Today's video is going to start out sounding like a pretty straightforward story about police trying to solve a murder. But when you get to the end of this video and you hear the big plot twist, you'll see that nothing in the story is what it seems. But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of The Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do and we upload once a week.
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[Music] [Music] On the morning of August 30th, 2001, a middle-aged police sergeant named Alan McGregor, drove with his partner, Officer Mark David, towards the Huron National Forest, which is a massive nature preserve in northern Michigan. The two of them were on the way to this forest to meet with a very unlikely detective who McGregor believed might actually be the key to solving a case that had haunted him for the last 21 years. And that case was the disappearance of Charita Thomas.
Back in 1980, Charita Thomas had been walking down the road located about 1 mile away from the police station where Sergeant McGregor worked when she had gotten into the car with this older man who had come by to pick her up. And after getting in this car, she was never seen again. Based on various tips and clues, police were nearly certain that that older man who had picked Charita up was a guy named Jimmy Nelson.
And their theory was he had murdered Charita shortly after picking her up and then afterwards disposed of her body in a particular section of the Hiron National Forest. But the problem was the police did not have any actual evidence that supported this theory. Their case against Jimmy was entirely circumstantial.
In fact, they didn't even know if Charita had really been murdered because for the last 20 plus years, they had searched that particular section of the Hiron National Forest. They'd gotten the FBI involved. They had chased down every lead.
Yet still, they had not found Charita's body. So, they really didn't know what happened. But, as Sergeant McGregor neared the forest, he hoped that today would be the day that that all changed.
He pulled up by the entrance of the Hiron National Forest, and he and his partner got their first look at their unlikely detective. they were here to meet. And this detective was a Doberman pincher mix with big floppy ears who was lying on the ground and panting and wagging his tail.
His name was Eagle, and he didn't look like a stereotypical police dog because he wasn't a police dog. However, Eagle was the best crime scene sniffing dog in the entire world. His trainer, a 40-year-old woman named Sandra Anderson, was standing right beside him.
Now, Sandra and Eagle were very famous in law enforcement circles, and so Sergeant McGregor and his partner were already well aware of their backstory. Sandra had actually adopted Eagle from a pound shortly before he likely would have been euthanized. And then after she adopted him, Sandra, who had made a career in teaching dogs how to sniff for cadabvers, just sort of naturally on her off time, began training Eagle how to do it, too.
And amazingly, Eagle really took to it better than police dogs did. Now, any good police cadaavver dog could sniff out hidden objects and track a scent for miles, and Eagle could definitely do that. But also, Eagle could do things that the police cadaavver dogs simply could not.
Like, he could smell blood that had been cleaned with bleach and also painted over. I mean, that's like a superpower. No dog could do that, but Eagle could.
One forensic anthropologist who had come in contact with Eagle and seen what he could do firsthand said that, you know, if a great cadaabver dog was rated a 10 out of 10, well, Eagle was like a 20 out of 10. He was far and away the best of the best. And so, Sergeant McGregor believed that if Charita's body really was in that section of the Hiron National Forest, well, Eagle would be able to find it.
Sergeant McGregor was excited to see Eagle in action. But after he and his partner parked, they walked over and spent a minute, you know, petting Eagle because Sandre said it was fine. And they gave him some pets and Eagle really liked it and he sort of rubbed up against them.
But then at some point, Eagle just kind of stopped and looked towards the entrance of the national forest like he was ready to go. At which point, Sandre said, "Okay, he's ready to work. " So Sergeant McGregor and his partner followed behind Sandra and Eagle as they led the way into the forest towards the section where they had been told to search.
And then once they reached that section, McGregor and his partner kind of stayed back on the fringes and just watched Eagle work and it was incredible. Now, McGregor and his partner had seen police dogs work before, so they were familiar with basically the pace at which these dogs would find something, which often, you know, it would take some time. But basically, as soon as they got to this clearing, they're watching Eagle and he's sort of walking around sniffing, you know, looking for something.
But then suddenly he stopped, turned, and made a beline towards this tree. And when he got there, he began pawing at the ground like he had found something. Sandre, his trainer, kneelled down next to him to see what Eagle had found.
And she saw as he continued to dig that there was something in the ground. And so she called out to McGregor and his partner. And they came rushing over.
And sure enough, Eagle had found a human bone fragment. To be clear, this dog only finds human bones. And so it's not like it would be able to find a chicken bone and think it was a human bone.
Basically, if it found a bone, it's a human bone. McGregor and his partner were totally shocked here. I mean, they had really high hopes for the search, but to already be finding human remains in this particular section of the forest was revoly.
I mean, not only was it a big deal to find human remains here, but these could be charitas. This could be the key to unlocking this two decades old case. But Sandre, Eagle's trainer, did not seem shocked at all.
This was pretty much par for the course. She smiled at the two investigators and kind of shrugged like, "Yep, this is what he does. " She gave him a treat and then Eagle got up and just continued searching the area.
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New series now streaming exclusively on Paramount [Music] Plus. After Sandra and Eagle had taken off, McGregor and his partner bagged the bone fragment and then just kind of continued to let Eagle do his work. And over the course of that day, Eagle just kept on finding more human bones.
It was truly incredible. And then the next day when they came back for a second search, Eagle found even more. It was like there were human bones all over the place.
However, this was actually kind of typical for human remains that have been left out in the wild for a long time, like they believe Choritas had been. The idea is, you know, after the body is left there and decomposes, animals come along and break apart the bones and kind of carry them in different directions. There's weather, you know, there's a bunch of things that affect the body that sort of gradually takes it and spreads it all over the place.
But as alarming as it was to find this many human bone fragments in such a small area in this forest, at the end of that second search on the second day, McGregor, all he could feel was elation. He felt like Eagle had done the exact thing he was hoping he would do. He had found the remains that very likely were Charita Thomas'.
McGregor thanks Sandre and Eagle profusely for their help. And then after saying bye to them, he and his partner went back to the station and they sent off the bone fragments to the FBI to be analyzed. And then after sending them off, they waited.
The analysis would take several months, but in February of 2002, the FBI finally called McGregor. Now, at this point, McGregor was very hopeful and sort of expected that these bone fragments would belong to Charita. But what they actually said shocked him because according to the FBI, those bone fragments that Eagle had dug up did not belong to Charita.
In fact, the bone fragments didn't even belong to a single person. They belonged to three different people. And when McGregor heard this, his blood ran cold because he wasn't thinking, "Oh boy, this totally blows up the case.
" Instead, he's thinking, "I bet Charita is out in that forest. We just haven't found her yet, and if we keep using Eagle, we will find her. " But now I have at least three more people that have been found out there.
Three dead people. So maybe Jimmy is way worse than I thought he was. Maybe he didn't just kill Cheerita.
Maybe he's a serial killer and he's dumping his bodies in that part of the forest. However, as explosive as this new information was, it only made things way more complicated for McGregor because he and his partner and all of his colleagues had no idea who these three new bodies were. And neither did the FBI.
The FBI could only determine that these bone fragments came from three different people, but who they were, they didn't know. And so to try to figure out who these three people were, Sergeant McGregor would need to find more clues. And to find more clues, he needed Eagle to go back to the forest and keep on looking.
And so he immediately reached out to Sandre, who said that she and Eagle would come back out there and search the forest again. The new search began on April 17th, 2002. McGregor, his partner Sandre Eagle, and a whole bunch of police officers and crime lab technicians descended once again on that same section of the Hiron National Forest.
But after a kind of lengthy search that day, the police officers, you know, the entire police force that showed up, they didn't find anything of note. But Eagle, he did. At some point, Eagle had sniffed out a human knuckle bone in a dried out stream bed.
When this discovery was made, officer McGregor was elated because it was like once again we are finding evidence that's going to help him break this case he has been trying to crack for 20 years, which now might actually be way bigger than he thought it was. It might not just be the murder of Charita. This might be the hunting grounds or the dumping grounds of a serial killer who killed Charita Thomas.
And he McGregor was going to be the one who solved it. He just knew it. But when McGregor turned back around to continue searching in the area that he was looking, he suddenly heard this commotion coming from behind him, sort of in the same direction where that human knucklebone had been found.
And he turns around and he sees what looks to be some sort of physical altercation happening amongst two people. He can't really tell who it is, but there's screaming happening. It's total chaos.
And so, having no idea what was going on, McGregor abandoned his search, turned, and ran to go break it up. And after this fight was broken up, another major discovery was made. But it was not another bone.
It would turn out the person who was dumping bodies in this section of the Hiron National Forest was not a serial killer, nor was it Jimmy Nelson. Instead, the real culprit was actually one of the investigators who was out here doing the search right now. Eagle was not the world's greatest cadaavver snipping dog.
In fact, Eagle was not even a cadaavver sniffing dog at all. And his trainer, Sandre, was well aware of that because this was all a big act. It would turn out when Sandre and her dog were called out to a site to perform a search, Sandre would show up with a stash of human bones tucked into her clothing right up against her skin.
And then once the search began, she would discreetly pull little bone fragments out and drop them on the ground in front of Eagle, who would immediately notice them and alert people to them, making it seem like Sandre and her dog had once again saved the day. Sandre did this dozens of times across dozens of searches all over the country, all because she loved the thrill of watching the police discover her crimes in real time. Sandre had been successfully searching for body parts that she herself had planted for years without anybody being remotely suspicious of her.
However, during the search for Charita Thomas, Sandre got caught. Right before that fight broke out on that last search, Sandre and her dog had stepped off to the side and believed nobody was watching them. And Sandre bent down and pulled a bone fragment out of her sock and was about to place it, but then realized a crime lab technician was clearly watching her.
She had been caught. And so the crime lab technician went up to Sandra to call her out on it. And Sandre, who knew she was caught, began to panic and pretended that she was being attacked by the crime lab technician and made a whole scene about it.
That's what McGregor heard when he turned around and wondered if there was a fight going on. There was no fight. It was just Sandre again being caught red-handed.
But as awful as Sandre's actions sound, she didn't actually kill anyone. Instead, during her years'sl long run of fraudulent searching, she had been stealing pieces of medical center kadaavvers and using those. Sandre ultimately pleaded guilty to multiple felonies, including falsifying evidence and obstruction of justice.
And so she was sentenced to 21 months in prison. After she was caught, the FBI had to go back and re-evaluate 50 murder cases that Sandra and Eagle had been involved in. Luckily though, during this examination, they discovered that in all of these cases, they did not hinge on evidence that Sandra had found, and so there were no convictions that were overturned.
As for Jimmy Nelson, he was eventually convicted of Charita's murder. However, his conviction was overturned, but it had nothing to do with Sandre and Eagle. The evidence used to overturn it was completely separate.
And so to this day, we still don't know what happened to Charita, and her body has still not been found. As for Eagle, nobody was mad at him, and he retired from working crime scenes and got as many treats as he wanted until he passed away peacefully in 2003. Thank you so much for watching.
Let me know what you thought of today's episode in the comments. And remember, we have hundreds of videos for you to binge right now. But if you're looking for a recommendation from me of that one video that's worth your time, well, it's this one right here.
So give it a watch. All right, until next time. See you.
