The original story was published in the local newspaper, The Cambrian, in April. I re-wrote it to enter it in the contest, with additional material that didn't make it into the newspaper story.
The advice I got from other insightful writers and an experienced editor was invaluable. Working with other writers is so rewarding. I can struggle for days with confusing material and not be able to clear it up, and a fresh set of eyes can break through with a few pointers.
Being a writer is the perfect job for me. I'm so grateful I get to do it. Thanks to everyone who has helped me.
By
Christine Heinrichs
Thanks
to an ever-present blanket of fog, most Spring mornings dawn gradually over
Piedras Blancas on California’s Central Coast. On the morning of May 3, 2008,
overcast skies shrouded the sheer bluffs overlooking the beach, a lighthouse
and the two White Rocks off shore that give the point its name. In this
tranquil setting, nearly 4,000 Northern Elephant Seals were sprawled across the
beach, sleeping. An occasional elephant seal grunt and a gull’s call were the
only sounds punctuating the surf – until three shots shattered the peace,
leaving three seals lying dead with bullet holes in their heads. There were no
witnesses to the executions, except for the gulls and seals.
The
vast herd of elephant seals living along this remote section of coastline, 200
miles south of San Francisco and 240 miles north of Los Angeles, are relative
newcomers. They began arriving in Piedras Blancas about 20 years ago. There
were only a few – just 12, in fact, in December 1990, according to U.S.
Geological Survey Wildlife Biologist Brian Hatfield’s records. A pregnant
female gave birth to a pup in 1991 and before long, thousands were taking over
the beach.
They
created a sensation, eclipsing any carnival circus that had ever come to a
coastal California town. The seals didn’t pay much attention to the
crowds gawking at them. But the seal watchers fawned over them like their pets,
taking their pictures and talking to them like they were great friends of the
seals. But with 5,000-pound wild animals crossing the same terrain as
humans, conflicts were inevitable. In 1996, a 12-foot, one-ton seal crossed
paths with a two-ton SUV. The seal died. The SUV was wrecked. But occupants
walked away
The
state highway agency, CalTrans, erected some concrete barriers to keep the
seals at bay. But the barriers didn’t stop them. Residents joked about the
state’s effort to stop the mammoth seals. “Where does a 5,000-pound elephant
seal go? Anywhere he wants.”
Almost
15 years ago, the state swapped some land with the Hearst Corporation and
re-routed the highway. It also paved a parking lot and built a boardwalk to
facilitate public access. Today, visitors are welcome to watch the seals as
much as they want.
The
beach rookery at Piedras Blancas is one of the few places on earth where the
public can see elephant seals in their natural habitat. There are only 17
established colonies on the West Coast, from Vancouver Island in the north to
Baja California. And unlike many of the other rookeries, Piedras Blancas is
easily accessible to humans. Most rookeries are on offshore islands that have
little or no public access.
During
the crowded breeding season, a beachmaster stands sentinel in the middle of his
harem of 30 females, keeping an eye out for interlopers. The beachmaster’s
vigilance, however, doesn’t offer any special privileges. The bulls still have
to wait until their harem comes into heat - at the end of a month of lactation.
Mating is always the last event before the seals return to the ocean, and only
the most dominant bulls get to enjoy the pleasure of breeding. So does the
public who flock to gawk and giggle at the love fest.
Pups
are born in January and February. More than 4,400 pups were born in the winter
2011 birthing season. In May, they lumber onto the beach to rest after spending
the winter at sea – hunting and eating. Scientists estimate that about
15,000 seals hang out at Piedras Blancas for several months during the year
doing what elephant seals do: rest, molt, fight, mate and give birth.
»»»
The
three slain seals were young males weighing at least 1,000 pounds. Their
companions were either adult females or other juveniles like themselves, less
than six years old. About a dozen were classified as “subadults” —six to eight
years old with noses not yet long enough to hang down from their heads. They
were shot without provocation while they were either lolling on the
beach, lying on top of each other, sparring with their brothers or
splashing in the breakers.
On
the morning of the shooting, shortly before 7 a.m., Kathryn Karako, a volunteer
for Friends of the Elephant Seals, showed up to count the seals. A dense layer
of fog kept the sun’s rays from breaking through, keeping temperatures below 55
degrees. The day was “dark and gloomy,” recalls Supervising Ranger Leander
Tamoria, with an occasional breeze.
As
usual, Karako began counting the seals at the south end of the beach. By 8
a.m., she was on the trail at the north end looking down on the seals from the
bluff. Something odd caught her attention. One of the seals among the jostling
juveniles wasn’t moving. “There were a lot of young seals in the area, sand and
movement,” Karako says.
She
got her binoculars to take a closer look. She was stunned to see a seal with a
hole in its head. She raised her eyes and saw another seal lying in a pool of
blood. “I never thought I’d come across something like that. It’s shocking that
we had that kind of violence against the seals in this area.”
»»»
Volunteer
docents arrived in their bright blue jackets around 10 a.m., carrying packs of
information about the seals: maps showing migration patterns, photos, bits of
shed skin for visitors to touch. Visitors often marvel at the sort of stuff the
docents carry around with them. “You’re like a walking museum,” one visitor
told a docent after scanning the free packet. Docents started counting the
visitors showing up at the rookery in 1997. To date, they’ve counted more than
a million. In May 2008, the month the seals were shot, the docents counted
6,632 visitors.
Karako
reported the dead seals to the first docent who arrived. The docent called the
Friends of the Elephant Seal office on his cell phone to report the
shootings. Park Ranger Leander Tamoria was the first state park official to
arrive at the crime scene. But he recognized that the killing of the seals was
a serious matter – one that would involve a team of seasoned criminal
investigators.
Todd
Tognazzini, a state game warden from Morro Bay, a fishing and tourist community
of 10,000 people 35 miles south of Piedras Blancas, arrived at the crime scene
around noon. He immediately closed the gate from the parking lot to the trail
on north bluff, just 30 yards away from the murdered seals. He marked off the
crime scene with bright yellow tape and began to scour the area for evidence.
He went down to the beach, examined the dead animals and took pictures. There
were no exit wounds. The bullets were lodged in the seal’s skulls.
Tognazzini,
now a lieutenant with more than 25 years in wildlife law enforcement, drew some
logical conclusions about how the shooting might have happened. The seals were
probably shot from the parking lot, about 25 yards away, with a high-powered
rifle -- a .223 caliber or 22-250. The shooter propped his rifle between the
door jamb and the truck body over the open door’s hinge, giving him a stable
place to brace the shot. The expended brass shell casings conveniently
discharged into the passenger side of the truck. The shooter “didn’t have to
get out of the truck, so he wasn’t exposed to potential witnesses,” Tognazzini
says. “I surmised that it happened around first light, when no one was around.
It’s a very easy shot for a rifle with a scope.”
Tognazzini
searched for shell casings, but didn’t find any. He hoped none of the visitors
had taken one away. The only physical evidence he had was in the animals.
Anticipating a prosecutor's request for physical proof, Tognazzini decided to
decapitate the seals below their head wounds. “If we ever came up with a
suspect in the case. I had the entire wound intact.”
The
seal skin was much tougher than he expected. He had to use a saw to cut through
their necks at the bone. The crude surgery was gorier than Alfred Hitchcock’s
movies. When the operation was over, Tognazzini’s uniform was caked with blood
and fragments of seal skin. Each head weighed 60 to 80 pounds. The game warden
stuffed the 200 pounds of seal heads into a bag and took them to an emergency
pet hospital 40 miles away in Atascadero. Located on the east side of the Santa
Lucia mountains over a 1,700-foot summit, the hospital was about an hour away.
At the pet hospital Tognazzini was met by a team of technicians and
veterinarians. They took X-rays, which showed that the bullets had shattered
after striking the thick skull bones of the seals. “The bullets were small
caliber as I had originally determined,” Tognazzini says.
“A
single rifle bullet traveling at high speed had killed each animal. A
handgun bullet would not penetrate to the depth found and would generally stay
intact due to its slower speed.”
After
the ballistic investigation was completed, Tognazzini stuffed the bloody heads
back into his bag, put them back in his car and transported them to a freezer
operated by the Department of Fish & Game in San Luis Obispo for additional
tests and analysis.
Tamoria
and a couple of docent volunteers created a makeshift burial ground for the
headless seals on the beach. As they worked, an afternoon wind rose up,
stinging them with flying sand and making the job of burying the seals even
more difficult. The wind continued to create havoc over the next few months,
scrubbing sand off the burial site. The stench of rotting carcasses polluted
the air around Piedras Blancas, a constant reminder of the unsolved crime and
the presence of an unknown killer.
»»»
Roy
Torres, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Office of Law
Enforcement Special Agent, arrived in San Luis Obispo County from Monterey the
following day, Sunday, May 4. Elephant seals are protected under the Marine
Mammal Protection Act of 1972, but the severity of the crime was compounded
because it took place in a National Marine Sanctuary. That’s why NOAA’s Office
of Law Enforcement (OLE) took responsibility for the investigation. “This is
like Yosemite or Yellowstone, except it’s marine,” says Torres. “We consider it
analogous to a national park.”
Torres
and another OLE agent in NOAA’s Monterey office handle investigations of
wildlife crimes like the killing of the seals. His investigations led to the
arrest and conviction of criminals engaged in smuggling juvenile leopard sharks
and for the shooting of a sea lion with a crossbow. Torres also investigated
sewage spills that damaged wildlife habitats and the theft of steelhead trout.
A wealthy San Francisco developer built a dam on his property to make poaching
the trapped trout easy. The developer was sent to a federal prison - a first
for a wildlife crime. Torres says most criminal activity involving wildlife is
difficult to investigate and prosecute. In June 2012, two dolphins were found
shot dead. But the bullets passed through the wounds, leaving prosecutors
without evidence. Even successful prosecutions often result in little or no
jail time.
At
Torres’s recommendation, NOAA offered a $5,000 reward for information leading
to the arrest of the seal killer. Using cash awards as an inducement for
informants enabled Torres to solve the case of Arrow, a Morro Bay sea lion shot
with a crossbow in 2002 after someone at a local bar overheard the culprits
boasting about it and called Torres for the reward money.
Torres
drove his truck on Highway 1 towards the crime scene, 100 miles south of
Monterey, the route he always takes when he gets a call from San Luis Obispo
County. From Carmel south, Highway 1 is a two-lane road, notorious for its
winding switchbacks along the very edge of the crumbling coastline. The inland
side of Highway 1 opens into ranchland in south Monterey County and San Luis
Obispo County. Fifty miles south, San Luis Obispo, the county seat, is home to
California State Polytechnic University and the California State Men’s Colony.
Cal Poly prides itself on its engineering and agriculture departments, although
it’s occasionally embarrassed by episodes such as the bad press created when a
major donor, Harris Ranch, tried to prevent food activist Michael Pollan from
giving a lecture in 2009. The Men’s Colony, a sprawling state penitentiary and
a major county employer, houses around 7,000 inmates crowded into space
intended for 3,700. It’s one of the largest in the country.
One
of the county’s major tourist attractions is Hearst Castle, William Randolph
Hearst’s Mediterranean-style estate overlooking the ocean from 1,600 feet up in
the Santa Lucias. Now a state historic monument open to the public as a museum,
it was the inspiration for Xanadu, the fictional estate of Orson Welles’
“Citizen Kane.” Piedras Blancas is only six miles north of the castle, making
the seal rookery a convenient stopover for sightseers.
For
Torres, the drive offers the opportunity to inspect his territory, about a
quarter of California’s 3,427 miles of shoreline, and see first hand how
construction activities along the cliffs, jade collection violations, steelhead
poaching on creeks, abalone poaching and the myriad other ways criminal acts
can mar the natural resources. “I’m never doing only one thing,” Torres says.
Torres
encounters the Piedras Blancas bluffs after passing through rocky cliffs, and
the road dips into rolling rangeland. The Piedras Blancas Lighthouse always
reminded Torres of the dangers at sea. Now it would remind him of the dangers
on the beach. Neither Torres nor any other marine mammal crime investigator
interviewed for this story has ever heard of the murder of an elephant seal.
Torres
wanted to know who would do such a thing. “Whoever shot the animals knew what
he was doing,” he says. Torres decided to hang out around the scene of
the crime on the chance that the shooter might return to kill some more seals.
He drove around the area for several days, sleeping in his truck in the rookery
parking lot. But if the assassin was nearby, Torres didn’t notice. Under
other circumstances, Torres would have enjoyed camping at Piedras Blancas. But
alone, stalking a seal killer that for all Torres knew might be stalking him,
was unnerving at times. “You’re really alone out there,” he says. “I was
concerned, and I have a gun.”
Growing
up in San Diego, the ocean was the underpinning of his social life.
Birthday parties were held on the beach. He surfed with the guys. He got his BS
in criminal justice at San Diego State University in 1991 and signed on with
NOAA. Balding under his NOAA baseball cap, gray peppering his temples and
goatee, Torres could easily be mistaken for one of the commercial fishermen in
his jurisdiction. He’s a regular patron of the local coffee shops and cafes in
Monterey. But frequent threats against enforcement agents keep him wary of
publicity.
No
photos please. “I’m working with people who aren’t nice,” he says.
Torres
drove out to the evidence freezer operated by the Department of Fish & Game
in San Luis Obispo and picked up the severed heads that Sunday. He wanted to
get the bullet wounds further analyzed, but without a NOAA forensic laboratory,
Torres has to rely on other law enforcement labs to evaluate the evidence. The
California Department of Fish & Game lab in Santa Cruz offered to help. He
sent the heads there.
»»»
Unknown
to Torres at the time, the seal killer’s story was starting to unravel on its
own. And as it did, Torres and other NOAA investigators swooped in, scrambling
to gather enough evidence to prosecute the seal killer. At first, investigators
were tight-lipped, refusing to disclose any information about their
investigation. But pressed by me for information about their investigation,
Torres and Tognazzini, with the consent of NOAA’s legal advisors, agreed to
discuss their investigation of the case without revealing the name of the seal
killer or anyone who was a party to the crime. What follows is their account of
what happened.
On
a Sunday morning, in a Central Valley town southeast of Bakersfield, Joe
Hodges (a pseudonym) was visiting a friend, Sarah Melton (also a pseudonym),
when her phone rang. The caller, a family member in Morro Bay, had read the
news of the elephant seal shootings in the local newspaper and knew who the
killer was: her father. Joe was sitting nearby. He saw Sarah become
unglued, and overheard enough of the conversation to know that Sarah’s father
shot the elephant seals.
Her
father — Ben McGurdy (also a pseudonym) — lived next door to Sarah, and
Joe was a friend of Ben’s. So he walked over and knocked on Ben’s door. “I hear
you are in some trouble,” Joe told Ben, according to Torres. Joe offered to
take the 22-250 rifle off Ben’s hands in case investigators came knocking on
his door. Ben brought out his rifle and the three expended shell casings.
He gave the rifle and the shell casings to Joe and asked him to keep them for
him. “Get this out of the house,” Ben told Joe, according to Torres. Joe took
Ben’s gun and shells to his home and put them together with his own air rifles.
Sarah
was married the following weekend, and Ben was present to give his daughter
away at her wedding. Ben may have feared that he couldn’t keep his crime
covered up for long. The shootings were a major news story on the Central
Coast. Oregon and Washington buzzed with rumors that a crazed gunman was
traveling the coast. The community was in an uproar. Whatever the case, he left
the following day for Louisiana to stay with another family member.
The
rifle stayed with Joe, who was having problems of his own. His marriage was
falling apart, corroded by drug and alcohol problems, and complicated by
business failures. His own guns had been confiscated by the sheriff’s
department after they had to break-up fights between him and his soon-to-be-ex
wife. To make matters worse, Joe’s old dog was sick and dying and now he
didn’t even have a real rifle to put his old dog out of its misery. His air
rifles weren’t powerful enough to do the job. Joe decided his only choice was
to use Ben’s 22-250 rifle. He led his old dog out into a nearby field and shot
it.
Joe
became so despondent after shooting his dog that he started drinking – heavily.
And during his drunken spree, he began shooting up his own house. With his
house filled with holes, Joe retreated to a cabin owned by Ben’s family in the
mountains. Joe didn’t mention to Ben’s family that he was going to their cabin.
They’d been friends over the years, and had shown him where the key was
hidden. He figured Ben wouldn’t mind, either.
But
according to NOAA investigators, his business partner and co-workers, including
Ben’s family members, upset about his drinking and drug use, decided to turn
Joe in. They knew about an outstanding DUI warrant for Joe, called the
sheriff’s office and tipped the deputy off to where Joe was staying. A deputy
came out and picked him up on the warrant. Joe spent a few days in jail
sobering up. As he stewed over how the sheriff knew about the warrant and where
to find him, he figured out who had sent the sheriff after him.
While
Joe was in jail, some of Ben’s family members decided to get Ben’s 22-250 rifle
– the one that could put Ben behind bars for a long time - back. Joe’s
shoot-em-up escapades inside his own house had broken water pipes. They could
hear water running inside. They got permission from Joe’s estranged wife,
living in Arizona, to enter the house, to stop the running water and prevent
further damage. While they were there, they looked for Ben’s rifle. They found
Joe’s air rifles and took them, but didn’t find the 22-250. They returned the
next day and searched everywhere again, finding it stuffed between the box
spring and the mattress in the master bedroom.
But
when Joe got out of jail, drove home and saw that his rifles were taken and his
house was turned upside down, he was furious. He decided to tell a local
sheriff the tale of Ben’s seal shootings. On May 23, just short of three weeks
after the elephant seal killings, Joe came clean about who the murderer was:
his friend, Ben McGurdy.
“In
wildlife enforcement, someone keeps their mouth buttoned until there’s some
motivation to tell,” says Tognazzini. “There’s some underlying reason to tell
about someone you have some dirt on.”
The
sheriff called Torres in Monterey and reported the elephant seal shooting
information. Torres had received the forensic ballistic report from the
Department of Fish and Game laboratory in Santa Cruz three days before – on May
20. The lab reported that the weight and ¼-inch diameter of the bullet
fragments were consistent with a high-powered rifle, possibly .223 caliber.
Torres had the report in hand when he got the sheriff’s call May 23. He needed
another bullet to tie the case together.
The
bullet that killed the dog was the crucial connection to the gun and its
owner.
Torres
went out to collect two-week-old-remains of the dog. Its body had largely
decomposed. What hadn’t been scavenged by wild animals was putrefying in the
sun. . As disgusting as the job was, Torres was determined to retrieve
the bullet to get the evidence he needed for a conviction, and he did.
He
sent the bullet to the Santa Cruz Fish & Game lab. Within days, ballistics
specialists determined it was the same kind of bullet as the ones that killed
the seals.
Although
Joe, their star witness, was unstable, his story checked out in every detail.
“Every
bit of information that he provided turned out to be true,” says Tognazzini.
“He never provided anything inaccurate.”
Added
Torres: “If that guy had kept the information to himself, the investigation
could have stalled.”
»»»
To
close the loop on their investigation, Torres and Tognazzi had to get their
hands on Ben’s 22-250 rifle. Ben’s daughter, Sarah, had remarried. Her new
husband, Tom Fielder (a pseudonym), was in possession of Ben’s rifle as well as
Joe’s air rifles. He kept them in Kern County. Torres and the Kern County
sheriff needed to persuade Tom to turn the rifles over to law enforcement. They
concocted a plan that, they hoped, would get them Ben’s guns. A sheriff’s
deputy would knock on Tom’s door at his home. The deputy would question him
sympathetically, telling him that he was sure that Tom would want to prevent
Joe from doing any more damage during one of his drinking sprees, perhaps
harming himself and others with wild gun-shooting antics.
Early
on the morning of May 27, Torres watched from a distance as the local deputy
talked to Tom. Torres was close enough to be able to watch events unfold, but
not close enough to be able to overhear the conversation. But Torres was
prepared to come to the sheriff’s rescue if the situation turned sour or if Tom
was resistant to turning the gun over.
As
Torres watched from his clandestine perch, Tom brought the guns to the front
door and handed them to the deputy sheriff. He went back to the office and
waited for the deputy to return. What Torres couldn’t tell from his vantage
point was that the guns weren’t the ones he wanted. They were the air rifles,
not serious weapons.
But
the deputy insisted that there was another gun that Ben owned and Tom had in
his possession. Eventually, Tom complied and led him to a fence lining Ben’s
property covered with dense brush. Tom walked into the brush and retrieved the
22-250 rifle, which was wrapped in plastic, covered in dust. Now that they had
the gun connected to the crime, Torres and Tognazzini had another challenge: to
establish that its owner, Ben, was the shooter.
Tognazzini
had reviewed video tapes from local gas stations and convenience stores for the
night of May 2 and 3 , just before the dawn shooting, but hadn’t
identified anyone as a suspect. “We had a narrow time line, any time over
night,” says Tognazzini. “Gas stations often have video cameras that can help
us. Criminals often have to fill up.”
Ben
McGurdy, 67 years old in 2008, was an avid outdoorsman who didn’t see the need
for government to control anything he did out in the wild – whether it was
hunting, fishing or anything else he damned pleased. With that attitude, he’d
tangled with Fish & Game up in Mendocino County back in 2000 for fishing
salmon illegally. He’d been using barbed hooks, not the required barbless ones.
Barbless hooks make it possible to release undersized salmon without injuring
them, so that they can grow up. A former abalone harvester, he had spoken out
against restrictions on commercial fishing. He wasn’t alone. Fishermen, relying
on the ocean’s bounty for their living, fight regulation. Threats against law
enforcement are common.
The
Marine Mammal Protection Act protects all marine mammals, including cetaceans
(whales, dolphins, and porpoises), pinnipeds (seals and sea lions), sirenians
(manatees and dugongs), sea otters and polar bears within U.S. waters. The act
makes it illegal to ‘take’ marine mammals without a permit. This includes
harassing, feeding, hunting, capturing, collecting, or killing any marine
mammal, including elephant seals.
The
law enrages some commercial fishermen who have to stand by helplessly watching
sea lions and harbor seals steal fish from their nets. But for seal lovers, the
law is a life saver. Today, hundreds of thousands of sea lions, harbor seals
and elephant seals, which are not endangered, are as protected as scarce blue
whales. In 1972, when the Act was originally passed, there were around 10,000
sea lions. By 2008, there were over 200,000. Today, NOAA estimates there are
around 238,000.
Elephant
seals were hunted nearly to extinction in the late 19th century.
Although the population probably was reduced to fewer than 100 individuals
along the way, elephant seals were able to recover. By 1960 there were about
15,000. In 2008, there were around 150,000.
California
sea lions compete with commercial fishermen for prey. While sea lions
unquestionably eat fish, blaming them for the decline in fish is debatable.
Protected zones that forbid any fishing provide places for fish to breed and
grow to let their populations recover from overfishing. Taking every last fish
not only eliminates the fisherman’s job, it collapses the ecosystem in which
the fish play a role. In 2011, NOAA authorized Washington and Oregon to kill up
to 85 sea lions that are eating salmon and steelhead below the Columbia Dam,
but not to protect the fishermen. It’s to protect the fish.
Fisheries
are protected around Morro Bay and the rest of the Central Coast, but
commercial fishing is allowed outside those lines. The creation of the National
Marine Sanctuary in 1992 established a protected zone, a marine park bigger
than Yellowstone in the ocean. Fishing in the ocean outside Morro Bay declined
over the years, going from 15 million pounds caught in 1985 to 1.2 million
pounds by 2006.
In
September 2007, after months of contentious meetings, 29 new Marine Protected
Areas, 204 square miles, went into effect along California’s Central Coast.
Nine no-take State Marine Reserves were established within the Monterey Bay
National Marine Sanctuary, which includes Piedras Blancas. Fish started
increasing, and in 2010 Morro Bay fishermen caught 3.5 million pounds.
In
2008, the Chinook Salmon run in the Sacramento River was a record low. The fish
return from the ocean in spring to spawn in the river. Salmon had been
declining for years, but in 2008 the return was described as a
“collapse.” The minimum conservation goal for Sacramento fall Chinook is
122,000 to 180,000 spawning adult salmon, the number needed to return to the
river to maintain the health of the run. In 2008, even with all ocean salmon
fishing closed, the return of fall run Chinook to the Sacramento was projected
to be only 54,000.
The
season was officially cancelled by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS)
on May 1, 2008, two days before the shooting. The closing was a foregone
conclusion after the Pacific Fishery Management Council, the decision-making
management agency, voted to close all salmon fishing April 11.
“For
him, the success of the Marine Mammal Protection Act had an effect on the
closing of the salmon season,” says Tognazzini, who spoke to Ben about this
issue on the phone. “He was pretty upset there was no salmon season.”
Tognazzini says Ben came close to confessing the crime, but never offered a
direct and unambiguous confession.
Interviews
with local people confirmed that Ben was in in Morro Bay the weekend the seals
were shot. “Animosity built up over the years over fishing restrictions,” says
Torres. “That year, the salmon season was shut down and that infuriated this
person.”
Elephant
seals are rarely a target for fishermen. They don’t eat the species commercial
fishermen catch. Elephant seals prefer Humboldt squid, which they catch deep in
the ocean. They are deep divers, hunting at 1,000 feet and deeper. They eat
fish as well, but the hagfish, rays and small sharks they eat aren’t in demand
for commercial catch. The elephant seals that were shot weren’t competitors to
fishermen in any way.
“I
don’t think that you will find fishermen who have any issue with elephant
seals,” says Mark Tognazzini, a commercial fisherman on Morro Bay and Todd’s
brother. “What they’re consuming isn’t in this area. I’ve never seen or
even talked to anyone who had any issues with elephant seals.”
»»»
Ben’s
rifle and the bullets taken from the elephant seal heads and the dog were sent
to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon, for
final analysis.
The
lab is the only one that is dedicated entirely to forensic analysis of wildlife
crime evidence. Established in 1989, it set up the protocols and data that meet
legal standards to give law enforcement the facts needed to prosecute wildlife
crimes.
Its
final report, completed in August 2008, confirmed that the bullets that killed
the seals and the dog could have come from the same gun and that the rifle
“could not be ruled out” as the weapon. That meant the investigators had
sufficient evidence to bring the case to a federal grand jury, seeking an
indictment under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
As
NOAA investigators and lawyers were gearing up to prosecute Ben McGurdy, the
seal killer, who had returned to the Central Valley, he collapsed and died of a
heart attack in July 2009. As abruptly as the seals were shot, NOAA closed the
case and it remained closed until 2011, when I started prying into the elephant
seal killing case. NOAA had its reasons for not reporting the case to the
public. “The general public has an appreciation for the animals they see,” says
Tognazzini. “But in wildlife justice, the work gets done behind the scenes.”
The
shock and horror of the crimes have passed into history at Piedras Blancas.
Vultures eventually ate the stinking, decomposing seal bodies and the bones
disappeared into the sand. Only a few visitors were ever aware of the crime,
and the docents who remember it don’t care to talk about it. For them, any
reference to the elephant seal killings reminds them of a cruel act of violence
they’d just as soon forget.
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