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S omewhere in remote Alaska, Ken Goddard stood freezing cold and soaking wet with his gloved arm elbow-deep in the rotting guts of a headless walrus carcass. Goddard and two of his colleagues had landed on the deserted beach in tiny planes piloted by Alaskan wildlife special agents. Clad head-to-toe in protective clothing, their assignment was to use the latest forensic science techniques to find out what caused the demise of the 4,000-pound beast.

This was in 1990, just a few months after Goddard became head of the newly established National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory, and it was not an assignment he wanted as a freshly minted lab director with a long to-do list. But the current investigation was the sequel to a decade-old case in which Goddard, then a field agent, had helped stop an outlaw biker gang — led by a man who’d almost certainly killed his last girlfriend — illegally trading walrus ivory. The new sightings of walrus carcasses washing up on the Alaskan coast were a sign the practice was making a comeback.

A few years later, in 1993, Goddard set out to investigate another case, this time on the other side of the Bering Strait in Russia. Wild sturgeon, a fish species as ancient as dinosaurs, were being overfished to the brink of extinction for their prized eggs, sold as caviar. The Russians tried to bribe Goddard, hoping he’d turn a blind eye to their intentional mislabeling of exported canned caviar products. Goddard’s “no” resulted in them intimidating him KGB-style during a terrifying car ride. When he called the U.S. Embassy for help, the representative advised him to “get out of town and don’t come back.”

While his profession turned out to be more dangerous than he anticipated when he enrolled at UCR as a biochemistry student in 1965, Goddard hasn’t looked back. His prolific career in law enforcement includes 12 years as a police criminalist and crime scene investigator working on gruesome homicides, drug raids, and robberies, and over four decades with the federal government, culminating in running the world’s only full-service lab dedicated to solving crimes against animals. Operated by about 25 forensic scientists and support staff, the lab Goddard runs in Ashland, Oregon, provides forensic expertise and evidence identification services to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service special agents across the country and wildlife inspectors at ports of entry to help target crimes like endangered species trafficking and habitat destruction. It is also the official crime lab for 184 countries that have signed the CITES treaty governing international trade in wild plants and animals, and it serves as the official wildlife crime lab to Interpol.

The Road Less Traveled

Goddard didn’t plan for a career in wildlife forensics, mostly because the field didn’t exist. Raised in San Diego, he was among the first students to enroll in 1964 at the newly established UC San Diego. Modeled on a liberal arts college, the university’s “Renaissance Education” curriculum encompassed a wide range of disciplines in both science and humanities.

“Being a science and math guy, I was fine with the advanced calculus and physics classes,” he said. “But to graduate, I would have to pass the foreign language requirement, and I knew that wasn’t going to happen.”

Goddard transferred to UCR, where he was inspired by professors like Tony Norman, who was on the brink of international recognition for his pioneering research on vitamin D, and Jerry Bell, a chemistry professor with a knack for explaining complex science in an accessible way.

“Biochemistry was a tough major, but I had great professors,” Goddard said. “I learned an awful lot about basic science, and I was poised to be a well-trained biochemist.”

Despite his positive experience, Goddard couldn’t see himself as an academic and found lab work tedious. But his decision to transfer to UCR turned out to be among his best; he met his future wife Gena on campus while the pair were training as part-time swim teachers.

“She pushed me into the pool,” Goddard said. “Of course, our instructor thought it was hysterically funny, and he made me get back out and stand on the edge of the pool. I’m there dripping wet and shivering, and she’s swimming laps and smiling at me. What could I do? I fell in love.”

In his junior year, Goddard asked Gena, a sophomore in biology, to marry him after he graduated. Weighing his career options, he hatched a plan to follow his father’s footsteps into the Marines. But a few weeks before his June 1968 graduation, Goddard was injured in a judo match, resulting in two collapsed knees and a dislocated shoulder. The UCR judo instructor who drove Goddard to the hospital was also a sergeant in the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office. En route, he asked Goddard a life-changing question: “Did you ever think about becoming a cop?”

“I told him something to the effect of, ‘Are you kidding? I can’t even win in a fair fight,’” Goddard said. “But then he explained that he was talking about forensics and it would be right up my alley. That was the first time I had thought about a career in crime scene investigation.”

Goddard married Gena the weekend after graduating and, after a short honeymoon, raised his right hand to be sworn in as a Riverside County deputy sheriff and crime scene investigator.

Adventures of an Adrenaline Junkie

While Goddard’s hire doubled the number of criminalists in the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, neither of the two-man team had any experience in forensics. Realizing he needed more training, Goddard enrolled in a part-time master’s degree program at Cal State LA taught by Tony Longhetti, director of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s crime lab and a veteran in the field.

“The program was easy after biochemistry at UC Riverside — I got A’s no problem,” Goddard said.

Seeing his potential, Longhetti offered Goddard a job. His 1969 move from Riverside to San Bernardino was a step up the career ladder; he was now the youngest on a team of six experienced forensic scientists investigating a medley of intense, complex, and sometimes chilling crimes in a vast county stretching from the dense city to the remote desert.

“The other criminalists were happy analyzing evidence in the lab, but they didn’t want anything to do with the field work,” Goddard said. “But I was learning that I was a bit of an adrenaline junkie.”

So much of an adrenaline junkie, it turns out, that when the department’s narcotics branch needed someone to pose as an underground chemist in a sting operation, Goddard volunteered. He soon found himself signing up for similar assignments, helping bust down doors on drug raids and dig up bodies from shallow graves. When Gena asked about his day, he started responding with, “Don’t ask. I’m very glad to be home.”

In 1971, Goddard’s daughter Michelle was born, and he decided it was time to be “more of a scientist and less of a cop.” He saw a job posting with the police department in Huntington Beach, a compact city in Orange County, and was hired in 1972 to establish the department’s crime lab.

Several years later, in 1978, the police chief called a meeting to discuss the Olympic Games, which would take place in Los Angeles six years later in 1984. After the meeting, Goddard approached him, asking why they needed to get ready so early. The chief’s response stuck with him.

“He said, ‘Right now, one well-prepared terrorist could take on this entire 200-person law enforcement agency and win,’” Goddard said. “The idea that we were that vulnerable blew me away. It also inspired me to write a book.”

Facts to Fiction

An avid writer since his teens, Goddard had authored several books, sending some off to publishers only to be met with long waits followed by curt rejection slips. But his story bringing to life his chief’s fears about a lone terrorist setting out to destroy Huntington Beach as a demonstration against the Olympic Games was different.

“The plot really flowed, and the characters rapidly came alive after I was presented with that real-life scenario,” Goddard said.

“Balefire” was published by Bantam in 1983 to positive reviews, including one from Publisher’s Weekly that described it as having “a real heart-attack of a climax.” It was translated into 17 languages and the paperback version spent a couple of weeks on the New York Times’ bestseller list. Bantam wanted more, and since then, Goddard has published 11 novels, including “The Alchemist,” the story of a university chemist who becomes the center of a drug war after creating a mind-shifting substance, and “Prey,” the first of his books based on his wildlife law enforcement work.

“Working crime scenes turned out to be wonderful training for getting into the skins of fiction characters, and forensic science offers a ready source of technical tricks and twists to add to the plots,” Goddard said.

His novels, in turn, became an important outlet for dealing with the psychological trauma associated with the grisly crimes and unscrupulous characters he encountered in his day job.

“I probably got a lot of that out in my writing,” Goddard said. “The bad guys don’t do well in my books. They tend to suffer appropriately.”

It was also Goddard’s writing that led to his work in wildlife forensics. In 1979, he wrote a nonfiction article for publication in Police Chief magazine. As he flipped through an advance copy from the editor, a job advertisement caught his eye: “Chief, Branch of Forensic Science, Law Enforcement Division, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.”

“It really got my attention” Goddard said. “I told Gena, ‘Wow, that sounds like a fascinating job,’ and she encouraged me to apply.”

Goddard was hired, and the family moved to Washington D.C., where he expected to start setting up the world’s first wildlife crime lab. But he soon learned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t have the funding for it yet. Worse still, his boss didn’t seem in a hurry to find any.

For the next seven years, Goddard helped investigate wildlife cases across the U.S. — including the Alaskan walrus case — as a technical agent, while crossing his fingers that the lab would someday come to fruition. Finally, in 1986, funding for the lab was approved and, thanks to the lobbying efforts of an Oregon chiropractor with an interest in science and science education, the scenic town of Ashland was selected for its location.

“I was sent to look at the site and I called Gena up and told her, ‘It’s beautiful here,’” Goddard said. “I couldn’t believe our luck.”

The Elephant Foot in the Room

Since taking on its first case in 1989, the lab’s annual caseload has increased to between 200 and 1,000, with a hodgepodge of evidence steadily arriving at the facility: a dead raptor one week, reptile leather shoes the next, a rhino horn the following. A multibillion-dollar industry, illegal wildlife and timber trade is surpassed only by guns and drugs on the black market.

In many ways, Goddard’s lab operates like a typical police crime lab, with pathologists performing post-mortems, geneticists doing DNA analysis, and chemists tracing poisons and pesticides. But while crimes involving humans typically link suspect, victim, and crime, working with endangered species is a completely different animal — or animals.

About 4,000 species of mammals roam our planet, joined by 9,500 birds, and 18,000 reptiles and amphibians. Earth sprouts 73,000 species of trees, and over 32,000 species of fish swim in our seas and lakes. Many of these are not endangered or subject to protective laws, and so the first question a wildlife special agent might ask is, “What is the victim?” or “Is it a crime?”

“When we receive evidence, it can be as big as a brown bear or as small as a feather,” Goddard said. “That’s where our morphology team comes in, to use the size, shape, color, and other identifying features of a sample to help identify it back to its species source.”

Supporting the morphology team is the lab’s 14,000-square-foot Morphology Center, a physical library of 100,000 animals — all dead — and animal parts, including heads, hides, furs, feathers, skulls, bones, tusks, claws, and teeth. Add to that a bizarre collection of animal products, including silky fur coats, gaudy leather purses, intricately carved rhino horn cups, and whole-elephant-foot side tables. If the walls in this place could talk, every animal would have a story.

During the “highlights” tour he gives visitors, collections manager Johnnie French points out the shell of a massive Galapagos tortoise donated by the San Diego Zoo that was born during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and died in 2016. Equally eye-popping is a whole grizzly bear, affectionally known as Bruno, who was hit by a train; the 12-foot-long skin of a king cobra that was seized from a poacher; a palm-sized sperm whale tooth polished into a traditional Fijian ceremonial piece called a “tabua”; and a whole cabinet of penises, including those of tigers coveted in traditional Asian medicine.

“We don’t do any wild collecting, so we rely on donations,” said French, a former Army paratrooper and wildlife biologist who skins, tans, and taxidermies the samples as they come in.

French said 70% of specimens come from zoos, 25% from seizures and adjudicated cases where “the bad guy can’t have his stuff back,” and 5% from museums that have damaged specimens they can no longer exhibit.

“We make the most use possible out of every specimen that comes in and divvy it up throughout the lab to the people who need it,” French said.

For many years, the collection was stored in boxes in a leaky warehouse. But four years ago, a new two-story building was completed as an addition to the lab facilities. As its curator, French has been meticulously organizing, labeling, and growing the collection.

“When we get a call or an email from a special agent who is working on a case or a wildlife inspector at a port and they need a quick photo identification to figure out if they should seize something, one of our morphologists can just walk over here with their phone or laptop and pretty quickly tell them, ‘Yes, you should investigate this,’ or ‘Nope, that’s perfectly legal. Facilitate the trade.’ That’s the great thing about this facility.”

Seeing the Wood for the Trees

If morphological clues aren’t enough to identify an animal or its remains, Goddard’s team often turns to genetic analysis using a reference library of more than 100,000 known DNA samples of everything from elephants to eagles to eels. If unanswered questions remain, a sample might find its way to Edgard Espinoza, criminalistics section chief.

“When something comes to the lab, if it has a form or structure, then it is usually identified by its morphological features,” said Espinoza, a UC Berkeley-trained criminalist who was Goddard’s first hire in 1989. “If it’s in tiny pieces, it goes to genetics so they can do DNA analysis. And if neither of them can identify the evidence, then it comes to the chemistry section. We deal with the weird stuff that no one else wants to deal with.”

A few years ago, the weird stuff Espinoza was asked to deal with was identifying wood species. Developing such a technique would help curb the illegal trafficking of valuable timber from rare tree species like rosewood and reduce the sale of fake “Native American” carvings made in Asia. But enforcing laws and treaties that protect endangered tree species is no small task given the tens of millions of cubic meters of lumber and wood products that pass through U.S. ports each year.

“On a tree, you have two different tissues called the heartwood and the sapwood. The heartwood, which is what people trade in, doesn’t have DNA, so we determined a chemistry technique to identify a species of timber and where it comes from,” Espinoza said.

That technique uses an analytical tool called DART mass spectrometry to generate a chemical fingerprint of a wood sample based on organic compounds like phytoalexins, waxes, and terpenoids — the same compounds that give trees their distinctive scents like pine or eucalyptus. The analysis can be done so quickly that Espinoza set up a mobile crime lab in a horse trailer to speed up the legal trade of timber.

“Instead of seizing an entire cargo ship, we can now take the mobile crime lab to a port, sample everything when it comes off, and have the results in two minutes,” Goddard said.

For Espinoza and his team, the identification of wood species is the latest in a long list of scientific breakthroughs that are helping protect wildlife and enforce conservation laws.

“Before wood, it was Russian caviar; before caviar, it was distinguishing between modern and ancient ivory; before ivory, it was identifying sea turtle oil,” Espinoza said. “Everything we do is tied to some law enforcement investigation or regulatory action.”

Goddard said the tools developed in the lab are game changers for special agents in the field.

“Catching a poacher in the act is incredibly dangerous; these are seasoned criminals who are very adept in the environment and very good with their weapons,” Goddard said. “We provide tools that allow our investigators to use the evidence to work the case after the fact. This keeps our investigators safer, makes inspections more efficient, and ultimately protects animals.”

At 78, Goddard sometimes contemplates retirement. But he does so while continuing to guide the work of his colleagues, assist with undercover operations, and train rangers and forensic scientists across the world. More than 80 countries have now established their own wildlife forensics labs, applying the tools and techniques developed by Goddard, Espinoza, and other scientists on their team.

“The work we’re doing is enabling wildlife investigators to go after things they never could have before,” Goddard said. “I think my job is among the best in the world — it’s fascinating work, and it makes a difference. I hear that every day.”