Gene and Sandy Ralston of Boise, Idaho, never intended to become body hunters.
Today no one does it better.
At 70 years old, the Ralstons have recovered more than 130 bodies from the murky depths of North America’s deepest lakes.
Now, they travel throughout the United States and Canada serving grieving families desperate to find their lost loved ones and law enforcement agencies pursuing violent killers.
Gene and Sandy not only have a very unusual hobby: they are unusually good at it.
Excerpt adapted from, Back from the Deep: How Gene and Sandy Ralston Serve the Living by Finding the Dead
There was a handwritten note taped to the windshield of Ralston’s truck.
Call Lieutenant Lunney as soon as you get back to town. It is urgent.
Gene and Sandy had just spent a long day at Beardsley Reservoir outside Sonora, California, searching for Scott Glover’s body.
He was missing for three and a half years after he fell from his boat while fishing.
But the Ralstons found him. Divers recovered the body that afternoon.
This is what the Ralstons do: hunt corpses. They got it by chance.
In 2000, the Ralstons invested in technology known as “side scan sonar,” which was developed by the military in the 1950s and became widely available in the 1980s.
Gene and Sandy thought the equipment would be useful in mapping lake and river bottoms for their environmental consulting work. But within weeks of putting it into operation, they imagined the body of a 23-year-old man on the ground in Bear Lake, Utah.
Word spread quickly about an Idaho couple with a mysterious machine that could reveal the secrets of the deep.
Soon, the Ralstons received phone calls from all over the United States and Canada from grieving relatives desperate for answers.
It didn’t take long for authorities to notice the couple’s remarkable skill. And sure enough, that’s why Lt. Lunney of the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Office called.
There was a handwritten note taped to the windshield of Ralston’s truck. Call Lieutenant Lunney as soon as you get back to town. It is urgent. Gene and Sandy (above) had just spent a long day at Beardsley Reservoir outside Sonora, California, searching for Scott Glover’s body.
In 2000, the Ralstons invested in technology known as “side-scan sonar,” which was developed by the military in the 1950s and became widely available in the 1980s. (Above) High-resolution image captured by a sonar from side sweep
In 2000, the Ralstons invested in technology known as “side-scan sonar,” which was developed by the military in the 1950s and became widely available in the 1980s. (Above) High-resolution image captured by a probe side scan
He had been working with the FBI on a series of kidnappings in the area between late 2001 and early 2002, and they had just taken a decisive opportunity.
A suspect in the case had agreed to betray his associates.
Ainar Altmanis, a forty-two-year-old Latvian, told investigators that the kidnappings were part of a murder plot for money.
Altmanis alleged that Soviet-born gangsters Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas, who lived in the United States, were holding wealthy people hostage to extort cash from their families, and had racked up $1 million in ransoms.
The worst thing, the informant confessed, is that the five people kidnapped by the group had already been murdered.
The body of one victim had been recovered, but four others were still missing, and Altmanis said they had been thrown from the Parrotts Ferry Bridge into the New Melones Reservoir, not far from Sonora.
But the reservoir was 12,500 acres wide and more than three hundred feet deep. Finding the victims would be nearly impossible, and without the additional bodies as evidence, it would be difficult to bring the case to trial.
They needed Gene and Sandy’s help.
The next morning, FBI agents briefed the Ralstons and told them they had no obligation to assist in the investigation, as doing so meant possible retaliation from a criminal group, potentially connected to the Russian mafia.
Gene and Sandy weighed the risk and decided to go ahead.
The FBI arranged for a dive team in New York to send a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to California to assist them.
Early one morning while searching the reservoir, FBI agent James Davidson walked to the dock and discovered that the Ralstons were already in the water.
‘Gene and Sandy. . . They got up early and went out on their own,” Davidson told me. “That’s how determined they were.”
It was difficult work. In accidental drownings, almost all bodies are found in the same position: face up, knees slightly bent, arms at sides, forearms and hands raised in the water, creating a telltale W-shaped shadow on the body. the sonar. But in homicides you don’t see the typical image of arms and legs out.
The next morning, FBI agents briefed the Ralstons and told them they had no obligation to assist in the investigation, as doing so meant possible retaliation from a criminal group, potentially connected to the Russian mafia. (Above) Gene Ralston and Sandy are shown with their boat on Monday, September 10, 2012.
Victims of Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas: Nick Kharabadze (left) and George Safiev (right)
Victims of Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas: Alexander Umansky (left), Rita Pekler (center), Meyer Muscatel (right)
Murder victims are often “packaged,” that is, tied up and carried.
Furthermore, the bottom of the lake was full of all kinds of debris that people had thrown from the bridge. It was difficult for companies to classify sonar images of refrigerators, washing machines and human remains.
Incredibly, the Ralstons found one of the four bodies in New Melones while fishing alone on the lake, dragging their sonar behind the boat.
When Gene and Sandy managed to identify something else that looked like a body, the FBI ROV operator dismissed it as a rock after viewing it with the submersible’s underwater camera.
One of the FBI agents told the ROV operator to gently push him. ‘It was like crashing into a beehive. All kinds of little bugs proliferated,” Gene told me later.
It was probably a swarm of aquatic insects feeding on the corpse.
‘There was enough material in his remains, which is typical of someone who has been in the water for a long time, that it looked like a rock from a distance. It was a gelatinous mass,’ he said.
Over two weeks, the Ralstons successfully located the four bodies at the bottom of the New Melones Reservoir.
The bodies revealed compelling evidence that directly linked the victims to the perpetrators. The killer had used zip ties to tie the bodies to the weights. And the same type of restraints were found in one of the suspects’ homes. The FBI also found receipts for the weights. But links with the Russian mafia were never established.
Six people were convicted for their involvement in the plot and Mikhel and Kadamovas were sentenced to death. They are currently in a high-security federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, awaiting execution. Four others convicted in the case received sentences ranging from 11 years to life in prison.
The case helped convince the FBI to expand its diving program with new underwater search teams established in Los Angeles, Washington and Miami. The agency also acquired sonar equipment based on the same configuration.
Today Gene and Sandy work almost full time and on a volunteer basis. They only charge for expenses, basically gas money to get to the lake. And they are still among the best underwater search and recovery specialists in the world.
Police and volunteer organizations are often limited in terms of resources and expertise when it comes to deep water. If the initial search fails, families must fund any additional efforts. They can hire a sales team, which can cost more than $4,000 a day on average.
Or you can call Gene and Sandy.
They serve the living by finding the dead.
Back from the depths: How Gene and Sandy Ralston serve the living from Finding the Dead by Doug Horner is published by Steerforth on March 12