The lab he started is now a 40,000 square-foot facility with a biohazard containment area and three DNA sequencers. Now a grandfather, Goddard writes thrillers and advises CSI: Las Vegas. But for Goddard, it was better than being a deputy sheriff in San Bernardino County, where the carnage he investigated made him worry about his young daughter. It was somewhat unnerving: The agents crept through swamps, confronted poachers without wearing bulletproof vests, and joined outlaw motorcycle gangs to penetrate illegal ivory-trafficking rings. In the meantime, Goddard put together a crime scene investigation kit, and spent the early '80s learning about wildlife law enforcement from the agency's special agents. It took him seven years to raise the $4.5 million needed to start the lab, and another two years to design and build the facility. In 1979, Goddard left police work for the Fish and Wildlife Service, where he was charged with developing a forensics program. In fact, the morphology lab already has a drawerful.
Its scientists pioneer methods unique to animal forensics, provide legal testimony, and aren't even surprised to receive a monkey hand through the mail. It also assists the fish and wildlife departments of all 50 states, and is the official wildlife crime lab for nearly 200 countries. Now the forensic lab helps identify evidence, bring charges and obtain convictions.
#Russian collection hcn. series#
The laboratory is as valuable to the world's wildlife protection laws as the CSI television series is to the entertainment industry.īefore 1989, the agency relied on museums and zoos to help analyze items seized by law enforcement agents, and to testify in court against deep-pocketed poachers. But he and Espinoza are still investigating wildlife crime, working as director and deputy director, respectively, of Fish and Wildlife's Forensic Lab in Ashland, Ore. The walruses, Espinoza concluded, were poached for their ivory.Įighteen years have passed since what Goddard calls the "Guts and Glory" case. But these bodies had bleached, clean neck bones - confirming that they were beheaded before being dumped into the ocean. If the walruses had been beheaded onshore, rotting tissue would still cling to their neck bones. Local Eskimos accused Russians of shooting the walruses they said they'd merely found the dead behemoths and beheaded them in order to salvage the ivory.
They roved from one carcass to another, fording Arctic streams in their underwear, in hopes of discovering: Whodunit? In 1990, they were dispatched to Alaska to examine hundreds of Pacific walruses that had washed ashore, headless. Fish and Wildlife's own forensic science branch. Goddard and Espinoza are part of the U.S. His boss, Ken Goddard, smote a few, too, but preferred to crouch upwind in his blaze-orange hat and capture their first crime scene investigation on camera. Whiffing and gagging, he waded into the rotten guts looking for clues. Ed Espinoza hacked into the bloated walrus with a machete.
0 kommentar(er)
