BELLE FOURCHE - The steep tree-covered hillside to the south casts shadows as dark as the police work Saturday morning.

A team of bloodhounds joined law enforcement in a search for any possible evidence in connection with the disappearance just over five years ago of Beverly Ozuna-Ulrich, a grandmother who was 43 when she was last seen in Belle Fourche Oct. 27, 2003.

As the team broke for lunch, Police Chief Tom Maunders said, "We found things of interest, and we will do more."

Ozuna-Ulrich stood 5 feet tall and weighed approximately 110 pounds. Her hair was black with gray and dark brown highlights. She had a tattoo, "Steven," on an arm and a pierced eyebrow.

Maunders said Saturday morning that the case of Ozuna-Ulrich's disappearance is still open. Both Butte County State's Attorney Timothy Vander Heide and the South Dakota Attorney General's office remain involved.

The family also remembers.

A candlelight vigil October 17 at St. Paul's Catholic Church in Belle Fourche brought out ongoing concerns from relatives that the disappearance had been forgotten.

Maunders said Saturday's search was an intensive follow-up on earlier leads in the case.

The search was scheduled to continue into Sunday morning at the location at the west edge of Belle Fourche, and perhaps at another location, the police chief said.

Bloodhounds have been documented in finding human remains older than a century and a half. Only a laboratory could draw a connection between some sort of remains and a known human, Maunders said.

Part of the difficulty is the 20-acre search plot itself.

"You're talking about an area around Belle Fourche where for over 100 years we have had people, and very likely human graves," he said.

Long before that, the area may have been an ideal camping site for Native Americans. The wooded hillside offers fuel and shelter; the Belle Fourche River and the big flat now home for the Roundup Grounds rodeo and sports complex still offers excellent graze for horses.

Maunders - and dog experts from Dakota Territory Search Dogs - noted that sometimes human remains may be identifiable as such, and sometimes not.

If not, there is the laboratory.

Joining Belle Fourche police in Saturday's search were dog handlers Denny Adams of Conde, and Nolan Baldwin of Edgeley, N.D.

Adams has taken his skill with dogs as far as Kenya where one of his bloodhounds was used to track elephant poachers.

Butte County Sheriff's officers and state law enforcement joined the relatively small search group. Adams prefers to have only a small group of searchers involved, and has strict rules for human support staff as he lets the bloodhound follow its nose without a leash or other physical controls.

Trained dogs help in search for missing woman

BELLE FOURCHE - If there's evidence of the disappearance of Beverly Ozuna-Ulrich, Denny Adams of Dakota Territory Search Dogs is "100 percent" certain the well-trained bloodhounds will find it.

"I am that confident in our dogs," he said after a police briefing on the five-year-old disappearance case.

Adams, of Conde, and Nolan Baldwin of Edgeley, N.D., brought Molly and Rusty to Belle Fourche Friday for an early briefing before searching a 20-acre area on the west edge of town.

The work to find some sort of physical evidence for the disappearance is not the first time for either man.

"I had been doing criminal investigation since 1965," Adams said. "We have taken our bloodhounds to Kenya. We spent a year with the FBI in North Carolina looking for Robert Rudolph, worked many high profile cases with federal, state and local agencies."

Adams has worked with the hounds about 20 years, Baldwin about 10. Baldwin's the first to tell anyone that he uses Adams' techniques on a search.

Five years seems like a long time to look for evidence, but Adams said, "In our line of work, in the utilization of our dogs, it is never too old or too late."

Baldwin added that there has been a documented instance of a bloodhound finding human remains after more than a century and a half.

The dogs can track living people or search out the remains of a human.

Living people have odors that can be covered, Adams said, but the individual's scent can't be covered.

"Once you are deceased," he said, "we pretty much all smell the same through our bone marrow."

A fully-clothed person who dies under a tree may still have a "personal scent" five to seven years later in remnants of clothing.

"But your bones would be what we call cadaver scent, and that's what the bloodhounds will be asked to do," he said.

"We have found parts of the body no bigger than the end of your little finger," Adams said. "Usually when you have been exposed, Mother Nature surely isn't very kind to you."

As for the dogs, they are even able to detect a body under water.

The two are in Belle Fourche on their own time.

Adams said, "We come into the community to help; we're up here only for our expenses."

The city is covering those costs.

The dogs are trained to sniff out the evidence they're asked to find, but not to touch it.

Baldwin said they are careful not to let anything happen that could possibly contaminate a bit of evidence.

As in the Belle Fourche case, that evidence may need DNA testing, and Adams said, "Our dogs will not pickup a bone, period."

He added they will not penetrate the ground, either. "If there's anything there at all, they are going to hit on it; and it's up to us to unearth it."

Strict rules observed during the search and intense training help the handlers' confidence in the dogs.

"We are going to give 110 percent, and that of the dogs," Adams said. "As long as someone is still concerned and is still looking, we're going to be by their side."