🌅 Good morning! Let's welcome Lois M. Collins who is starting off the newsletter today by sharing her experience from her perspective reporting on a special project.
When Deseret News photographer Jeff Allred first invited me to join him on a project he was already working, my imagination ran wild. He was documenting the work of human-remains dogs — so-called “cadaver dogs" — and I, like most of the world, knew what they where. Sort of.
When natural disasters happen, I knew that eventually the search for survivors turned into a search for those who hadn’t survived. But I hadn’t thought too much about the dogs and how they were trained or even what it means to return someone who is lost to a family that longs to know what happened.
Sometimes, happy endings aren’t possible, but families never give up hope and never stop searching, as the families of Kiplyn Davis and Reed Jeppson recently explained poignantly to me. These dogs and their handlers sometimes bring at least some measure of peace. It’s an underreported and underappreciated story that I feel really privileged to help explain.
Meet husband and wife team Dee Dillman and Marie Ginman and their dogs, just one of the many search and recovery teams who help families find answers and bring the fallen home.
This is a love story — families with a person-shaped hole in their hearts and the strangers willing to donate hours and effort to try to restore what they can of a truly terrible loss. And dogs with special skills who can make it happen if all goes well.
A shocking number of people go missing each year, some by choice and some by circumstance. Each story has layers of tragedies and people left behind wondering. Sometimes, a dog can provide the answer. A very special dog.
The dogs who bring the fallen home
Some of those very special dogs include Booze, Rhum and Coke.
In 2023, the West Valley Police Department and West Valley City Honorary Colonels Association named Dillman and his dogs Rhum and Coke, and Ginman and her dog Booze as “citizens of the year,” for work solving a missing person case that was part of a suspected crime. They searched a remote mountainous area in Utah’s west desert, where their dogs signaled a find. They called officials and waited outside the scene as investigators confirmed they’d located human remains in what turned out to be a crime scene.
Stories like this missing persons case are unfortunately not unheard of.
More than 600,000 people go missing in the United States each year, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons database, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice.
There are also about 4,400 unidentified bodies recovered in the U.S. each year.
Some of those cases hit home in Utah like the case of Reed Jeppson, who went missing at 15 years old on Oct. 11, 1964, in Salt Lake City.
He's perhaps Utah’s oldest active missing person case.
Sixty years later, the family thinks they know what happened to him. After many decades of looking into it, police are convinced he was kidnapped, assaulted and murdered. But his body has never been found, though they’ve searched sometimes desperately through the intervening decades.
Suzanne Tate got to see cadaver dogs at work during a search for her brother Reed, though he wasn’t found. It wasn’t too surprising; neither family nor law enforcement have any clue where to search. Instead, they have been eliminating areas where he might have been left, looking at a gully behind a neighborhood church and in the area between where he disappeared and the suspect lived those many years ago. “We really have never known where to look. But every shovel of dirt turned over had us hoping: Will this be the one?” she said.
Tate said watching the dogs work is a “strange and heartbreaking process,” full of hope and, in their case, ultimately deep disappointment.
There's a lot that goes into training the dogs, search and rescue missions and ultimately body recovery, but the work is important to those who have lost a loved one.
Read more about these heroic dogs and how they help recover the bodies of loved ones who have gone missing.
The Cougars completed the comeback to keep their unbeaten season alive in a nail-biter finish.
Will Ferrin made a 44-yard field goal with four seconds remaining, and BYU stopped a Utah kickoff return that included several pitches to wrap up the Cougars' 22-21 win over rival Utah.
BYU drove 65 yards in 11 plays to set up the game-winning field goal. The drive initially looked like it was over at the BYU 1 four plays in, when Jake Retzlaff was sacked on fourth down.
But Utah was called for holding on the play, giving the Cougars a first down. BYU then had big plays from Chase Roberts, Darius Lassiter and Hinckley Ropati on the final drive to set up the game-winner.
Read more about how the Cougars drove for the game-winning field goal with 4 seconds to play after trailing 21-10 at halftime.
Packed with behind-the-scenes insights from players like Robbie Bosco and Kelly Smith, game-by-game highlights, and more, this collector's edition is your all-access pass to one of college football's most legendary seasons. Get your copy today and celebrate the triumphs of the 1984 BYU Cougars!
Utah
Holidays on hold: The financial strain of the 2024 holiday season (Deseret News)
Sunny with a warming trend through the weekend (ABC4)
How To Take Care of Yourself in Salt Lake (City Cast)
How Salt Lake City International grows its own holiday decorations (Fox 13)
Kurt Dirks: ‘Trust is the key to leadership and innovation’ (Utah Business)
Utah among dwindling group of states that bans sports betting (Axios)
Get up close, but not too close, with birds of prey at Cedar City event (St. George News)
‘We just kept getting squeezed’: Why Spring Lake voted to become Utah County’s newest town (Daily Herald)
Park City timeline for major Main Street work bumps up against Winter Olympic preparations (The Park Record)
Navajo food traditions tap into the past, and future, of farming the arid Southwest (KSL)
Health
FDA moves to pull popular decongestant from shelves amid effectiveness concerns (CNN)
Getting more light in the day and less at night is good for your health. Here's why (NPR)
Faith
How to watch or attend First Presidency’s Christmas Devotional this year (Church News)
35 years since fall of Berlin Wall: Remembering Latter-day Saints in a divided Germany (Church News)
The odyssey of Dallas Jenkins’ ‘The Best Christmas Pageant Ever’ starts in Utah (Deseret News)
Politics
Who will win the Arizona Senate race — Lake or Gallego? (Deseret News)
Stop bashing democracy: People vote for candidates for lots of different reasons. Trump included (🔒The Dispatch)
The Trump administration transition starts now. Here’s what to know (PBS News)
Have we just witnessed a blow to American democracy, or evidence of its strength? (Deseret News)
A record 13 women will be governors next year after New Hampshire elected Kelly Ayotte (ABC News)
The Nation and The World
America’s prospective homebuyers absorb harsh reality: Mortgage rates probably aren’t coming down for a while (NBC News)
Trump adviser says Ukraine focus must be peace, not territory (BBC)
🗓️ Events Calendar
We put together a calendar list of events and activities going on around the state of Utah over the next month. Check it out and let us know if we are missing anything!
Here are some highlights for events in Utah today:
Grand Kyiv Ballet Nutcracker | Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, Salt Lake City
Utah, USU women’s tennis ITA Conference Masters
Utah men’s tennis Sectional Championships
Weber State women’s tennis — Colorado Cup
UVU, Utah Tech men’s soccer — WAC Tournament
Please reach out to me at sgambles@deseretnews.com if you have any thoughts, feedback or ideas you would like to share!
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