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:

• How Brian led a search of a landfill in Sarpy County, Nebraska to find the remains of a 4-year-old boy murdered by his father and placed in a dumpster.





• The search, which involved over 600 volunteers from the community over 30 days, with meticulous records from the landfill helping to determine the search area.





• Search methods, which included excavators loading trash into trucks to spread it out for searching, with trucks dumping further from the landfill for teams to manually search.





• Who searched. Only first responders searched initially for safety and mental health reasons, but public volunteers were recruited when more searchers were needed.





• Results of the search. No remains were found but the perpetrator was still convicted based on evidence and confession. The search provided closure for the victim’s family.





• Community support was found to be critical to the success of the Sarpy County search operation, with hundreds of volunteers, donations, and cooperation from local businesses.





• Paulsen’s subsequent research. He looked into 46 landfill searches and found a success rate of under 50%, with the chances of recovery dropping significantly after 30 days.





• The search raised awareness of landfill search protocols and lessons on factors like timeliness, search area size, and mental health support for searchers.





• No centralized database currently tracks landfill search data, but individual case records could help build understanding over time.

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

• Desert News: Still searching landfill for boy’s body (June 22, 2003)





• Desert News: Landfill hunt for Nebraska boy ends (July 26, 2003)





• Forensic Archaeology: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives (2019, Springer; Amazon.ca link)

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 p