Gene and Sandy Ralston of Boise, Idaho never intended to become body hunters.
Today, no one does it better.
In their 70s, the Ralstons recovered more than 130 bodies from the murky depths of North America’s deepest lakes.
Now they travel across the US and Canada providing their services to grieving families desperately searching for lost loved ones and law enforcement agencies hunting violent killers.
Gene and Sandy not only have a very special hobby, they are also extremely good at it.
Adapted excerpt from, Back from the Deep: How Gene and Sandy Ralston Serve the Living by Finding the Dead
A handwritten note was taped to the windshield of the Ralston truck.
Call Lieutenant Lunney as soon as you get back to town. It’s urgent.
Gene and Sandy had just spent a long day at the Beardsley Reservoir, outside Sonora, California, searching for the body of Scott Glover.
He had been missing for three and a half years after falling from his boat while fishing.
But the Ralstons found him. Divers recovered the body that afternoon.
This is what the Ralstons do: body hunting. They ended up there 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 the bottoms of lakes and rivers for their environmental consulting work. But within weeks of putting it to use, they imagined the body of a 23-year-old on the floor of Bear Lake, Utah.
Word quickly spread about an Idaho couple with a mysterious machine that could reveal the secrets of the deep.
Soon, the Ralstons were receiving calls from across the United States and Canada from relatives desperate for answers.
It didn’t take long for police to take notice of the couple’s remarkable skills. And sure enough, that’s why Lt. Lunney of the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Office stopped by.
A handwritten note was taped to the windshield of the Ralston truck. Call Lieutenant Lunney as soon as you get back to town. It’s urgent. Gene and Sandy (above) had just spent a long day at the Beardsley Reservoir, outside Sonora, California, searching for the body of Scott Glover.
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 side-scan sonar
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 side-scan sonor
He had worked with the FBI on a series of kidnappings in the area between late 2001 and early 2002 – and they had just made a decisive breakthrough.
A suspect in the case had agreed to attack his associates.
Ainar Altmanis, a forty-two-year-old boy from Latvia, told investigators that the kidnappings were part of a murder plot.
Altmanis claimed that Soviet-born gangsters Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas, who lived in the US, were taking wealthy people hostage to extort their families for cash – and that they had amassed $1 million in ransoms.
What was worse, the informant admitted, was that all five people kidnapped by the group had already been killed.
The body of one victim had been recovered, but four others were still missing. Altmanis said they were thrown from the Parrotts Ferry Bridge into the New Melones Reservoir, not far from Sonora.
But the reservoir was 12,500 hectares wide and more than a hundred meters deep. Finding the victims would be virtually impossible – and without the extra bodies as evidence, it would be a difficult case to bring to justice.
They needed Gene and Sandy’s help.
The next morning, the Ralstons were briefed by FBI agents and told that they were under no obligation to assist in the investigation as this meant possible retaliation by a criminal group possibly 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 ship a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to California to assist them.
Early one morning during the search for the reservoir, FBI agent James Davidson walked down to the dock and discovered that the Ralstons were already on the water.
“Gene and Sandy. . . got up early and went out alone,” Davidson told me. “That’s how determined they were.”
It was a difficult job. In accidental drownings, almost every corpse is found in the same position: on the bottom, knees slightly bent, arms out to the sides, forearms and hands up in the water, creating a telltale W-shaped shadow on the sonar. But in murder cases you don’t see the typical image of outstretched arms and legs.
The next morning, the Ralstons were briefed by FBI agents and told that they were under no obligation to assist in the investigation as this meant possible retaliation by a criminal group possibly 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 “wrapped,” meaning they are tied up and weighed down.
In addition, the bottom of the lake was littered with all kinds of garbage that people had dumped from the bridge. They were difficult businesses to search through sonar images of refrigerators, washing machines and human remains.
Incredibly, the Ralstons found one of the four bodies in New Melones while towing the lake on their own, towing 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 on the submarine’s underwater camera.
One of the FBI agents told the ROV operator to push it gently. ‘It was like bumping into a beehive. There were all kinds of little bugs flying away,” Gene told me later.
It was probably a swarm of aquatic insects feeding on the corpse.
‘There was just enough material on her remains, which is typical of someone who had been in the water for a long time, that from a distance it looked like a rock. It was a gelatinous mass,” he said.
Over two weeks, the Ralstons successfully located all four bodies at the bottom of the New Melones Reservoir.
The bodies revealed hard evidence that directly linked the victims to the perpetrators. The killer had used cable ties to tie the bodies to the weights. And the same brand of fasteners was found at one of the suspect’s homes. The FBI also found receipts for the weights. But no ties were ever established with the Russian mafia.
Six people were convicted for their participation in the plot and Mikhel and Kadamovas received the death penalty. They are currently in a federal maximum security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, awaiting execution. Four others convicted in the case received sentences ranging from 11 years to life behind bars.
The case helped convince the FBI to expand its diving program with new underwater search teams based in Los Angeles, Washington and Miami. The agency also purchased sonar equipment based on the same setup.
Today, Gene and Sandy work almost full-time and on a voluntary basis. They just charge fees, basically gas money to get to the lake. And they remain among the best underwater search and recovery specialists in the world.
Often police and volunteer organizations are 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 commercial outfit, which can cost an average of more than $4,000 per day.
Or they can call Gene and Sandy.
They must find the living through the dead.
Back from the depths: How Gene and Sandy Ralston Serve the Living by Finding the Dead by Doug Horner is published by Steerforth on March 12