Mike Byers: The Day My Dog Dug up the Body in our Backyard.

Our house had a large backyard that backed up onto the yard behind us. The people who lived in the house directly behind us had a large shed next to the chain-link fence that separated our two yards. With my mother being nine months pregnant, we spent most of our time playing in the backyard. On occasion we would slip out of the yard and sneak down the block to the weird guy who had an airplane parked in his front yard. The airplane was an old DC-3 cargo plane from WWII, and as any ten-year-old little boys would, we would spend our days bombing the Germans, the Japanese, the southern rebels, the wild Indians out West and anybody else we could think of… they all got bombed by us. We believed Custer would have won if he had just waited for our air cover. Then we would sneak out of the airplane and head home for dinner under the bright daylight of the Alaska midnight sun.

We had a tan dog named Buddy. He was a boxer and as dumb as a box of rocks. One day we noticed that Buddy was chewing on something in the backyard. We were afraid that it might be a chicken bone or piece of plastic or something else that could get lodged in Buddy’s throat and require a trip to the veterinarian’s office. So we went over to investigate and what we found was Buddy was chewing on a bone… the bone was human! Well… The summer was about to get very interesting.

We investigated and saw that Buddy had dug under the chain-link fence and then under the storage shed. We collected up all the bones in a box and took them to my mother to see what we needed to do in this situation. My mother saw the box of bones and realized two things: they were human bones and they were real. Needless to say, my mother lost her mind and called the police. We were not allowed to go to the backyard until the police got there.

When the police arrived, they took the investigation away from us and started it all over on their own. The police did something very interesting as part of their investigation to avoid giving away their presence. They asked us if we were sure that we had collected up all the bones and there were no more bones in the backyard. We assured them we had. Then they turned Buddy loose in the backyard, and from the safety of the window above my mother’s kitchen sink they watched the dog while staying concealed from the neighbors. Buddy ran around the backyard a little bit then started sniffing around. Then as sure as anything down that hole he went and about a minute later he came back out with a bone in his mouth. I believe this one was a femur.

The police had my mother open the back door and call Buddy. The dog brought the bone into the house, which was a little bit freaky. The police now had probable cause that a crime had been committed and were aware of the proximity of the body. Needless to say, this was the coolest thing that ever happened on our block. And we were right in the middle of it. We figured we had helped the police bust a serial killer and made our mark on history.

The police waited in our house until more police had arrived. When the new police officers had arrived, they went into the backyard and hid behind the shed while the police that had been in our house went around to the front of the neighbors’ house. We were thinking how cool this was: our serial killer neighbors were going to get into a shootout with the police, and we had a great view of everything. This surely was going to be the greatest summer ever!!

Then something happened that we didn’t expect. The police came out the back door into the backyard with our neighbor and he was not even in handcuffs. Our neighbor and the police were talking for a little bit and our neighbor did not look happy. The police officer who had just been in our kitchen pointed to our house. All I could think was, “Oh, no he just told the serial killer where we lived.” The officer who was in charge then walked over to one of the officers who had been hiding behind the shed, told him something, and then pointed to our house. That officer then came to our back door and asked us for the box of bones.

I asked, “What are you going to do with them?

The police officer said, “We’re going to give them back to him.”

I said, “But those are evidence.”

“Normally they would be,” said the officer “but in this case he has a permit.”

Now this had just gone off the weird charts. A permit?? How do you get a permit to be a serial killer!! It turns out our new neighbor was a professor of human anatomy at the University. The bones were part of his teaching props and although they were actually human bones he had a permit to possess them. Now they were damaged and had been half eaten by our

dog. He was not happy with us at all. Needless to say my parents had to make restitution.

After that Buddy was sent out to live at my Uncle Mike's in Copper Center. I was kinda okay with that because Buddy was as dumb as a box of rocks.

Years from now I would be sitting in a bar and people would say “Hey, do you remember that summer in 1972 when those kids helped the police bust what turned out to be the worst serial killer in Alaska history?” I would smile wide and say, “Yes… yes I do. I was one of those children.” I could already see there were probably going to make a movie out of this and I wondered what childhood star would get to play me.

Mike Byers is a sixth-generation Alaskan whose family came over the Chilkoot Trail in 1896. Born in Fairbanks in 1962, Byers grew up in Anchorage and graduated from Dimond High School in the 1980s.