'Occult Cop' Walks Beat on the Dark Side

MIAMI — The coffin had been dug up and pried open, and a corpse, headless, 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 Santeria 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 Santeria, she said.

Godoy, 37, became the department's specialist in ritualistic crimes in 1988. Born in Cuba, her family moved to Spain shortly after Fidel Castro took power. They migrated to the United States when she was 8.

Reared a Catholic, she initially knew little about occult practices. She took classes on Santeria and Palo Mayombe and learned from anthropologist Rafael Martinez.

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.

"I had to learn the language," Godoy said.

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 [are] a lot of drug lords who practice Santeria," Godoy said.