The site looks promising, but so do several others on pristine Whidbey Island. Agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) hack through the thorny brush with a machete, leading LaBarca to a mound here, a depression there. LaBarca can barely contain himself at a spot where the forest meets marshy tidal lands. “We’re, um, getting data we’ve seen before,” he says, looking up from his screen. Don Johnston, the NCIS’s lead agent in the Hunter case, punctures the earth with a five-foot metal probe. The dirt feels soft. Once LaBarca is back at the Matawan, N.J., offices of US Radar, Johnston will further explore the site using two considerably older technologies: cadaver-sniffing dogs and archeology tools.
It’s taken ground-penetrating radar–GPR for short–30 years to become a valued weapon against crime. The science itself isn’t new: in the 1960s, NASA scientists used crude GPR to determine whether the first manned moon landing would sink into lunar dust. It was not until the mid-1990s, when British and Belgian authorities used far more sophisticated equipment in two serial-murder cases, that the technique earned real respect as a tool for finding bodies, drugs and cash. “In the past, police had to dig a lot of holes–and pay to fill them in,” says Jon Dittmer, a geophysicist with ERA Technology, the London-area firm that builds LaBarca’s equipment. Radar offers a cheap, less-invasive way of peering 10 feet down. In the last six months, says geologist Dan Delea of GSSI, a New Hampshire manufacturer, “we’ve been swamped with law-enforcement calls that start out, ‘We have this mysterious site in the woods…’ "
LaBarca’s machine has two components. On the bottom, a two-way antenna fires electromagnetic waves into the ground and records the patterns with which they strike targets and bounce back. On top, a controller processes and displays the data as vertical or horizontal slices of the earth. LaBarca’s eye can detect objects, cavities and locations where digging has disturbed the soil. But radar isn’t photography: last fall, when he helped Chicago police unsuccessfully hunt for possible victims of mass killer John Wayne Gacy, one suspicious-looking object turned out to be a saucepan. When LaBarca is working for his usual clients–utilities or contractors–the length and uniformity of, say, a buried pipe makes it easy to spot. Detective work is trickier. A corpse has soft contours and degrades over time.
The Hunter case is a natural for radar. Francine Hunter vanished around Labor Day 1996. Her husband, Derek, then a lieutenant at a naval air station, reported her missing. He said the couple had stopped at a shopping mall en route to a day of target-shooting in the Cascade Mountains. He said Francine introduced him to a man she identified as someone she’d known in high school. Derek said that during the stop, Francine and the man disappeared. An international search by the NCIS, the Navy’s own detective agency, found no trace of Francine. But with no proof that she’s dead–such as her remains–investigators list her as a missing person.
Did she run off with an old friend? Or is there more to the story? The NCIS is clearly treating the case as a possible homicide. Last December, Johnston told the Whidbey News-Times that he had “one suspect” in the case. He added that Derek Hunter’s cooperation had been “minimal to non-existent.” For reasons Johnston won’t discuss, the NCIS is focusing an exhaustive search on 100 acres of woods, about 150 yards from the base housing where the Hunters lived.
Derek Hunter told NEWSWEEK that he thinks his wife is alive. “I do believe she’s out there somewhere,” he said, adding that “she’s being helped to hide very well.” His Seattle attorney, Jim Frush, says Derek, who has left the Navy, is an innocent man victimized twice–first by his wife’s disappearance, and now by zealous NCIS agents who “are trying to do everything they can to make his life hell.” Why? Because, says Frush, they need a suspect.
In the end, LaBarca’s first search didn’t produce a body. Johnston’s digging team later unearthed a wood-and-metal contraption–perhaps part of an old wharf–from beneath the plywood. The spot at the forest’s edge yielded rotting wood, possibly a railroad tie. The excavations were delicate: it’s sometimes possible to remove a body and find the gravedigger’s footprints beneath it. And the NCIS isn’t finished. Johnston will next lead perhaps 100 searchers on a shoulder-to-shoulder examination of the forest floor. If they find possible grave sites, LaBarca says he’ll return.
GPR has a promising future beyond detective work. Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are using the experiences of Earthbound technicians like LaBarca, who was trained as a civil engineer, to build satellite-based radar that will look for water beneath the surface of Mars. But for Francine Hunter’s family, no scientific quest is more important than explaining her disappearance. “I want to bring her home,” says sister Christine Tremblay Turner. “A woman this wonderful doesn’t deserve an unmarked grave.” The use of GPR to search for a body might have intrigued Francine, who showed a passion for murder mysteries. Too bad she wasn’t home on Whidbey Island, looking out a window, watching Ron LaBarca push his radar through the forest.
