Radio Script
1998

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DNA Detectives
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STORY: When a hunter shot a mountain goat in Chugach State Park near Anchorage recently, he thought he'd committed the perfect crime. After taking the head to be mounted as a trophy, the only things left behind were the bones and rotting carcass. No one, he thought, could trace the remains to him. Obviously, this hunter hadn't counted on science.

Wally Soroka is the field supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Enforcement Division in Anchorage.

SOROKA: "We got a tip that an individual shot a goat. We went and did a crime scene and found the remains of a goat that was shot there. The cape and the horns were missing from it. We had a prime suspect, but we couldn't prove that suspect killed this goat. We were able to get a tissue sample from the horns and cape that the suspect delivered to a taxidermist for mounting."

Scientists at the service's crime lab in Ashland, Oregon, then matched the genetic material from the carcass to the hunter's trophy. Ken Goddard is the lab's director.

GODDARD: "We use DNA as one of our tools to do two things that crime labs all do, whether they are a wildlife crime lab or a police crime lab. We identify evidence and we attempt to link suspect, victim and crime scene together. Identifying evidence in our case often means identifying genus, species, and subspecies of the animal. It's also possible if we know enough about the DNA of the species in question that we can say the head on the wall matches the gut pile at a certain place. That animal and no other animal in the world."

Goddard says that many poaching cases would be difficult to prove and take far longer to investigate without DNA evidence. He says defendants are often surprised to learn that such sophisticated tools are brought to bear against them.

GODDARD: "Astounded I think is a better word. Not just them but their attorneys. We match the blood, we match the footprints, we match the bullet to the gun. There's not a whole lot for defense attorneys to do other than to mumble to themselves."

DNA isn't the only tool in federal agents' bag of tricks. Wally Soroka says that in another recent case, agents planted a tracking device, called a global positioning system, inside the wing of a suspected wolf poacher.

SOROKA: "We knew he was an aerial wolf hunter out on the Alaska Peninsula, but we couldn't keep track of where he went. So we stuck a global positioning unit in the bad guy's wing. We could sit back in our office and figure out where he went, when he landed. And then we'd go do a crime scene if we see he landed and killed a wolf. Eventually we caught the guy."

But by far the most creative trap for wildlife criminals was set when federal agents set up an undercover taxidermy shop in Anchorage.

SOROKA: "It was a two-year undercover investigation. Basically we looked the other way and before you knew it people who had things to hide with their animals would come here to this taxidermy studio that was actually being run by undercover wildlife agents. We would mount the illegal wildlife and collect evidence at the same time. Because we didn't want to end the investigation and wanted to be able to recover these illegal things when it was time to do the take-down part of it, we would put transmitters inside sheep heads, walrus skull mounts, all of this sort of thing. When we caught as many bad guys as we thought we could handle we used the transmitters to locate where all these things went. We recovered illegal sheep heads taken on the Kenai Peninsula as far away as Jacksonville, Florida."

As long as money or ego is the incentive, poaching and trading in illegal wildlife will likely continue. But Soroka doesn't feel he's losing the battle. He's philosophical about it.

SOROKA: "Well, I don't know if we'll ever win the battle, but I guess we're stemming the tide. We catch lots of bad guys and the ones we don't catch are always looking over their shoulder."

OUTRO: For Arctic Science Journeys, this is Doug Schneider reporting from Fairbanks, Alaska.