Sleuth School : Former Officer’s Investigation Class a Springboard for Some and a Police Refresher Course for Others

Dec. 8, 1992:

A male body is discovered slouched against a stall in a women’s restroom at Ventura College. The white T-shirt on the corpse has been ripped by several bullets and is soaked in blood.

The first cop on the scene is Officer Dungood, Ima Dungood. She makes a preliminary search and calls the police department to request a detective.

A detective, make that about 30 detectives, arrive at 1105 hours to further study the crime scene. They search for evidence, make a list of requests for the forensics laboratory, talk to witnesses, determine what will be needed from the medical examiner, and prepare a crime report and sketch of the scene.

This is a critical case and much is riding on it.

No, not life and death, but pass or fail.

These detectives are actually students and their reports, which are due on Dec. 15 at 1700 hours, are the final exam for Prof. Richard Goff’s criminal investigation class, for which the bathroom murder scene was staged.

*

Jan. 19, 1993:

It’s 1745 hours (5:45 p.m. for those who don’t normally write police reports). Goff parks his 1990 Harley in a teacher’s space and heads to his office. He has about 15 minutes before the start of his first criminal investigation class of the spring semester.

Goff’s small office is packed with stuff: news clips, books, old police photos, a “No Smoking” sign (which doesn’t deter Goff from working on a cigar), a picture of his three grown sons--Mark, Matthew, and Richard II--and a bust of Elvis.

Upon entering his office Goff removes his leather jacket and exchanges it for a slightly more formal sport coat on a hangar on the inside of his door. It’s part of his teaching uniform: blue jeans, boots and sleeveless gray sweat shirt (what better way to show off his tattoo).

He grabs a few books and a couple of handouts and proceeds to class. Students are waiting for Goff as he takes the cigar stub out of his mouth and places it on a railing outside the room. He’ll retrieve it after class.

“I can’t take it inside,” he says. “The kids don’t like that.”

The 49-year-old former policeman enters the class and commands instant attention. It may have something to do with his offbeat nature, his size--he’s 6-foot-2--or his confident demeanor.

“Looking for ‘Introduction to Invertebrate Biology?’ ” he asks each tardy student who peeks into his classroom on that first evening. The students, bewildered but undaunted, find seats as the other class members laugh at the banter. They will laugh many times throughout the three-hour class. As one student says during a break, it’s like a comedy act.

That may be, but it’s a comedy act with a purpose.

AJ 8 (Criminal Investigation) is part of Ventura College’s extensive Administration of Justice program. Thirty-seven courses are being offered this semester; 16 of them (or 30 units) are required for an associate in science degree.

There are two full-time faculty members in the department, Goff and Bob Camarillo, a former deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. They share the load with 10 part-timers, all of whom work in the criminal justice field. Emphasis is placed on criminal law, the state Penal Code, the legal aspect of evidence, criminal justice report writing, criminal procedures and police community relations.

The goal of the program, Goff said, is to do one of three things--to prepare students to major in a criminal justice discipline at a university, to prepare them to go straight into police or correctional jobs, or to supplement the education of those already in the criminal justice field.

Goff’s criminal investigation class is an elective in the associate degree program. Regardless of a student’s motive for taking the class, the teacher is determined that each student leaves knowing the fundamentals of investigation.

He’s going to do that, in part, by sharing his real-life experiences.

Goff served as a foot patrolman with the Tactical Patrol Force in Harlem in the mid-1960s, as a homicide detective in Manhattan for about five years, and, briefly, with the Ventura Police Department.

“My basic rule is that you can’t gather too much evidence. You can always throw evidence out, but you can’t necessarily go back later and find it,” he said. “The major weak link in investigations is poor evidence gathering.”

In that first class session one thing is immediately evident--Goff will tell it like it is in a manner very much his own.

“In the old days, we’d threaten this guy or beat him or trick him, whatever . . . and we’d get the direct evidence,” he tells his new class. “Detecting is a heck of a lot harder than threatening.”

Pretty soon Goff is quoting Shakespeare to make a point and making exaggerated noises while describing an autopsy. And he’s explaining the behavior of overworked law-enforcement people: “Everybody’s up to their butts in alligators and they forget why they’re in the swamp.”

He is an altogether different person at school, Goff said, than he is at home. But his demeanor, his jokes, even the pictures he puts up in his office, are part of his methodology, “which is to motivate (students) to think about the subject.”

Arthur Jimenez, chief investigator for the Ventura County public defender’s office, has taken three classes from Goff, including criminal investigation.

“There wasn’t a whole heck of a lot I didn’t already know,” he said of the investigation class. “But it was a reaffirmation of some of the general principles. I’m sure it was a tremendous amount of information for the new students.”

Jimenez said he recommends that his investigative staff also take the course “to make sure we have our bases covered.”

Ruben Robinson already had worked three years with the public defender’s office and five years as a criminal investigator with the Probation Department when he enrolled in Goff’s criminal investigation course last semester.

He said the course allowed him to see the investigative procedure from the other side of the fence, through the mind of a police officer.

“It was fascinating to see what kind of things they are looking for, the types of approaches they would take. Now I’m able to see how they, the adversaries, do their work,” he said. “When I’m out there looking for additional information, certain ideals come to mind on how to approach an interview, how to approach a person. You become more of a detective, and less of just an information gatherer and interviewer.”

*

Goff started to become more of a detective, albeit unofficially, at age 12 while growing up in an Irish working-class family in Astoria N.Y.

“I was one of those kids, I didn’t have television. But I read--I read Sherlock Holmes, (Raymond) Chandler and thought it was really nifty to figure out who did it and nail them for it,” he said. “It seemed like fun to me . . . and a public service, I might add.”

So, after “consulting” with Holmes, Goff hit the pavement.

“I used to make notes,” he said, “on how Holmes looked at fingernails, how people blew their nose.” Goff said he began riding the subway and picking people out of the crowd. He’d look at them, make a guess at how they spent their time, and follow them to see if he was correct.

“Now I think it’s called being a pervert,” he said. “But it makes you observant.”

Goff attended an inner-city high school in New York. When he was set to graduate in 1962 his counselor, he said, suggested that he forgo college and instead “find a simple trade.”

He joined the Army and served in the Special Forces. Goff spent some time in Germany, where he met his wife, Chris, who was working at an Army hospital. She is now a psychotherapist in Ventura.

When he got out of the military in 1966, Goff joined the New York Police Department’s Tactical Patrol Force. The unit was established to patrol high-crimes areas of the city. Goff was assigned to various precincts in Harlem and the South Bronx.

“We augmented the regular patrol force of a precinct. If there was an area where there were a lot of car thefts, or a lot of armed robberies, or a lot of drug deals going on, that’s where we worked,” he said. “During the riots, we were basically riot cops.”

Goff said he couldn’t believe the poverty he witnessed during his time as a patrolman. “I got out of the Army and figured I’d seen everything. And then I got to Harlem. I thought, ‘This is wrong, I don’t blame you for being pissed off.’ And they were. It wasn’t a good time to be a white cop in New York.”

A lifetime dream was fulfilled when Goff became a detective in the Manhattan North precinct in 1970: “That was my whole reason for joining the cops, to become a detective.”

In the early 1970s Goff and his wife, then parents of two small boys, decided that they didn’t want their kids growing up in the city. At the same time, the Police Department decided to send Goff to the National Crime Prevention Institute at the University of Kentucky. While there, he met a Ventura police officer. The rest is history.

Goff moved west and served with the Ventura Police Department for a year. He received his master’s degree in administration of justice from Cal Lutheran University in 1975, the same year he began teaching at Ventura College.

Only occasionally does he miss police work: “You miss the ups, you miss the downs. It’s like childbirth. Women tend to forget the nine months of looking like a balloon, throwing up, feeling funny.”

With police work, he said, “You miss the chase, you don’t miss the stakeout. You don’t miss almost getting killed, the diarrhea from the bad food or stumbling down the stairs in the dark.”