Cadaver Dogs Brought In to Help with Search for Missing Novato Man

Police and FBI personnel are using cadaver dogs to conduct a backyard excavation in Novato in an effort to find clues about a man missing for several months, police said Wednesday.

Dale Smith, 74, was determined to be missing after were called to a home on Rebecca Way, off Olive Street on the city’s east side, for a welfare check and suspicious circumstances, police Captain Jim Berg said. Officers conducted interviews with family members and neighbors and the investigation has been ongoing since then, he said.

“This is very preliminary,” Berg said. “There are a number of investigative steps we still have to do. There are so many unknowns.”

Rebecca Way was packed with law enforcement vehicles Wednesday afternoon as neighbors talked to one another about what they knew. Phil Olbrantz, a resident there since 1973, said he hasn’t seen Smith since September and that another neighbor called police for a welfare check, sparking the investigation.

Olbrantz said Smith lived with a woman named Evelyn, but he wasn’t sure of they were married. Berg said he could confirm that Dale Smith is a husband and father and that his wife was living in the same house when officers first visited the residence on Feb. 9, but he said he wasn’t at liberty to release more information about Smith’s family.

 “They’ve been neighbors of ours for a long time,” Olbrantz said. “They seemed to get along as a couple, but I wouldn’t call them a typical couple. They both had some abnormal traits or what you’d call quirky personalities.”

On Tuesday, the police requested assistance from the California Office of Emergency Services for the use of cadaver dogs. Berg said the results proved inconclusive and a call to the San Francisco-based FBI Evidence Recovery Team was made.

Olbrantz , who shares a fence with the Smith residence, said Evelyn Smith had a some work done in her backyard in January. “She said she was putting in a slab of some sort,” he said. “Today they were back there removing brick things, like pavers. I just assume they’re looking for Dale.”

Melitta Walker, another neighbor on Rebecca Way, said she has spoken to Evelyn Smith several times since Walker and her fiancé moved in about a year ago.

“I figured she was the neighborhood busybody but she didn’t seem malicious or harmful at all,” Walker said. “It was her business to be in everybody else’s business. I don’t know what’s going on right now. It’s crazy. Sleepy little Novato …”

Olbrantz said several neighbors had asked Evelyn Smith about Dale’s whereabouts in recent months, and the answer had been that he was out of state visiting his brother. But more recently, she was asked by another neighbor “and she was talking about Dale in the past tense. When the police got involved, I don’t think they were satisfied with that answer about visiting his brother, and a missing person report was filed.

"Now we have all these forensic people here. … Hopefully they won’t find anything and Dale will just turn up OK.”