A SAR Dog Team that is searching for a missing person can follow these steps.

1. Leave your dog with a support person.
2. Get reports, information regarding the case that has been collected to date.
3. Get your own scent article. Do not allow anyone else to collect it.

Get the victim's scent article and attempt a track or trail of victim.
If or when the track or trail stops, look for clues of a burial, struggle, or tire tracks to indicate what happened to the victim at this location.

1. Get a consent-to-search or a search warrant for the suspect's vehicle.
2. Give your search dog the victim's scent article only.
3. If the dog alerts in the front seat, back seat, or trunk of the vehicle, observe the kind of alerts the dog has: stress alerts, normal alerts or death alerts.
   If the suspect killed the victim on a hard surface such as the floor or ground death scent will often be transferred from the victim's body fluids to the suspect's footgear. When the suspect drives the vehicle, they transfer the death scent to the gas pedal, clutch area, and carpet or mat area on the driver's side floor.
4. Study your dog's alerts closely here.
VIDEOTAPE THE SEARCH WHENEVER POSSIBLE.

If you still can't find any track, get the suspect's scent article and try to get a track from the PLS of the victim.

We did this in a search in Tennessee. A young girl had been kidnapped and the suspect admitted to throwing her in the river. The local Law Enforcement and SAR were able to prove that the suspect's claims were not probable based on where and how the suspect got rid of the victim.

After we tracked the victim we wanted to confirm the route.We got the suspect's scent article and tracked the suspect along the same route the victim's track led us. This confirmed what the victim's earlier track showed us. We were able to testify that both the victim and the suspect traveled the same route and that the victim was picked up in the suspect's vehicle and placed in the right front passenger seat. We knew this because there were stress alerts from the front seat right passenger side and death alerts from the driver's side floor area of the gas pedal and carpet on the floor.

If there is a good suspect in the case and you're given either a consent to search or have served the search warrant on the suspect's residence, business or vehicle, document the following: time, date, location, air temperature, wind direction, findings. Photographs also help.

If you are searching an enclosed area (Barn, Home, Vehicle), the scent can persist for approximately a year or longer depending on how much the search area is contaminated.

When searching a vehicle for scent evidence, start with the driver's door and concentrate in the floor board area. If the suspect walked on the death scent site, then the death scent will have transferred from the victim to the gas and clutch areas and the floor mats. This is very common in scent searches involving homicide cases.