The content of Dark Arenas includes topics and subject matter that may not be suitable for all audiences. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast and do not represent those of AudioChuck or its employees. Information discussed by the host and interviewees includes content related to crimes against children, abuse, acts of terrorism, and violence. Listener discretion is advised. Atf special agent, Zane Dodd, takes a deep breath, puts his car in park, and idles in silence. Once they've arrived. This is the first homicide his new partner has been to, and he knows this first is going to be the hardest. He's seen plenty of dead bodies, but his partner, she'll likely be distracted by the sight. In their shared silence, she twitches nervously next to him. They both take a moment, compose themselves, then get out. All Zane and his partner know is that there's been a shooting in the South Florida neighborhood, and a man is dead. Several yards away, residents peer on at the scene, which is now lit up by law enforcement lights. A group of police officers and crime scene techs hover around the outline of a body draped with a white sheet.

Zane glances over at his partner, and surprisingly, she looks fine. They scroll around the perimeter together, observing the grim scene in front of them. But after a few moments, Zane notices her behavior change. She no longer appears comfortable. She's got a distant look on her face. Something is definitely different now. It's like she's beginning to understand the gravity of the work waiting ahead of them. Her body begins twitching more. She picks up her pace, then she lays down. She's halted next to a critical piece of evidence, something that will be a big clue in telling Zane and the officers crowded nearby who killed the man laying underneath the sheet. That is the sound of millions of air particles streaming into the nose of a Labrador retriever.

Babs, seat.

The dog's name is Babs, and she's working.

When I have the food bag on, her reward, she's ready to go.

Babs and ATF special agent, Zane Dodd, have been partners for almost three years. Before they got together, Babs was just a normal dog with zero training and no skills the ATF would value.

Atf dogs, when we receive them, they're all failures for the most part. They are people or dogs that have dropped out of this guide dog foundation seeing eye dogs that just didn't quite cut the mustard there. There's also puppies behind bars. We received those dogs. And then our trainers train the dogs to the explosive odors.

Zane knows Bab's well. In fact, he says he knows her probably better than most of his human colleagues.

The dog's motivation is to get fed. So in order for Babs to get food, she has to actually find an explosive. And I can tell when she's getting close to an explosive or a shell casing, she'll start getting excited. She'll have that change of behavior, that excitement, because she knows I'm going to get food.

Zane proves his ability to predict what Babs is going to do and how she's going to act by setting up a little experiment in the conference room we're inside of. A few minutes earlier, I'd just been sitting across from his colleague, Kevin Bonakowski, for an interview. Kevin is the ATF supervisory special agent you heard from in part one. Kevin. Kevin stepped out after we wrapped up his interview, and Zane and I focused on what he and Babb's do for the ATF. The first thing Zane does is brush past the table Kevin and I had just been sitting at and calls Bab's to him. He clips a leash to her collar and takes her out of the room entirely. Then a few minutes later, he returns without her. As he walks through the door, his arms are full of a stack of cardboard boxes that all look identical. He lays them out in a straight line on the carpeted floor with about two feet of distance between them. Before he leaves the room again, he looks at me and gestures to the second box to the end, indicating that I should probably get over to that one with my recorder ready because something is about to happen.

He exits the room again and seconds later comes back with babs and toe. He unhooks the leash from her collar and tells her to seek.

Back, seek. She immediately.

Jets over to the first box in the line, sniffs around and quickly moves on. She goes down the line box by box, then suddenly stops in front of the package I'm standing by. She lays down and begins to salivate. Zane walks over to us and picks up the box and reveals trace amounts of black powder, explosive, packaged inside of it. The substance was completely undetectable to me. I couldn't smell any odor, and there was nothing on the outside of the box that suggested it was any different than the other ones lined up on the carpet. What Babb's did was remarkable, but the experiment wasn't just for me. It's actually something Babb's and Zane do dozens of times a day.

She's on duty 24/7, so my job is to train her every day. So she's hitting older 20, 30 times a day every day, and I do that in a variety of different environments.

The office and conference room we were in is a cushy place to practice Bab's explosive detection skills. But Zane says staying in the same building isn't really realistic. She's going to.

Go to a bunch of different scenes where there may be a lot of people. There may be sirens going, and I need her to be ready for that so she can concentrate on her job of finding the casing or finding the explosive.

The duo practices scent detection scenarios near busy city roads, interstates, residential neighborhoods, warehouses, retail centers, many. Anywhere, bombs or explosive material could be traveling through. Some of these areas might also be where criminal investigators believe a firearm or spent shell casing might be.

The explosive dogs are looking for explosives, and their sense of smell is so good that they can actually smell the powder residue on a firearm and ammunition. So she can find shell casings, firearms that have been tossed by bad guys. Every casing tells a story. Every bullet, all guns are born legal, and it's somewhere along the line that they are diverted to the illegal market. And so that's her job is to say, Okay, here's the aftermath of this particular shell casing or something that was born innocent. And how did it become to be used in this crime?

The story I started this episode with is entirely true. It happened in 2018 and was the first shooting homicide Zane ever took Babs to.

I remember one case where the dead body is there. It's the first dead body that she's seen, and she's just pure love. I mean, she's happiness all the time. And so she thought that it was, I have younger children, that they were playing under the sheet. And so we see the guy's arm under the sheet, and she's thinking, Okay, he's going to play with me.

Her reaction is one I think any innocent dog who's used to seeing people alive would have. At the crime scene, Zane realized pretty quickly that somewhere in Vab's animal brain, she made the connection that the hand poking out from underneath the white sheet indicated something dark was behind the situation.

And then as she got closer, you can see that instinct and are like, Okay, there's something wrong here. So then you see that darkness, and then she has to overcome that to go, Okay, I'm training.

Zane says he and Babs actually deal with the side of deceased victims of crimes in similar ways. At some point, they have to decide to set aside the horrible nature of the call and compartmentalize what disrupts them. Their work, which is finding evidence, is what needs to come first.

As her handler, I'm watching her. I'm trusting her. Okay, get back to your job. And then she picks up the order and she did indeed find the casing from the shooting.

That successful start was just the beginning.

In the past two years, I think she's found somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 shell casings at crime scenes.

Babs and Zane together have thwarted countless violent acts in one of America's most populated states.

There was nails and ball bearings and that thing. And so she was able to find the chemicals in the house that the individual was mixing.

As explosive specialist, Kevin Bonakowski said in part one, he's discovered explosive devices in his jurisdiction that by absolute luck didn't detonate like the bombmaker wanted them to.

Let's say maybe they wouldn't have worked exactly they were the way they were intended, but they were suspicious in nature.

Kevin says that's often the case when a bombmaker doesn't know what they're doing or they're completely uneducated about the materials that they're using. Really, Kevin says bomb makers are always putting themselves in danger when they build a device.

And if they take certain ingredients, again, very unpredictable because you don't know how things are going to react to basicallybased on temperature and humidity. It's very unsafe, obviously.

The more unstable the raw material and chemical mixtures in a homemade bomb are, the harder it is for a maker to predict when a bomb could go off. Shrapnel often embedded in these devices of terror can just as easily kill the maker if the bomb detonates prematurely while being transported or whatever the case may be. Kevin's job focuses a lot on post-blast investigations to figure out what a device was made from, as well as ways to intercept suspicious packages and thwart attacks. But where Zane and Babs really come into the picture is when the ATF is trying to prove if explosive material that isn't easily seen is present, or when the agency is trying to find physical evidence to tie a suspect to the raw materials that made an IED. Here's Zane again, talking from experience.

We were called to an individual that was making explosives with a pressure cooker device. He was making his own black powder, like you had mentioned earlier, with anti-personnel things. There was nails and ball bearings and that thing.

On this call, as Zane and Babs made their way through this search, Babs sniffed out hidden evidence tucked inside of cabinets that her partner and the rest of the agents didn't see.

She was able to find the chemicals in the house that the individual was mixing.

Not only that, Babs followed the unseen residue trail from the raw material hiding spots all the way to the exact room in the house where the guy had been building his devices. So it.

Helps out when we're working a scene to say, Okay, this is a spot where they were, like I said, with the residue, and here's some of the powders, to find that small evidence that is difficult to find as investigators.

In that case, the ATF couldn't just arrest the suspect for having ball bearings, nails, and a pressure cooker in his home. I mean, I know it's definitely a lot of suspicious stuff laying around, but it was the agent's ability to tie the guy to actual explosive powder in the same residence as the shrapnel and pressure cooker that allowed authorities to not only arrest him for assembling explosive devices, but prevent him from detonating those bombs. It's that process that saves lives. The sequence of events of what Zane and Babs are doing every day in all reality is something I often tend to label with drug traits or investigations. Usually, at least what we see on TV shows is that law enforcement dogs and their handlers go into homes or locations and are able to tie drugs or drug making operations to traffickers or dealers. To me, knowing what I now know about bomb makers, it seems just as equally important to have dogs and their handlers trying to sniff out bombs and bomb-making materials and put those criminals behind bars too. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's definitely a benefit to drug sniffing dogs, but I think there's also a huge benefit to people when dogs like babs are doing their thing, especially in an era where sophisticated bombs are all too prevalent.

All of the devices apparently have similar detonators, flip cell phones, if you will, that have police believing that it is all connected. We mentioned in part one, pressure cooker bombs are often used by bombers who want to harm a lot of people at once. They are incredibly dangerous and inflict violent wounds on their victims. The Cernayov brothers used two pressure cooker devices at the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. Just three years later, in 2016, according to CNN's reporting, a New York man was convicted for creating and planting two pressure cooker bombs in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. A package with five pipe bombs was found, and one of those devices exploded as the police and FBI were trying to secure the scene. One bomb detonated and injured 30 people, while the other, thankfully, didn't go off at all. Kevin and Zane didn't want to go into any specific detail of how someone builds these kinds of bombs, but reading between the lines, you pretty much get the picture. A lot of shrapnel stuffed into a hot cooker, which can fit into a small bag and be planted anywhere. It's awful to even think about, but these kinds of bombings do happen and they're usually deadly.

Probably the scariest part to me about everything I'd learned from the ATF is the fact that anyone with enough motivation, access to the internet, and a relatively low budget can make bombs. That doesn't mean I'm walking around thinking a pressure cooker or pipe bomb is going to go off all the time, but it certainly makes me think twice when I'm in big crowds. Both of my interviews with the ATF agents enlighten me to a lot of information I didn't know about the inside world of bombings, bomb makers, and bombing investigations. Now I can't help but pay a little more attention to idle bags or strangely parked vehicles. My natural sense of fear feels sharper, and I think that's something we should all revisit and think about from time to time in our lives. We should be asking the questions, does that look wrong? Did that person mean to leave their bag behind? Should I report a package I didn't order? We can't afford to be ignorant about the dark reality of bombings. Maybe more often, we should look into that dark space and see what we can learn from the experts who live in it.

This episode of Dark Areas was written and produced by Delia D. Ambra, with writing assistants from executive producer, Ashley Flowers. You can find pictures and all of the source material for this episode on our website, darkarenas. Com. Dark Areas is an audio Chuck original show. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?