Ken Goddard

Ken Goddard is a police and wildlife forensic scientist who transitioned his early law enforcement career as a young criminalist, deputy sheriff and homicide crime scene investigator --- digging up victims in shallow graves in the Mohave desert, and reconstructing the events that lead to their often violent deaths --- to directing a small police crime laboratory in southern California, and finally to developing and directing the first (and sadly, still only) full service crime laboratory for wildlife law enforcement in the world.

As developer and director of the National Fish & Wildlife Forensics Laboratory, located in Ashland, Oregon, Goddard’s team of wildlife forensics experts in veterinary pathology, genetics, criminalistics, analytical chemistry and morphology (the identification of hides, hair, fur, feathers, teeth, skulls, and bones back to their species source) provide forensic expertise and evidence identification services to the US Fish & Wildlife Service’s Special Agents, and Wildlife Inspectors at ports of entry. Goddard’s wildlife forensics lab is, by treaty, the official crime lab for the 182+ signatory countries of CITES (Conventional on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), and the official crime lab of the Wildlife Working Group of Interpol.

As a wildlife forensics and CSI expert, Goddard has trained Wildlife Rangers throughout sub-Saharan Africa to work elephant and rhino kill sites like homicide crime scenes. In addition, Goddard wrote a pair of non-fiction texts on police crime scene investigation, as well as a wildlife-oriented CSI and Evidence Handling Manual for Interpol’s Wildlife Working Group.

Goddard also utilized his land-based CSI expertise to assist a team of international marine biologists to apply CSI techniques to damaged coral reefs, a project that required him to quickly become certified as a scuba diver in one of southern Oregon’s 45-degree, mountain-stream-fed lakes. As Goddard cheerfully admits during his lectures, at the onset, everything he knew about CSI on land just didn’t work in the open ocean. He couldn’t set a perimeter around the huge coral reef crime scenes, his evidence location tags floated away, the currents made CSI photography frustratingly difficult, and he wasn’t used to worrying about his neutral buoyancy, how deep he was, where his dive buddy was at, and how much air he had left in his tank … much less having things that bite show up at his crime scenes!

Goddard has given talks to a wide range of national and international training sessions, meetings and conventions on wildlife forensics, including a TEDx talk in the middle of the Amazon jungle, a memorable presentation cheerfully watched by several hundred environmental activists and one apparently curious crocodile.

Driven by what he admits was probably mental health at the onset of his fiction writing career, Goddard is a NY Times best-selling author of eleven ‘thriller’ fiction novels on the topics of terrorism and the Olympics, designer drugs, crazed burglars (who cut holes in living room floors and wait for their victims like trap-door spiders), wildlife law enforcement, and what might be actual physical evidence of extraterrestrial contact … a series of three novels inspired by Goddard’s appearance on Art Bell’s ‘Coast to Coast’ radio show.

A Canadian TV Production Company is currently adapting three of Goddard's wildlife law enforcement novels into a TV series.

As a result of his police and wildlife CSI expertise, and successful fiction-writing of CSI-themed novels, Goddard also functioned as an informal advisor to the CBS CSI TV shows, often telling the script writers (who really didn’t care) that they were getting it wrong, that there was no such thing as a criminalist, CSI and detective … or, at least, there shouldn’t be, he would add, explaining that his job as a CSI/criminalist was to search for evidence linking the suspects, victims and the crime scenes, not to hunt down the bad guys! That was a task he would save for his fictional police and wildlife law enforcement heroes.

Note: due to Federal ethics rules, while Goddard is still employed by the US Fish & Wildlife Service (expected to be the present through December, 2020), he is not allowed to give presentations to entities having a financial relationship with that Service.