A Washington man alerted authorities when his pet dog brought home a human leg last Tuesday.
93-year-old Bill Flowers left his house to feed his dog Liberty outside. But he was floored to discover the boxer lab mix crouching over a human leg.
"My dad did not know what to do," daughter Cheryl Flowers, who first rescued the dog, told ABC News. "He's 93 years old. He picked it up, put in a plastic bag and buried it. He was panicked."
Bill Flowers reported that the greying leg did not seem to be injured other than the fact that it was cut off from about four inches below the buttocks, by his estimation.
When Cheryl returned from a visit at her mother's house, her father informed her of the strange happenstance.
"'Oh my God,' that's the first thing I was hit with, of course," she told ABC News. She called 911 immediately thereafter.
When police arrived at the scene, they affixed a GPS device to Liberty hoping that the boxer would take them to the place where he found the leg. But in the end, search and rescue dogs discovered further human body parts at a nearby abandoned fish hatchery.
ABC News reported that Thurston County Coroner Gary Warnock said the dogs found a "pretty complete set" of remains including two legs, a skull with the jawbone and teeth, and a rib cage. The flesh on these remains had deteriorated and bones were all that was left. The leg, however, was found largely intact. Warnock said the leg might have been buried underground initially, and that the dog might have dug it up. There is also a high population of coyotes that might have found their way to the body.
"We're going to look for any tool markings to see if there were any tools [used] to dismember it or if it was dismembered by animals," Warnock told ABC News. "Tomorrow we'll begin the process of starting to put everything together as far as age, sex, identification and how the person died."
Cheryl Flowers reported that she didn't know who the body could have belonged to.
"I just pray for the family," she told ABC.
