Miami Detective Investigates Crimes Of The Occult World

MIAMI - The coffin had been dug up and pried open, and a decapitated corpse sat against the tombstone. Arrayed around it: small gourd bowls, a severed rooster's head and a cow's tongue, nailed to a tree.

Time to call in Amy Godoy - the "Occult Cop."

Godoy, a Miami-Dade county detective, walks a beat on the dark side; it is her job to investigate crimes committed during rituals some would find bizarre, or at the very least exotic.

Imagine agents Mulder and Scully from TV's "The X-Files," rolled into one. Godoy is skeptical but open to the extraordinary.

"I don't care how you cut up the religious and spiritual aspects of your life. . . . What I am concerned is if you do break the law," Godoy said. "That's where I come in."

Police began stumbling onto occult practices more frequently after 150,000 Cubans migrated to South Florida in the 1980 Mariel boat lift. They brought with them their religion: Santeria and Palo Mayombe. Haitian voodoo was already here.

"When we arrested these people, we found many times items that we didn't understand," Godoy explained. Items like the Santaria deity, with seashells for eyes, that sits on Godoy's desk at police headquarters.

"You can see if you look really carefully that it was fed blood," a legacy of the animal sacrifice that is part of Santaria, she said.

Godoy, 37, became the department's specialist in ritualistic crimes in 1988. She initially knew little about occult practices.

She took classes on Santeria and Palo Mayombe and learned a lot from anthropologist Rafael Martinez.

"These are very different religions, and there needs to be respect for and an understanding," Martinez said. "This has required a lot of extra effort on Amy's part. Sometimes police don't see a need for this, and she has learned on her own time."

Godoy learned, for instance, that a Santero will use cowrie shells, which resemble lips readying for a kiss. In readings, Santeros throw 16 shells. Depending on how they land, a complicated code results that speaks for the gods

She learned the code to read from a Santeria "Book of Life." That knowledge helped her solve a 1996 murder; what Godoy called a "Santeria confession" led to the arrest of a murder suspect.

Godoy's fellow officers call her Mama Chango after Santeria's most powerful deity. Her specialty came to be appreciated during the 1980s when cocaine runners embraced the occult.

"There is a lot of drug lords who practice Santeria," Godoy said. "Some Santeros will actually take large amounts of money from these criminals in order to protect them from the police."

Most Santeros, Godoy says, do not engage in illegal practices.

Three years ago, Godoy went undercover for the Fish and Wildlife Service. At the Miami home of Jose Torraguitart, she discovered numerous rare animals, some dead and others ready to be sacrificed in the name of Palo Mayombe.

"We confiscated . . . . human skulls. He had a femur he could not account for," Godoy said. "He had four baby owls in captivity and all kinds of birds frozen - blue jays and cardinals - and the worst part was a baby panther, which he had frozen in the refrigerator."

Torraguitart, a high priest or palero, was taken into custody for violating the Migratory Bird and Endangered Species acts and is currently under house arrest.

He was selling powder made from the animals for ceremonies. In the world of Palo Mayombe, if, for example, a believer wants to be knowledgeable, the powder derived from the wise owl is used. For strength and quickness, one uses panther powder.

Palo Mayombe was blamed after Albert Pinder's body was dug up at Evergreen Cemetery last April.

"Grave desecration is big-time criminal activity, not to mention immoral," Godoy said. A group of people nailed the tongue to the tree and "sacrificed animals and left them there. All this was so they could ask permission to take the head."

Under the religion's tenets, a dead person must give permission for a palero to use his skull for magic.

Once the head is procured, it goes into a caldron with other materials such as knives, guns and animal bones, and the palero asks the spirit to do a deed for the living. It could intercede in a romantic triangle, or perhaps ensure that a curse works.

Santeros believe they can perform rituals that result in their being possessed by the dead.

"It's eerie," said Godoy, who has witnessed such a ceremony. "It is like a movie or science fiction. It doesn't mean you believe it, but you say, `Wow, there's a possibility."'