<figure class="wp-block-audio"></figure>

*** This is a continuation of my interview with Brian, without preamble. I *highly* recommend listening to Part 1 first.

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:

• Deseret 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)

---

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop Yvonne a line at ykjorlien@gmail.com

---

Transcript, Part 2

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so a search protocol was established through 9/11.

Brian Paulsen: Correct.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you know anybody else like that, is that the kind of standard now for searching either catastrophes or any time there’s a lot to sift through?

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, literally and figuratively. Yes. That’s one thing that I didn’t, that I wish I had inquired about and what was their methodology to searching in the landfills and such. A couple of them volunteered and they seemed to do something very similar. They brought the trash out. There are a couple that actually just sent investigators or law enforcement only in to the landfill and they would search an area and then they would be done. There’s not a lot of, I don’t have a lot of information on what others did as far as their methodology.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It sounds like is a bit of a continuum too in search methods.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so from our previous conversations, it sounds like this case that where you had to go in and search the landfill for this boy, prompted you to then do research on landfill searches.

Brian Paulsen: So I came out of the landfill, which it really consumed, basically eight months of my life. And the whole investigation had – there were nights out driving around saying okay, maybe went there, just letting your mind kind of take you and not really saying, okay I got to put it into this –so I was working 18, 20 hour days, sleeping for about four and then getting up again.

I got done with this case in August and we knew we had the trial coming up the next spring, but I had all this time on my hands and I thought, “what am I gonna do?” I had always thought about getting my Master’s degree and I had taken a crime scene, a year-long crime scene course that was put on by a community college in conjunction with the hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska, the state capitol. Nebraska Wesleyan had taken that over and that turned it into a Master’s program. One of the instructors, and eventually the dean of the program, was one of our searchers. She came out. Her background is in archeology and specifically forensic archeology. Dr. Connor. She came out and searched only one day, maybe two. She was one of those that had to get back because of commitments, so I drove her back down to her car, and she was saying, “hey, this is my background, I think what you’re doing is exactly how it should be done. Just continue. If there’s anything you need help with or questions, just let me know.” And really we had, that was kind of where we had really formed our relationship.

After I’d got done with the case, I said, let’s get into forensics, and it was right there in Lincoln, Nebraska, so it was an hour-drive for me. So I went in. It was an accelerated course. I met with a number of cohorts that were doing it as well, some of them that I knew and some of them that I would become good friends with. We started our Master’s program. It was pretty early on that I identified that, “Gosh, I want to know: what were our chances? At what point should we have stopped? What should we have done differently?” I just wanted to know more and, if I ever had to do it again, refine how I’d do it.

As part of my thesis, Dr. Connor sent out an email blast to a number of archaeologists and said, “Hey, are you aware of any landfill searches?” And I sent written letters to state patrols, or highway patrols, depending on what their designation, as well as the state’s attorney’s office because I felt they would have helped at least prosecute or investigate or have knowledge of it within their states. And then all the large departments – Dallas, New York City – if they had a specific investigative unit, I sent a letter to them. All in all, I probably sent out 125, 100 to 125 letters.

My boss at the time, I had made chief 3 years before this (I had made chief in ‘99), and my city manager, I went to him and said, “Can I use official letterhead for my research?” And he said, “Absolutely. This is going to help law enforcement, whether it’s us or somebody else, yes, please do.” And I told him: I will pay postage out of my own pocket, but I felt it would be more official letterhead. I believe that was also some of the reason why some of the agencies did respond. It was of interest that the letter would go out and it went to one department and they’d say, “Oh you need to probably talk to this department because I know they had one, and it was a smaller agency but there was just no way I could send out that many letters. One in particular was a case in southwest Colorado. That was somebody else, probably Denver PD, that said, “We didn’t have one, but so and so did in the southwest corner. You might want to reach out to them.” And we reached out to them as well, any time we got that information.  

I should also say that my thesis was also a presentation at the international forensic archaeology conference in St. Louis, and I don’t recall the year. Probably had to have been 2008, I believe.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because you gonna go look it up.

Brian Paulsen: Yup. Absolutely. Quite honestly, that’s where I met Kimberlee. And other components of that book, Forensic Archaeology book, where my research is published, there were a couple others that were there as well. And I believe one was from the UK. So some of those crime scenes, unusual crime scenes were presented that day. 

And one of my cohorts in the program, his thesis was on decomposition and different, not stages, different speeds of decomposition in controlled environments. Because we knew that the landfill was, as I said, 32 degrees, and when we were in there in July, and we also knew it was sealed from oxygen or a lot of oxygen. So he did his using pig cadavers to work on the decomp side of it. So he, we kind of worked hand in hand, and really kind of discovered some of the information from each other. Just off of those two, off of his and mine.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Okay, so when you sent out these letters, were you just asking them if you could talk them, or were you sending them a survey? What was the level of engagement you were looking for?

Brian Paulsen: I was hoping that they would reach back out. Obviously all of my contact informa