LYNCHBURG, Va. (AP) - Mike Hull couldn’t give up the chase.
After a career in environmental law enforcement, including a 27-year stint protecting wildlife with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF), Hull retired in 2008 but still was “addicted” to what he calls the lifestyle and the science of tracking.
From the way he tells it, Hull really has two passions: tracking and teaching the skills of tracking.
“The ground is one of the oldest newspapers in print,” Hull said. “I teach people how to read the ground instead of the paper.”
As a special agent with the VDGIF, Hull spent decades pursuing poachers and burglars through Virginia’s protected wilderness.
His work required him to read nearly every inch of the earth, looking for depressed grass, disturbed soil or unnatural shadows - all clues pointing him in the direction of a fleeing criminal.
“I call it a complex application of simplicity,” Hull said. “I like to think of it as a language. A universal language, because you can go anywhere in the world and read your surroundings.”
As Hull worked on his craft, he realized law enforcement agencies interested in tracking had few resources to turn to.
“I wanted to try to fill a void,” he said.
He soon founded his own tracking school geared toward law enforcement and in 2015 published a book on the subject: “Man Tracking in Law Enforcement.”
Since his jump into education, Hull’s work has taken him across the nation. He has trained scores of law enforcement officials, from local sheriff’s deputies to state game wardens to federal park rangers and even Navy SEALs.
Hull got his first taste of tracking instruction in the late ’90s with the Lynchburg-based Central Virginia Criminal Justice Academy, when he began teaching field officers how to be “track conscious.” In 2010, he developed an online course - a first for the academy.
Hull argues the academy course is a must for officers who often are trained in buildings, on pavement or in other urban settings.
“We’ve got all kinds of people who are trained to clear buildings, but when you put them in the woods . it’s a totally different ball game,” he said.
According to academy Director Ron Staton, Hull’s course helps officers identify patterns and clues in the natural chaos of a wooded environment.
“(The course) helps us in the aspect of tracking individuals in various terrains,” Staton said. “If you’re in the woods, that’s different than if you’re down on the riverfront.”
When Hull isn’t teaching, he works part time for local sheriff’s offices and police departments, who occasionally call on Hull to assist in manhunts.
Nelson County Sheriff David Hill called Hull’s expertise invaluable and said he personally looks up to him as a mentor and role model.
“He has assisted by locating lost and injured hikers, tracking (runaways), individuals with dementia, wanted persons that have fled on foot (and by) analyzing crime scenes,” Hill wrote in an email. “Mike Hull is definitely someone that a criminal never wants on their trail.”
Two weeks after training park rangers at Shenandoah National Park some years ago, Hull got a call in the middle of the night from a park official asking if he would return the next morning.
The park was on high alert after a parkgoer said he had been shot at while camping. Local law enforcement asked Hull to help track down the gunmen.
After he arrived from his home in Nelson County, Hull and local officials made a tactical approach to the campsite. When they arrived, he asked the team to stand still while he inspected the site.
He quickly found the camper’s tracks, which were still visible in the wet mud. But things didn’t add up.
“I started measuring the tracks and found that his strides going in were longer than his strides coming out, which is consistent with going in faster than coming out,” Hull said. “This don’t make any sense. If he had his camping gear and all when he went in, I would think he’d being going slower than when he came out when somebody was shooting at him.”
Hull analyzed the campsite and found no clear line of site for a gunman and no spent shell casings.
“I came back to the supervisor, and I said, ’This didn’t happen.’”
Officials questioned the man’s family and found he had a history of fanciful tales. As it turned out, the shooting was cut from whole cloth, a complete fabrication in order to convince a girlfriend of an exotic life as a special agent on the run, Hull said.
The episode was a lesson in the clarifying power of tracking.
“People lie, but the ground doesn’t,” Hull said. “This is one of the cases where the tracking evidence turned it around on a guy who fabricated his whole story.”
When Hull looks back on his career, he thinks of the scores of “awesome” cases he has been a part of but said he is most proud of winning the Director’s Award in 2005 for best academy instructor by the recruits at the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries’ basic academy.
For Hull, the honor represents all he has accomplished over his career.
“It’s kind of unimaginable,” he said. “Things just mushroomed bigger beyond my imagination.”
___
Information from: The News & Advance, http://www.newsadvance.com/
Please read our comment policy before commenting.