In tragedy, they step up
Tears filled Gene and Sandy Ralston’s eyes Thursday when they were asked why they volunteer their time and equipment to help search for bodies lost in lakes, rivers and the sea.
They hugged each other tightly in the parking lot behind the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office, just hours after helping locate Gary Fox’s body on the floor of Lake Coeur d’Alene.
“Because we can,” Sandy Ralston said softly, after a moment of crying quietly into her husband’s chest. “It’s something we’re technically capable of doing. We just feel we need to do what we can.”
When Kootenai County authorities asked the Ralstons for help recovering Fox’s body, the Boise-area couple hopped in their motor home and headed to Coeur d’Alene, their own boat in tow.
Within three minutes Wednesday, they located what appeared to be a body, in about 100 feet of water, using their specialized sonar equipment. It was Fox, a Spokane Realtor who fell off his boat last Friday, officials confirmed Thursday.
Fox is the 42nd person to be found with Ralstons’ help. The two have been involved in several other local searches as well as the high-profile search for Laci Peterson, the pregnant woman whose husband was convicted of killing her and their unborn baby and dumping Peterson’s body in San Francisco Bay.
The Ralstons also helped find the bodies of four people near Yosemite in California. All allegedly were killed by members of the Russian mafia. The couple found a car that had been resting in a lake since 1929, providing long overdue answers about a missing family, and they searched for debris from the space shuttle Columbia explosion.
The Ralstons helped find two bodies in Hayden Lake and two from Lake Pend Oreille. In a search of Priest Lake for a missing man, they found someone else’s remains – which they estimated had been underwater about 100 years.
That person has yet to be identified, but Sandy Ralston said they refer to him as the “priest of Priest Lake.” Though authorities attempted to recover material to test for DNA, the body had been in the water so long it basically disintegrated as soon as it was touched.
Last year the couple spent about 150 days searching for lost bodies.
The Ralstons purchased their side-scan sonar equipment in 2001. The equipment sends sound waves sideways to produce a picture of the lakebed.
Bodies are typically easy to spot in the pictures. Gene Ralston said they once spotted a body in three feet of silt that wasn’t visible to divers searching the lake bottom.
After detecting Fox’s body in Coeur d’Alene Lake on Wednesday, the couple attempted to put a marker near the body to help guide divers to the spot, but they couldn’t get the marker any closer than 25 feet. Divers attempted to retrieve Fox’s body anyway, but the surface was rough and the water below murky.
Thursday morning, the Ralstons used global positioning satellite coordinates to go back to where they’d found the body. They attempted to pull it from the water using a remote-operated vehicle but were unable to grab hold, Sandy Ralston said. But the ROV and an acoustic marker dropped nearby helped guide divers to Fox’s body.
The Ralstons, who own an environmental consulting firm, purchased the side-scan sonar equipment because they had been search-and-rescue volunteers for years and were frustrated at the difficulty in finding drowning victims.
Because of their business, they already had much of the equipment needed to go with the side-scan sonar. It would cost about $100,000 for a local law enforcement agency to buy all of the equipment.
Law enforcement agencies reimburse the Ralstons for out-of-pocket expenses such as gasoline, but the couple said they wouldn’t think of taking money for their services.
“It’s not something we want to make money from,” Gene Ralston said.
He recalled finding a woman in 1983 in the Boise River. “The gratitude expressed by the family was overwhelming. We bring people home to their loved ones.”