BRING UP HE BODIES

Gene and Sandy Ralston are a married couple in their seventies – who also happen to be among North America’s leading experts at searching for the dead

- DOUG HORNER

WHEN Gene and Sandy Ralston returned to their bakkie after a day on the Beardsley Reservoir in 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 in the western USA, had worked as scientists until the late ’80s, when they began helping out on local search and rescue missions. By 2002 they’d volunteered on more than a dozen searches for victims of drowning across the country and had developed an uncanny knack for finding bodies.

They’d just helped Lunney’s sheriff ’s department to locate the remains of a man who’d drowned in the reservoir three 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 the lieutenant. Their expertise was needed by some other folks, Lunney 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 $1,2 million (then about R13,8m) between them to an account in New York, from where the money had been transferred 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 in California.

This was the Ralstons’ first homicide case. Until this moment, they’d used their specialised sonar system only to scour lake- and riverbeds for victims of accidents or suicides.