Michael Yon

Her photo was on television and in the papers and local radio stations broadcast the alert. Posters with her image were stapled all around. Her greatest handicap to escape was probably Peaches, the poodle by her side. Her loyal pet was just another scent or sound to alert searchers and their dogs.

By now a hundred men and women were searching, with experience and technology in their corner, yet the evasive Elinore somehow remained ahead of them, or let them slip by. Her advantages were her superb physical condition and the dense jungle canopy that occluded the helicopter’s infrared sensors.

The vegetation was so thick in places that the hunters would practically have to stumble upon her. Yet the jungle was surrounded with densely populated neighborhoods, trapping her in the hot and steamy June growth while mosquitoes buzzed and snakes slithered and the giant banana spiders, the largest of whose legs span nearly half a foot, patiently clung to their webs.

Spot where Elinore was found on the ground.

The Alachua County Sheriff’s Office in Gainesville, Florida was leading the woman-hunt. The deputies had trained for special cases but this had already gone past special. Time was everyone’s enemy, especially as the hunt dragged on, so deputies called in a University of Florida civilian “mind tracker” whose expertise was predicting where Elinore might hide.

Meredith Rowe, PhD, was in Utah when she got the call, but she quickly returned to Gainesville. After examining maps and reviewing the known facts, she used these to predict Elinore’s path. Having studied a thousand cases, Dr. Rowe knew this was as much a match of minds between her and Elinore as it was a campaign of helicopters, dogs, volunteers and seasoned law enforcement officers.

While the Alachua County deputies, Gainesville Police, the University of Florida police and others continued to launch organized searches, Elinore was avoiding their best efforts and apparently doubling back to reoccupy areas that had already been searched. Bringing Elinore in alive would be difficult.

Map created by Dr. Rowe to predict and describe and Elinore’s steps.

Hours had already extended into days when Dr. Rowe stepped in. The few facts she had about Elinore did not bode for a good outcome. Elinore may have been 66 years old, but she had been an athlete well into middle age, competing in the Boston Marathon in her late 50s. She’d been running marathons for years and her life was hallmarked with tales of her trekking off to Mexico with $20 and a backpack just to roam the country for two weeks on her own. And though apparently she had no food, water was plentiful and somehow she was feeding herself.

The streams were cool, clear water running through the jungle, and alligators use those streams as hidden highways between the lakes, rivers and swamps. Day after day trackers continued to slog through mud and heat, while the helicopter infrared sensor was mostly blinded by the jungle canopy. The search dogs were getting no scent. As the first full week came to a close, Elinore was toughing it out, apparently surviving off the land, sleeping on the ground. Jungles are raucous, noisy places at night. The loudest is probably the owls with the hoo hoo hoo hooo hoooo! amid the steady sounds of insects, branches rustling when unseen animals pass through as quiet fireflies blink their lights, fly a short distance and land, keeping blinking, and then stop.

Found asleep.

Dr. Rowe was good. She had accurately predicted Eleanor’s location more than once, but the woman was elusive as a buck and she was afraid. But as week two began and there was still no clear sign, the “mind tracker” began to fear the worst: Elinore would slip away. Then, on the eleventh day, a construction worker spotted a small dog emerging from the jungle. The media alerts had paid dividends: the man recognized the dog as Peaches, Elinore’s poodle, and called 911.

Deputy David Visconti was first to respond to the call and he also recognized the poodle as Peaches. Visconti, who’d been on the task since Day 1, knew the chances of finding Elinore alive were growing more remote with every passing day. Surrounded as she was, she could only hide. Visconti knew he might only help recover her body which would be easier for the dogs to locate as the hot days rolled by. Although no one was prepared to admit defeat yet, the call went out to bring in the cadaver dog.

As if verifying Visconti’s dread, the dog who finds the dead picked up the scent of rotting flesh and tracked off into the jungle to what likely would be a grisly sight. Following on the heels of the handler, they found only a giant dead snake. Sniffing the wind for more rotting flesh, the dog turned its nose away from Elinore and pulled the team further into the jungle.

News of the Peaches find spread and other officers began arriving on the scene, but by now Visconti was cutting his way through the jungle with a machete following the dog and handler away from Elinore. After an hour and a half of steaming heat wore down dog and handler, finally there was a clue. The dog found Peaches’ tennis ball, leash and Elinore’s shoes. She was close, but the dog was tired, so Visconti directed a deputy to take the dog team out and to deploy a fresh team.

Meanwhile, Visconti, an ex-soldier, kept hacking and slicing with his machete, sweating, wiping his brow, searching the immediate area, now following his own instincts instead of the dog’s nose. Elinore and that poodle were not easily separated, Visconti knew, she had to be near. Besides, this was precisely the area where Dr. Rowe had told them to concentrate their search.

Visconti found nothing, but he did not want to lose that spot. With no GPS to mark it–not that it would have worked in the jungle–he wisely began slashing a path straight back to the command post for reinforcements to enter and begin a grid search using the find as an epicenter.

He slashed through several hundred yards of dense and tangled vegetation until he came to a chest-deep stream. In the lush green, out of the corner of his eye, he saw clothing. Moving closer, he saw a foot. A sinking feeling came over Visconti: he’d found Elinore a day too late.

Kneeling beside Elinore, Deputy Visconti at first saw only that she was very dirty, but as he examined her body, he saw her breathing.

“Elinore,” he said, softly. No response.
“Elinore,” he repeated.
“Okay,” she said, waking up.
“I’m Deputy Visconti from the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office. Are you thirsty? Would you like a drink?”
“No, no, I have not been drinking,” Elinore insisted.
“Do you know where you are?”
“Yes, Gainesville.”

Elinore had been sleeping when Visconti almost stumbled over her. He did not want to move her, but the more awake she became the greater the risk that she would panic and slip away, so he was not going to leave her alone. He yelled out loud to the command post, located on a road less than 50 yards away. The jungle sprang alive with the commotion of dozens of officers and medical personnel rushing in, slicing the path as they followed his voice. But Elinore and Visconti were on the other side of the stream and it was chest deep.

Condominiums were being renovated nearby, and quick-thinking deputies took doors from the job site into the jungle to make a bridge. They loaded the bewildered Elinore onto a stretcher, and rushed her to the local hospital. The doctors who pronounced her fit said she did not appear dehydrated or even hungry and apparently had been finding food. No one will ever know exactly how Elinore survived, but there was fresh running water with fish, and there were birds, squirrels and cattail roots.

News that Elinore had been found alive and taken into care spread quickly and came as a relief to everyone involved, because Elinore was not a wanted fugitive. Elinore the athlete, adventurer and apparently accomplished backwoodsman, has Alzheimer’s disease. Like many of the millions of Americans afflicted with the disease, she had wandered off and became disoriented. In Florida, the area where Elinore was found might be called “dense forest,” “wetland” or “swamp.” Yet to someone who has trampled through jungles in India, Laos, Nicaragua and many more, the area where Elinore was discovered surely is a jungle.

To most of us, the experience of “coming to” in a place we don’t seem to know, not clearly remembering where we were going or how we got there, would be distressing and panic inducing. Add to that the sounds of strangers calling out, chasing and driving the dramatic chaos of an organized search, and one can empathize with Elinore, whose faculty to comprehend what was happening and reason her way through it was itself an early and ongoing target of a disease that is a national and worldwide scourge of nearly unimaginable proportions. In the United States alone, nearly everyone knows someone like Elinore, and the annual cost in dollars is more than the combined cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

(L-R) Colonel Emery Gainey, Detective Matt Barr and Dr. Meredith Rowe, just near where Elinore was found.

Standing where Elinore was found, Dr. Rowe later told me that the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office is the best in the country when it comes to proactive training and smart searching for Alzheimer’s patients, and she commended the leadership and attitude from top down.

Dr. Rowe singled out Colonel Emery Gainey as an extraordinarily adept leader, open to “outside the box” ideas, such as “Project Lifesaver,” a proven system which he implemented in his jurisdiction. “Project Lifesaver” is built around a bracelet designed specifically for finding Alzheimer’s and dementia patients who can, despite the diminished capacity caging in their neural networks, nonetheless be experts at escape and hiding.

Not all the cases end as fortunately. Searches can cost millions of dollars–and most law enforcement agencies, according to Dr. Rowe, are clueless when it comes to the particulars of searching for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients who are almost always found within one mile of where they disappear. One patient near Jacksonville was found when searchers stumbled over his body. The man had camouflaged himself with leaves and died in his hiding space.

Although there are no hard statistics, Dr. Rowe estimates that helicopters find only about 5%, and most patients found by air are usually dead, floating in water. She recalled one patient who died on a roof and the helicopter actually missed him. Dogs find less than 5%, says Dr. Rowe.

Dr. Rowe says that when patients escape care-centers, those centers often are reluctant to call law enforcement because they fear liability, but fact is, Alzheimer’s patients probably could escape some county jails, so it’s important to call the troops immediately and front-load a heavy search. Dr. Rowe sees a pattern where the first days of searching are not concentrated efforts. As days roll on without success, the searches intensify, but by then it’s usually too late. Amber Alerts are not particularly helpful in finding patients who are hiding. If the only choice were search or don’t search, there would be something unseemly about calculating costs. But millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours can be spent to recover a dead body, yet the Project Lifesaver radio tracking bracelets cost only about $250 and most patients who wander off while wearing them are recovered, alive, within half an hour.

Colonel Tommy Carter, is Chief of Training at Project Lifesaver, International in Chesapeake, Virginia. Carter, a retired deputy, says the bracelets have a range of 5 to 7 miles, and that since 1999, there have been 1,376 searches with 100% success, meaning everyone was alive when they were found. Average search time is less than 30 minutes. More than 500 agencies currently have the system, and 42 more are coming aboard as this goes to press.

The Alachua County Sheriff’s Office is outfitted with the inexpensive tracking gear. Colonel Gainey mentioned that many families of Alzheimer’s victims have no idea that this gear is available. Even though Elinore’s family had not put the bracelet on her wrist, Gainey encouraged his people to think freely and one of his deputies got the idea of putting a bracelet on Peaches the poodle hoping she would lead them back to Elinore. But Deputy Visconti found her first.

An Alzheimer’s Memory Walk is scheduled for November 4th at Westside Park, NW 8th Avenue & NW 34th Street, Gainesville, Florida. Registration begins at 8:00 AM. Detective Visconti, Colonel Emery Gainey, and other Alachua County deputies will be there, as will Dr. Meredith Rowe and members of Elinore’s family. Project Lifesaver will have an information table there as well. Please mark the event on your calendar and come on down. To pledge financial support for the walk, please click here. To learn more about Alzheimers’ and related diseases, visit www.alz.org. The National Institute on Aging has a website dedicated to this problem.

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