Criminal - The Devil’s Hole Pupfish

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

There is a cave in the middle of the Mojave Desert called Devil's Hole. It's home to a small iridescent blue fish, called the Devil's Hole pupfish - and you can't find them anywhere else in the world. There are fences, cameras, and motion sensors for security. In 2016, three men rammed the fences and broke in. We need your help. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Did you know we have a shop on our website where you can buy things like t-shirts, water bottles, postcards - even baby onesies? And right now, we're having a summer sale. Go to thisiscriminal.com/shop and get 20% off your purchase. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving

homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. It's a really fascinating place in that the water surface is about 50 feet below the land surface.

So it's essentially a collapsed cave or cavern. And so when the ceiling fell in about 60,000 years ago, it exposed the aquifer or the groundwater. And so the spring doesn't actually flow out into a stream. It's just a body of water that you can see that has unknown depth. Devil's Hole is in the middle of the Mojave Desert. It isn't easy to get to or see. It's surrounded by fences, topped with barbed wire, and there are cameras everywhere.

In April of 2016, police were called to Devil's Hole with reports of an incident. The fence surrounding it had been breached. And when police arrived, they found shotgun shells. They immediately started collecting fingerprints and footprints. But the victim in this case wasn't a human. It was a tiny fish. A very special fish that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. The devil's hole pupfish.

The pupfish have large eyes and large heads. Scientists in the 1950s named the fish for their playful behavior because the fish reminded them of puppies underwater. The devil's hole pupfish are some of the first fish that were protected under the Endangered Species Act of 1967. At the time, their population averaged only 200 fish in the spring and 450 in the fall. Scientists estimate that the pupfish

has lived in Devil's Hole for over 10,000 years. And the only place in the world that you will find the Devil's Hole pupfish is in this one opening there in Nevada. Nowhere else will you find this species. Nowhere else in the wild can you find the Devil's Hole species outside of Devil's Hole. This is Kevin Wilson, an aquatic ecologist at Death Valley National Park. He's worked with the pupfish at Devil's Hole for over 14 years. The security cameras around Devil's Hole are partly for security and partly to observe the fish's behavior. So we can actually, I could go on my

computer now and have several views, one of us underwater, and several views of the top, the parking lot, the observation platform. And so it does have a pretty good security system. So you really can't go into Devil's Hole now without being captured on multiple cameras. That is true. So it was a Monday morning, and one of my staff, Jeff Goldstein, was already here, and he was going to look through our video over the weekend

because there was an earthquake that happened. Earthquakes can create changes to devil's soul. It creates these waves that can, you know, wash away stuff and whatnot. So Jeff was taking a look to see if the earthquake affected Devil's soul. And when he started to look, I could hear him go, oh no. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Three men could be seen on the camera breaking into Devil's Hole. They had driven around the gate over a dirt berm up to Devil's Hole.

They rammed another chain-link fence gate, gate trying to break that open and that was unsuccessful. And so they shot up the lock trying to break the lock so they could enter more easily. And it was initially just thought to be an injury to property, destruction of property case because they had rammed a gate and shot up a video camera and some research equipment at the site. This is Morgan Dillon, a detective at the Nye County Sheriff's Department. He's been a detective in Nye County for 17 years. But before working this case, he had never been down inside Devil's Hole. It's not much more than a big hole in the rock.

If you didn't know it was there, you probably would not find it. It's kind of an obscure location, and it's fenced off, and you can look down into it. But if they didn't have the fencing and the markings, I don't think many people, even though you drive 50 yards past it on a dirt road, would ever know it's there. It's just kind of a depression in the rock that kind of drops down, and the area of water that you can see is not very large. This is not like the Grand Canyon. Oh, absolutely not. This is the size of a large living room, maybe. As he climbed down into Devil's Hole, Morgan noticed damage to the cameras and motion sensors the biologists had set up all over the cave.

And then there was a large pile of puke, because one of them puked right outside of the hole. So it made it pretty gross to be down there. It stunk pretty bad with the heat. There's a steep rocky path that leads to the water between pale orange and gray rock walls. Once the path gets too steep, you hit a metal staircase to continue making your way down. When you get near the water, you reach narrow platforms which allow researchers to access the pool. It was kind of roiled up because one of the suspects had gone into the pool.

And the pool is, I don't even know, six or ten feet, maybe, ten or twelve feet, of a shallow shelf, which is maybe a foot to two feet deep. And then it drops off into kind of the abyss that goes down hundreds and hundreds of feet. The pupfish mainly live near the surface of the water. But scientists estimate the Devil's Hole is 400 feet at its deepest. In 1965, three amateur divers went into Devil's Hole to explore. Only two came back up.

One of them went back down to look for the first diver. He didn't make it back either. What that led to was the first protections of putting up a fence and a gate to protect Devil's Hole and to protect humans from entering Devil's Hole and getting hurt. Kevin and his team spread out to see what, if any, damage the intruders had done. And so we're traveling down further into Devil's Hole, getting closer to the water. And, you know, I'm concerned. I want to see the fish. I want to look at the ecosystem.

And so I'm going right to there. And there's a set of boxers floating in the water. In Devil's Hole? In Devil's Hole. So we did see fish swimming around, which was a nice relief. But within about a half an hour to 45 minutes, we did notice one dead adult fish. At the time of the incident, the Devil's Hole pupfish population was around 115. Whoever did this had come right in the middle of pupfish breeding season. March, April, early May, that's when we have the greatest or most successful reproduction.

The pupfish do spawn or try to mate year round, but spree time is the best time. And so seeing the dead fish, knowing that this individual walked, staggered on the shallow shelf, we which is about three feet by uh 18 feet i was concerned about how many little fishies they stepped on how many eggs did they destroy there's no video of any of the men actually getting into the water the camera looking over devil's hole was one of those damaged. But there is a camera underwater that's aimed at the rocky shelf where the pupfish lay their eggs.

In the video, you can see a pair of feet plunge into the water. The Devil's Hole is kind of a political hotspot area. It's an endangered species. Nye County is a mining and agricultural county. Politically and socially, people don't generally want any kind of restrictions, federal protections, because it limits the ability to use the land. So when we initially heard the damage had been done to Devil's Hole, one of the things we had to figure out, was this an intentional act and was there a political motive behind it? For decades, there's been conflict between nearby ranchers and conservationists about Devil's Hole.

Researchers have monitored the water level since 1962, monitoring to make sure it was high enough to cover the rocky shelf where the pupfish lay their eggs. If the water level dropped too low, the shelf wouldn't be underwater, cutting off the fish's food supply and breeding ground. In 1970, the water dropped low enough that the shelf was in danger, and it continued to drop over the next year. Park rangers figured out that a nearby ranch had begun drilling new wells, and as they pumped water for their livestock, the water in Devil's Hole was disappearing.

The National Park Service ordered the ranchers, Francis and Marilyn Kappart, to stop pumping their wells. The Kapparts refused. The U.S. government sued. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In Nye County, public opinion was split between conservationists and biologists and land developers and cattle farmers.

There were two bumper stickers that would be put on cars in the local area. One that said, save the pupfish, and another that said, kill the pupfish. That sentiment is still, you know, in the local town that I live in you know when people find out what i do and i'm honest i'm not going to hide you know my passion in my career there's people that say oh how neat and then no people you know i went to a dinner party from a mutual

friend and one of the guests found out what i did and they go well they should just drown those pupfish and i had to really think about that one. Drown the pupfish. They live in water, sir. In 1976, the Supreme Court sided with the federal government. The Kapparts had to stop pumping. Water use was reduced, and the water came back up and the pupfish population came back up. Today, the water level at Devil's Hole is holding stable.

But the pupfish are still in a precarious position because there are so few of them to begin with. In the 1990s, the pupfish population mysteriously started to dwindle. There were fewer than 100 pupfish every year. And then, in 2004, a flash flood knocked over a stack of fish traps that scientists had left next to the water. The traps accidentally killed 80 fish, nearly a third of the total population. In 2013, the pupfish hit an all-time low. Scientists

counted just 35 fish. Kevin told a reporter for The Guardian at the time, We're hoping to figure it out, because once you've lost a species, they're gone forever. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend W highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these Series Essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman

as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions, what should

you use it for, what tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Because the devil's hole pupfish is an endangered species, killing one can lead to a $50,000 fine and up to a year in prison. To build a case that the intruders had endangered the pupfish, investigators needed proof that the dead pupfish they had found had died from unnatural causes. You can't charge the crime until you can prove that the fish was killed by the actions of the people. So we needed the biologist to determine what the cause of death was for this fish and that it directly related to the three suspects breaking in and going in the water and stomping along the shelf.

Typically, we don't find young adults that have died naturally. Usually, they're much older that have succumbed to old age or disease. How were you able to determine that? Did you do an autopsy of some sort on the dead fish? Exactly. So the autopsy that some sort on the dead fish? Exactly. So the autopsy that we do in the fish world, this was done by Amber Shadouan, one of my staff members. She's a biotech here at Death Valley. She did a necropsy.

And so in the fish world, what that means is that you look for certain things that might show a disease. So you look at the gills of the fish. Are they pink? Are they in good condition? You look at the scales of the fish. Are they flaking off? Are they, you know, the color of the fish? Even though it was deceased, you can tell if things were off before they died.

You know, more advanced necropsy that we couldn't do is you can remove the brain and send that off for special analysis. We didn't do that. We just looked at the stomach, the internal organs, and the gills and the scales, and everything looked just fine. So what we determined, the National Park Service, that this young adult succumbed to stress or possibly being compressed a little bit, but not enough to smash the fish.

We couldn't see really any crushing of the fish. So just it was related to this incident because of the, being a young adult and the condition of the body parts and the scales that we look at. You can actually send away a fish's brain? You can. How tiny is a pupfish brain? I can't even think about how small that brie must be. Maybe a very small pea, because the fish is small to be, you know, already. It's very small. After investigators determined that the pupfish had died of unnatural causes, they turned their attention to figuring out who was responsible for its death. First, they went back to the surveillance videos. So you could clearly see three suspects.

You could see the vehicle. You could see them drive up and their actions when they were above the hole. You could clearly see them carrying the shotgun. And they hopped the fence. They were kind of milling around. The surveillance cameras also captured one of the men getting stuck trying to climb back out over the fence. One of his friends had to help him over. One of the men actually came back the next day. That's on video too. He'd left his wallet behind and had come back to get it. There isn't a clear shot of any of their faces,

but the National Parks investigators released footage from the surveillance video and offered a $5,000 reward for information. Meanwhile, Detective Morgan Dillon brought back the evidence he'd collected that day, including the shotgun shells and underwear, to his office in Pahrump, Nevada. He also had a copy of the surveillance video, which showed the men driving away in an ATV. So we were reviewing the video, and one of my friends is a deputy. He's now promoted and a lieutenant tom cleansard he is super familiar with off-road vehicles he buys them and sells them he works on them so he was able to

look at that video of the side by side and go this is aftermarket and this looks like this thing and this is not a paint job this is a wrap wrap. Lieutenant Tom Klenzar also noticed that someone had added an extra seat and safety cage to the ATV. He identified it as a Yamaha Rhino that had been extensively customized. Because Lieutenant Klenzar knew so much about this world of custom off-road vehicles, he knew that Craigslist was a popular way to buy and sell parts for modifications, and sometimes for the vehicles themselves. And he was able to go on Craigslist

and find what we thought was an exact match to the vehicle. It had been posted the day before the pupfish was killed. And in the pictures on Craigs list that the person had posted, they had given a phone number and we were able to trace that phone number. And as he had taken pictures of the vehicle in his front yard, in one of the pictures was included the numbers on his house, which matched the address that the phone number turned up. Investigators drove to the man's house and knocked on his door.

His name was Stephen Schwenkendorf. He was 29 years old and from Pahrump. When asked about the Yamaha, he told investigators he'd just sold it. They asked him where he was on April 30th. And he said that he and his friends had been barbecuing and drinking. He said, we'd been drinking quite a bit. Then he said they got into his Yamaha Rhino and started driving around the desert. We asked him, hey, what were you guys doing out there?

Were you out at Nash Meadows? And he said, yeah. They called it bunny blasting. They were out in the desert. Is that shooting rabbits, bunny blasting? Yeah, that's what they called it, is going out and shooting jackrabbits. So they had just kind of gone out in the desert shooting rabbits and just shooting whatever and ended up in the area of Devil's Hole. And that was where they had fired a few shots.

They had shot the fence and shot a gate. He didn't remember initially that he had climbed the fence. We showed him a video and he's, oh, yeah, that was us. That's definitely us. But he had all three of them had been super intoxicated, so he didn't have a full memory of everything that they had done. He didn't deny anything? No, I don't think...

He was grossly intoxicated at the time of the incident, all of them were. And so I don't know that he was aware fully of the damage that they had done. We'll be right back. Are you looking to eat healthier, but you still find yourself occasionally rebounding with junk food and empty calories? We'll be right back. to do with psychology. Noom is the weight loss management program that focuses on the science behind food cravings and building sustainable eating habits. Noom wants to help you stay focused on what's important to you with their psychology and biology-based approach. Noom takes into account your unique biological factors, which also affect weight loss success. The program can also help you understand the science behind your eating choices and why you

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But he said that all three of the men had been shooting. Edgar said he was nervous. He'd seen his picture on the news, the blown-up still from the surveillance video that the Park Service had released for reward. The third man was 26-year-old Trent Sargent. Trent was from Indian Springs, Nevada, a small town about an hour away from Pahrump. When Detective Dillon called Trent Sargent, Trent told him everything. So he gave us kind of an admission over the phone.

He told us that he was an ex-felon and shouldn't have been with the gun. Admitted that he had gone down into the pool. And by the time the next day when I tried to go meet with him, this had hit social media, and this had spun completely out of everybody's control on social media. The Nye County Sheriff's Department posted a press release on Facebook. There are a lot of comments on the post,

overwhelmingly pro-pupfish. One person commented, I hope they get some serious time. Another, throw the book at them. And, they don't deserve to walk among the free. But that kill-the-pupfish-save-thepup-fish divide from the 1970s is still around today. And in 2020, when the government changed the name of a nearby hill to Devil's Hole Pupfish Peak, someone on Facebook commented,

Now I see where my money goes, instead of repairing our streets. Someone else wrote, Oh for God's sakes. instead of repairing our streets. Someone else wrote, Oh, for God's sakes. All three men were charged with violating the Endangered Species Act and one count of destruction of U.S. property. All three men pled guilty. Stephen Schwenkendorf and Edgar Reyes were each sentenced to one-year probation. But because he'd had a previous conviction, Trent Sargent faced a third charge,

felon in possession of a firearm. His lawyer acknowledged that Trent had harmed the pupfish by going into the water, but argued, quote, this is not a case involving the purposeful trapping and sale of endangered species for profit. Trent read a letter to the judge in which he said, I made a stupid mistake. I'm not a bad person, Your Honor, and I take full responsibility for my actions

and the crimes I committed. The judge sentenced him to 12 months plus one day in prison. Detective Morgan Dillon says that without the video cameras and without finding that Craigslist ad, investigators would likely not have figured out who any of the men were. The county is extremely rural. I think we have 25,000 people that live outside of the town I live in, and our county is 18,500 square miles in size. So there's not a lot of eyewitnesses.

There's a lot of ranches, a lot of wide-open spaces, so sometimes crimes don't even get noticed for weeks to months. So solving stuff is generally purely luck by the time we get down to it. When it was determined that there was no political motive, I was kind of relieved because we could focus on just the simple issue at hand as far as the investigation. It's kind of the same as some of these wildfires. You know, people don't have the intent, but they're out camping and they light a wildfire and don't put it out. Driving off-road where you're not supposed to. A lot of these people that do some of these outdoor crimes related to the environment,

I don't see them as having an intent, a criminal motive. It's almost more negligence. It's kind of different from an investigator's realm of some of the other criminal cases we do where there's a clear intent and malice behind their actions. It's just kind of a different way of investigating and a different type of crime, I guess. Of all the things I've done over the years, case-wise, you know, we've solved murders and rapes and done big drug busts, but for some reason this pupfish case is the one that just keeps resurfacing and that people focus on. National Park psychologist Kevin Wilson

says that after the men were caught, he and his team had a lot of work to do. It was still pupfish breeding season, and they were trying to figure out how many eggs may have been crushed and how it might affect the population. They'd go out at night, hoping to see baby fish. So we continued those monitoring efforts,

and we still saw little fish being hatched or being born. So there was eggs being laid, and there was eggs that survived this trespass. And so it was a relief. But it is a major concern when you are responsible for the most critically endangered fish in the world. What does a pupfish look like? Describe it to me. The males can be a really iridescent blue when they get into their spawning colors or the colors

in which they're ready to mate. And the females are more olive green or a little bit more drab. And so, you know, it's kind of hard to compare them to a goldfish, but they're small. So if you think about the size of your thumb, you know, it's a really cute, beautiful fish. Does that ever make you think, you know, you and your team there work really hard to save this fish that people who might get drunk and have no idea how important or special this species is and how close it is to being extinct, that the work you do is thankless, because maybe people just don't know how hard you've all tried for so many years to keep this little species alive.

You know, for me, it still gets me up in the morning saying, you know, what can I do today to better understand why we are where we are with the devil's hole pupfish? And so we're on site a lot. We have visitors that come from around the world and around the United States just to see devil's hole. And there's a whole range of responses we get from the negative people saying that, well, you can't eat them, why should we care? And then we'll have individuals saying that, you know, thank you for what you do. This is important. What a great job you have.

Kevin says numbers are up. This spring, they had their highest count in more than two decades. 175 pupfish. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Samantha Brown, and Libby Foster. Our technical director is Rob Byers.

Engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. If you like the show, tell a friend or leave us a review. It means a lot. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Thank you. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults.

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