On a foggy September morning in Idyllwild, Copper the bloodhound presses his nose into a black baseball cap and inhales deeply. He finds a perfect clue, naked to the human eye, and it beckons him down a hiking trail, across a dry creek bed and up a small hill that leads into an empty field.

Copper howls. He’s got the scent.

“Go to work!” shouts Cpl. Todd Garvin. Copper darts ahead, pulling on his leash.

A minute later, the bloodhound has found him. A man dressed in black is hiding in the shrubbery at the field’s edge. Copper jumps on the man, slobbery with excitement, like a giant puppy who wants to play.

On any other day, this man could be a missing person or a wanted suspect, but today he’s just a volunteer. Copper and his partners have gathered in Idyllwild to practice tracking scents through the mountain wilderness. Just two months ago, the bloodhounds found a lost dementia patient wandering in this same forest.

“It’s an awesome moment when you find someone,” said Deputy Robert Ochoa, whose bloodhound partner, Windy, found the missing man. “It’s why we do this job, the family gets a happy ending and the dog gets a hamburger.”

Copper and Windy are the third generation of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department’s Bloodhound Unit, a two-man, two-dog team based in Cabazon. The unit is just a tiny fragment of one of the nation’s largest police agencies, but in the two decades since it was first envisioned, the team had amassed an impressive record of saving lives and catching suspects.

Today, the unit is widely considered one of the best in the country, said Roger Titus, vice president of the National Police Bloodhound Association.

“You don’t stay around in police work if you don’t produce,” Titus said. “With bloodhound work, that means you have to have well-trained dogs that find people when nobody else can.”

“In Riverside, she sure has solved a lot of cases.”

The "she" in that sentence is Lt. Coby Webb, of the Palm Desert sheriff’s station, a dog-loving cop who was almost singlehandedly responsible for the founding the bloodhound unit in 2001. If you want to learn about bloodhounds in Riverside County, just about every conversation starts and ends with Webb.

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In the late ‘90s, Webb, then just a deputy, was working a patrol duty in Rancho Mirage but dreamed of being assigned to a K-9 unit. She had grown up around dogs and horses and “loved anything with four legs.” A police dog seemed like the perfect marriage of Webb’s two passions, but the sheriff’s department wasn’t looking to add any K-9s in in the Coachella Valley. For Webb, this was a hurdle to be overcome.

“That’s how it all started,” Webb said. “I had wanted to work K-9 since I was a little girl, but it just wasn’t needed. So I started thinking – what are we missing out here?”

Rancho Mirage didn’t need another patrol dog.

It didn’t need a drug dog.

It didn’t need a bomb dog.

What about a bloodhound?

At the time, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department didn’t have a bloodhound unit and didn’t believe it needed one. Instead, when someone couldn’t be found, the department called upon a volunteer, Bob Glass, who had trained his personal dog in search and rescue. Webb saw this as her chance.

She started researching the capabilities of bloodhounds and was amazed by what she found. Bloodhound noses are so uniquely powerful that they can isolate and compartmentalize individual scents – like separating the ingredients in a stew – then track just one. In practice, this allows police bloodhounds to hone in on the distinctive smell left on a sweaty baseball cap, then follow that scent as if it were an invisible thread connected to a missing hiker that left the hat behind.

Convinced, Webb went to her sheriff’s department bosses pitching the idea of a deputized bloodhound. She insisted that Riverside County was too big to be dependent on a single volunteer.

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The bosses didn’t say yes, but they didn’t exactly say no either.

“My captain said to me, ‘I’ll tell you what Coby. If you can prove it’s an asset, and we need it, and it’s reliable, I will push this for you.’” Webb said. “They gave me an open door. So I went and got a dog.”

Her name was Maggie Mae, but everybody just called her Maggie. She was the quintessential hound dog – soft eyes, long ears, a droopy folded face and a powerful nose. Webb had bought Maggie with her own money, but believed that if the dog could prove herself, the sheriff’s department would eventually welcome her into its ranks.

The next step was training. Maggie and Webb began to train with a small groups of bloodhound handlers in California and Colorado, then attended a certification seminar with the National Police Blood Hound Association. After a battery of exams and field work, the final test was tracking a human scent through the muck and mud of a South Carolina swamp. Maggie aced it.

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With that certification in hand, Webb returned to Riverside County. She worked full days as a deputy, then donated her free time as a bloodhound volunteer.

The proof of Maggie's abilities came in April 2001, when she showed that she could do what other police dogs could not. Webb was working as a K-9 officer, partnered with a Belgian Malinois named Barrie, when she was summoned to Cabazon to look for a rape suspect who had disappeared into the desert.

Barrie, a powerful patrol dog but with a less precise nose, couldn’t follow the suspect’s trail. The scent was lost within the mixing smells of other cops at the scene.

Another deputy had an idea.

“Why don’t you go home and get Maggie?” he told Webb.

“You are right,” Webb said. “I’m going to go get her.”

Webb drove home to Banning, then came back with Maggie riding shotgun in her patrol car. The bloodhound sniffed one of the suspect's footprints, then pulled Webb into the desert. A minute later, Maggie stopped, circled and sat down. Her tail was wagging.

She had found the suspect.

He had buried himself in the desert dirt.

Maggie was sitting on him.

Maggie was deputized six months later. Soon she was so busy that Webb got a second dog, Abigail, to help keep up with the caseload. The Riverside County bloodhound unit was born, then quickly established itself as a pioneer one in California, where police hounds are far less common than on the East Coast.

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Within the next few years, the National Police Bloodhound Association would list both Maggie and Abigail among the top bloodhounds in the country. Since then, the bloodhound unit has found people in every corner of the county and helped identify killers in some of the region’s most gruesome murders.

For example, in 2001, when the unit was still new, Maggie helped identify Bailey Lamar Jackson, a rapist and murderer who was targeting elderly women in Riverside. In 2009, the bloodhounds were instrumental in the arrest of Belinda Magana and Naresh Narine for the murder of Magana’s 2-year-old son. Two years after that, in 2011, the bloodhound tracking unit was used to identify Wesley Elwin Gibbs, who was later convicted in the murder of Judy Munson, a La Quinta woman who was beaten to death with a hammer.

With each successful track, the unit's reputation grew. Webb remembers staring in amazement at her bloodhounds, who were blissfully ignorant of how important their work was.

“You have no idea what you did today,” Webb said, reminiscing about Maggie. “You have no idea how you changed someone’s life.”

Reporter Brett Kelman can be reached by phone at (760) 778-4642, by email at brett.kelman@desertsun.com, or on Twitter @TDSbrettkelman.