Ken Goddard Biography

Ken Goddard is a police and wildlife forensic investigator who transitioned from his early law enforcement career as a young criminalist, deputy sheriff, and homicide crime scene interrogator digging up victims in shallow graves in the Mohave desert and rebuilding the events that led to their often violent death to guiding a small police crime laboratory in southern California, and eventually to developing and guiding the first (and sadly, still only) full service forensic laboratory in southern California.As the creator and director of the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon, Goddard's wildlife forensics experts in veterinarian pathology, genetics, criminalistics, analytical chemistry, as well as morphology (the recognition of hides, hair, fur, feathers, teeth, skulls, and bones back to their species source) provide forensic expert knowledge and evidence identification services to US Fish and Wildlife Service Special Agents and Wildlife Inspectors at ports of entry. Goddard's wildlife forensics lab is the official crime lab for the 182+ CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) signatory countries, as well as the Wildlife Working Group of Interpol. Goddard, a wildlife forensics and CSI expert, has trained Wildlife Rangers throughout Sub-Saharan Africa to work elephant and rhino kill sites as if they were homicide crime scenes. Goddard also authored two nonfiction books on police crime scene investigation, as well as a wildlife-themed CSI and Evidence Handling Manual for Interpol's Wildlife Working Group. Goddard also assisted a team of international marine biologists in applying 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, everything he knew about CSI on land simply didn't work in the open ocean at first. He couldn't establish a perimeter around the massive coral reef crime scenes, his evidence location tags floated away, the currents made CSI photography difficult, and he didn't feel comfortable worrying about his neutral buoyancy, how deep he was, where his dive buddy was, and how much air he had left in his tank... let alone having things that bite appear at his scene of the crime! Goddard has spoken at numerous national and international wildlife forensics training sessions, meetings, and conferences. along with a TEDx talk in the middle of the Amazon jungle, a noteworthy demonstration smilingly viewed by numerous hundred environmental activists, and one evidently curious crocodile. Goddard is a New York Times best-selling writer of eleven 'thriller' fictional books on the subjects of terrorism as well as the Olympics, designer drugs, crazed burglars (who cut holes in living room floors and wait for their survivors like trap-door spiders), wildlife law enforcement, and what would be actual physical evidence of extraterrestrial contact... a trilogy of three novels inspired by Goddard's looks on Art Bell's 'Coast to Coast' radio show. Three of Goddard's wildlife law enforcement novels are currently being adapted for television by a Canadian television production company. Because of his expertise in police and wildlife CSI, as well as his successful fiction writing of CSI-themed novels, Goddard also served as an informal advisor to the CBS CSI TV shows, frequently telling the script writers (who didn't care) that they were getting it wrong, that there was no such thing as a criminalist, CSI, and detective... or, at the very least, there shouldn't be, he'd say, explaining that his job as a CSI/criminalist was to look for evidence linking suspects, victims, and crime scenes, not to hunt down the bad guys! That was something he'd leave to his fictional cops and wildlife officers. Due to Federal ethics rules, Goddard is not permitted to give lectures to entities that have a financial relationship with the US Fish and Wildlife Service while he is still employed by the Service (which is expected to be the case until December 2020).

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