in there as well as the knife that he used, the weapon that he used. Then he just kind of bundled it up. So the excavators knew to look for bundled up blankets / comforters, as well as anything that may produce or look like blood. Quite honestly, we had a couple of those excavators that were so precise and so talented that they were able to take items and place them right in front of us. If they would come across the blanket and they couldn’t get it to unfold when they were moving it, they would literally pick it up, they’d bring it over to the team in the hole — which is generally four of us — and then we would actually go in and search that. If it was done, then they would actually move it to an area down in the landfill that had already been searched or already been opened up, and just kind of placed it out of the way. One of the operators came across a roll of carpet and literally laid it out and rolled it with his bucket right in front of us and opened it up for us, so we did nothing but look. It wasn’t what we were looking for, but it could have concealed a body and we thought how truthful is this dad been. We were fairly confident that he would tell us about the comforter and absorbing all the blood because he had put some thought into it. So that carpet went over to the side.

We would do that down in the hole. We would also move items that we knew that didn’t need to go up top. We found some religious statues down there, plastic statues, a lot of comforters and blankets. We had literally had a pile of comforters and blankets that we never sent up top. After we had searched them, we would just drag them out of the way.

And then up top, would be all the other searchers. That was the predominant number of searchers. Towards the end of the search, we had three or four of those civilians that said, “hey, we’d like to come down and help you because we know that the four of you are doing a lot of work down there.” We allowed them to come down to help for a short period of time, probably the last couple, three days. Maybe just the last two days. And again, but we didn’t find anything that was of substance to the case.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so you didn’t need, if the excavator operators found something, they didn’t put it in the truck and then wait for it to be brought out to the clearing area for the other searchers. They brought it straight to your attention so you can have a look at it, right then and there.

Brian Paulsen: yes, yep, the four of us, the team down in the hole, we felt that we were kind of the control mechanism That if we could save somebody in the general population from seeing something traumatic — this young boy’s body — that we would take that on ourselves in the hole and with the excavators, and then save them up on top that experience. And we had hoped that, if we did find the body down on the bottom, that they would maybe find the comforter on top or something like that. There was a number of things we did take and have tested but nothing that was applicable to our case.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So you did mention mental health concerns. Like that you wanted first responders in there first because they had a trauma training or trauma experience. So let’s talk a little bit about that. Let’s talk about the physical limitations, or anything that may be physical challenges: was it hard labor? Was there as asbestos, anything in the landfill that the searchers needed to be aware of? And then we’ll go into mental health.

Brian Paulsen: Sure. For us, we were really more worried about glass. And we talked with the landfill manager about that and he said it’s kind of a mystery of the landfill that glass generally isn’t found. Our concern with the glass was we knew we had done a bunch of the legwork before, when we taking the overburden off of the landfill, we were doing a lot of leg work on the backside. We knew that the pick-up before the apartment building with the dumpster was a very popular bar, lounge in the area. So there’s a lot of the beer bottles and metals and everything, all the trash that you could imagine coming out of a bar. So we knew there were glass and that was a concern we had for the manager and he said it just kind of disappears. We went down, we knew the 10 or 12 stops on that truck. We knew the order of that truck, as I said, when it went in but also the pickup.

We also were concerned with there was a auto mechanic or an auto dealership that probably had some metals that they may have replaced or something. So we’re worried about that as well. We took care of that on the front side of it. Sarpy County, the Sarpy Count’s attorney’s office here, or there in Nebraska, actually contacted their Department of Health. We provided tetanus shots for all of our searchers, if they wanted it. Gloves along with all the equipment. And we had water at all locations, both out at the pit and then back at the lunch site, plus we had coolers that were in vehicles. So if we needed anything like that.

So we were doing a lot of that leg work. We actually had to sit down and determine on our own — there’s a probably six or seven of us — that sat down and said, “okay, how long do you keep mail?” So your mail, if it’s junk mail or third-party mail that it’s unsolicited sent to you, you throw that right away. We all thought we did. So we started looking for postmarks. We also were saying, “okay, there’s newspapers. When would this story have hit? Would it be out?” We looked at our own bills. How long do you hold a bill? Do you pay it right away, anything like that. You know, the personal things that come through your mail. We felt that those were probably not a good barometer because we’d hold those until we paid them. Some people pay him right away. Some of them will wait to a paycheck or something like that. So we found mail in that window, probably from the day after the murder up until probably a week or so, maybe two weeks later. We found a lot of that mail. We found the debris from that bar. We could hear the glass falling, but in the pit, we didn’t find any of that. We were never worried about any large items. I never saw any large item that would cause an injury and so we knew we were, and it’s just undiscovered territory for us.

It was the first landfill in the state of Nebraska and there’s a lot of information we wanted to gather. So we gathered daily, we took temperatures at the bottom of the landfill. I can tell you that we were searching in July and we found ice and snow in the bottom of the landfill because it was so insulated and encapsulated with dirt at the end of each workday. We found food items that were, as I’ve said many a times in some of my presentations, if you told me that piece of chicken or turkey or roast had been in a landfill, I would have never guessed it if you had just washed it off it. It had some debris on it, but it wasn’t decomposed or anything like that because it was sealed and really couldn’t get a lot of bacteria down to it. So we do that we did that. The temperatures was in the low 30s in the bottom of that landfill when we started probing it with a thermostat, or, excuse me, a thermometer. And so we knew that it was going to be well preserved. And that helped us kind of decide what condition the body would have been in.

And then from there, moving into the mental health, we just had… I had had training and most of my officers had experienced the critical incident stress management — basically a critical incident debriefing. So we are fully aware that we felt that, if we’re able to recover the boy’s body in the landfill, regardless of who it was, we would need to have immediate mental health presence to kind of help debrief them. Honestly law enforcement would have been extremely busy. We didn’t feel that we could push it off on, “Hey, I’ve worked with you for a couple days. Let’s just sit down and talk about it.” So we reached out two of them actually, very good personal friends of mine through the critical incident stress management. They were out there quite regularly and they were always on call if we needed anything. So we wanted to put that in place as well. And again they were valuable to us in whether we released the cause or the manner of death of the young boy, which was very important. And in hindsight, we actually hadn’t told some of the dump truck operators as well as the bulldozer operators hadn’t been informed.  So we had the first responders, the general public, the excavators, but we had left a faction out. So it was the mental health folks that came in and said, “hey make sure everybody knows. You can’t leave somebody out because if they find him, or if they see something, we haven’t prepared them, haven’t taken care of them.” So there was a valuable resource to have them out there.

Yvonne Kjorlien: and so I’m just going to reiterate, so the general public that you had in helping you, they were volunteers, correct? Whereas your first responders, they were paid?

Brian Paulsen: Not all the first responders were paid. Some of the first responders were just out there on their days off. At that point, through almost 20 years of law enforcement, I had a lot of networking had gone on and we put that call out, and we called our larger agencies and said “hey if you can spare anybody.” So there are a few that were paid but most of them they’re out there on their days off. We reached out to the National Guard. That’s not something they wanted to do just because that wasn’t their role and we understood that as well. But yeah, we reached out to quite a few of them. The general public were all volunteers.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And so when you put out the call and you had general public people show up, what kind of, I guess, response did you get from the general public when you told them what you were looking for and how you were looking for it? Did you have people immediately say, “Okay, you what? I want to help out but it’s just not within my capacity to do this. Good luck to you.” Or maybe after a few days’ searching, you have people say “Okay, I can’t do this anymore.” What kind of… just because I’m looking at this because people going with the best of intentions, but they don’t really understand or appreciate what’s involved with these searches.

Brian Paulsen: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: and that, you know what? It’s okay, if you want to back out, that you don’t completely understand and it can be damaging to your mental health to stay.

Brian Paulsen: Yes, and we did talk to him about that. And we also let them know that it was totally okay with us if they chose to leave. We all gathered up near the front gates of the landfill and then we took them back on flatbed trailers that a local business had a pumpkin farm or it was a pumpkin farm provided us. So we had seating around this hay rack several hayracks and we have pulled him out there with a tractor most of the time — a couple times it took out with a pickup — and we just unload them. Then there were other, there’s probably four or five of us that drove our own vehicles back there. It was specifically so if we had something or someone that said, “Gosh, this is just too much for me. I don’t want to continue this,” that we could immediately get him out of there, for their own mental health, to make sure that they were okay, that we were going to get them out of there. Actually, it also gave us the opportunity, because it was sworn law enforcement or the prosecutor’s office that would have transported, we would have been calling those mental health professionals saying “please meet us at the gate. We got an individual we’d like to have you talk to.” So we knew that that was a possibility. It was very few people that did that.

We had a couple that chose not to after they had all the facts and they left and there were never any hard feelings. They came out, they decided they couldn’t do it. Perfectly fine with us. We knew what we were asking. It was just a monumental mental and physical task that we were asking folks to do. So, we had a few that would just leave after they got the information, but very few, maybe a couple.

Then we did have a couple that went into the landfill and search for a little while and then just they said I can’t do it. I’m afraid that I’m gonna be 1) the person who finds something of substance in the case or 2) I’m gonna mess something up.” And we told them you can’t mess anything up. This is a recovery for the family at this point. We had enough with the case — obviously because he was prosecuted or pled to second degree murder — but we’ve just felt that really we were recovering part of the case, but also we were hoping for closure for the family.

This was a regional event that had started in January. In April of that year, we had an outburst in the courtroom when the father was sentenced for a willful reckless driving. He made the proclamation in front of a full gallery and full of media, that he had actually indeed killed his son. And then from there he spent about a month negotiating back and forth whether he was going to give us information or not. He finally divulged to the Nebraska state patrol investigators method of, manner of death. And then what he had done. Took him about another week or two before he actually said, “okay, I’ll take you to where I dumped him.” He says, “I can’t tell you or describe it,” he says,” but if you’ll take me out, I can identify where I dropped him in the dumpster.” So about two weeks after his confession – so, about the middle of May or so, towards the end of May — actually was when he finally said, “this is where it’s at. This is where I dumped him.” And we were pretty confident at that point. We had been working with him, trying to gather information so that we could retrieve this young man.

We also knew that as we went in, probably about week one or week two, regardless of the outcome, that we were talking with our mental health professionals, and they said we probably need to do a large debriefing. Now you’re talking, when it was all said and done, we kept a roster. We had some searchers from the general public who, every day that we were searching, they were there. That was probably about a dozen of them that kept coming out day after day after day. We started to know their names and their spouses names and their history, just working side by side and having those conversations. So at the end we said we’ve probably needed to do a large debrief: tell these folks what they’re going to experience and what they need to do and how they should handle it and, quite honestly, some of the feelings they’re having is normal for what we had asked them to do. So we took those 300 or we sent out 300 invitations to folks to come to a banquet and be recognized. Again, this was regional. So many businesses donated: the hall donated, the food was donated, there were so much that was just donated for us that quite honestly, yet we didn’t recover the young man, the boy, but it was a successful endeavor by law enforcement with cooperation of the general public.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Did the family come out and search? Or any relatives? 

Brian Paulsen: We had asked the family not to come out and search. We felt that Mom, as any parent or anybody close to a victim, mom really struggled, and rightfully so. And we had asked her not to come out. She had agreed that she wouldn’t. She said “I can’t do that, there’s nothing no way I could do that. But please thank the people that are doing it.” And again, we had asked both her and her mother not to come out and search. We felt that it would affect those searchers, the general public overall.

So they stayed back. I supplied them with information daily: how much we’d searched, whether we had found anything at all. If we had recovered something and said, hey, let’s have this tested, I would tell them. We had a couple items we picked up just to make sure that we don’t miss anything, and we snet it off to be tested. And again, as I said earlier, none of that really added to our case, it was unrelated items. At the end of the landfill search, when I called it, and I’ll never forget the words, I told the group that was standing in front of me, the general public, I just told them, “I have nowhere to lead you at this point. There’s nowhere for me to take you into the landfill.” From that point they were pretty accepting of it, but we still knew we had to do it.

Once we got all of the general public out that afternoon, we had called Mom and Grandma and told them that we were gonna end the search, and they came to the landfill. They were upset. They thought that we were going to recover him. I took them back and we stood at the edge of that hole and I said this is what we’ve done. They said it’s remarkable. They were hoping that we could continue. But we had no place to take them – we could have eventually searched that whole landfill and never found the young man. But they were appreciative of it and they understand. I think as time’s gone on, they understand.

Grandmother’s passed. But I’ve stayed in communication with Mom off and on. We communicate through social media just to tell her, “hey, I’m thinking of you.” On July 31st, when it’s her son’s birthday, I sent her a little note saying “hey, I’m thinking about Brendon today. I know it’s a tough day for you.” January kind of passes without us really having any type of conversation. There for a while, even January, I’d send her a little note said, “hey. I know this is a terrible day for you, but I’m just thinking of you.” So I still have contact with Mom.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The perpetrator is incarcerated, but the body has not been found.

Brian Paulsen: Yes. Yes, correct. It was the first bodiless prosecution in the state of Nebraska. We had enough. We had a crime scene team out of Douglas County, which is Omaha, Nebraska, but their crime scene unit did fabulous work from start to finish for us on this case. They had determined that the amount of blood – the young boy was placed, once he was murdered, he was placed in a fabric recliner in the garage –  and they had taken that, gathered all the blood that they possibly could out of that chair to determine that was enough blood that whoever lost it couldn’t sustain life. So, three liters or whatever it would have been. And that was a huge component of it for us.

Then there was enough with the confession which was pretty, it was recorded. There’s video of the perpetrator shouting out in the courtroom that he had killed his son. He then claimed that he was the Antichrist. In hindsight, he had told the jail staff that it was going to be his day in court. So he had it well thought out what he was going to do that day as well. And then the full confession that was videotaped and recorded with the Nebraska state patrol. There’s a number of components. I’ve mentioned other agencies throughout. Again this was regional, it was an individual case that turned into a regional case, incorporating federal partners, our state partners and fellow County, neighboring County agencies as well. So it was a joint effort.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Just wow, that you’d managed to pull it off and it all came up like, at least the perpetrator, the bad guy was caught, in jail, even if the boy wasn’t found. There was some success out of this.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yeah, and it was a learning experience in that landfill. I’ve used that a couple times on some consults, or just I really wouldn’t say ‘consults’. I’ve had a couple call me and say “hey, what do you think? Can we go in? Can’t we? What should we do?”

Since our landfill search in Sarpy County, there are two other landfill searches in the State of Nebraska. Both of those were successful. One of those, the second one, the police chief called me and said “hey, what do you think?” and I said shut your trash down, immediately shut your trash down. He said it’s already done. I believe, as of all the records and in my thesis, that was the fastest recovery, I believe in the United States. And it took about six hours because it was a community about 7,000, they knew where the baby had been dropped or put, and they’d stopped their trash. So when they went in, it took them, I believe about six hours. The other one in northeast, Nebraska, I think was right at 28-29 days. I know we’re gonna talk about the research, but that 30-day window is very important on recovery. If you hit 30 days and you haven’t found the body, I found throughout the research that once Day 30 hits, the likelihood of recovery starts to diminish pretty quickly.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so let’s segue into the research here. First, let’s talk about any research that you did for the methods to do that landfill search and then lessons learned from that, for just about the methods. Then we’ll about the rest of it.

Brian Paulsen: Sure, the method, quite honestly, both in that January with the FBI evidence recovery team was modeled after 9/11 and what they were doing in New York purging the trash out of the Twin Towers.

We kind of modified that when we went in and just put our dirt up on top, open air, breeze, things like that, knowing that we would clean it each time. In our search, we brought in clean soil at least once if not twice, but that was it. Bring it up, spread it out, search it by hand, and then dispose of it. Take that overburden and put it elsewhere. It had never been done, as I said in Nebraska, before. So we looked at, and we looked really heavily to our federal partners who had done it and then modified it, the way they have done it, in the bottom to the top.

(Continued in Part 2)