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Letter from the South


THE MYSTERY OF THE HEADLESS GOATS IN THE CHATTAHOOCHEE

Hundreds of decapitated goat carcasses have turned up in the river that runs
through metro Atlanta. Are they evidence of animal sacrifice? Drug smuggling?
Both?

By Charles Bethea

September 29, 2022
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When I was twelve, my mother, Sally Bethea, co-founded a nonprofit that was
eventually called Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, or C.R.K. Part of the Waterkeeper
Alliance, a network of environmental groups devoted to defending rivers, bays,
and other bodies of water, C.R.K. seeks to protect the
four-hundred-and-thirty-five-mile river that flows across northeast Georgia and
then south to the Gulf of Mexico. (There are now more than three hundred
waterkeeper groups around the world.) She was not only the group’s executive
director but also the designated riverkeeper, positions she held for more than
two decades.

After my mom retired, Jason Ulseth became the riverkeeper, assuming all
boat-related duties. One October a few years ago, he took three of the group’s
donors, all women in middle age, on a two-hour tour of the river that included a
stretch ten miles west of downtown Atlanta, where the Chattahoochee passes a Six
Flags Theme Park and goes under an I-20 bridge. Ulseth had boated it a hundred
times before. “But, this time,” he told me recently, “I saw something white off
on the side near the bridge.” He pulled the boat over to the bank. “There were
eight or nine baby decapitated goats just floating in the water. The ladies
flipped their shit.”


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Ulseth “booked it out of there,” he told me. It wasn’t the first time a dead
goat had been seen in the river—in the nineties, Georgia Power informed C.R.K.
that a goat carcass was caught in a swirling eddy near a power station’s intake
pipe. (Riverkeeper employees have also come upon grocery carts, sex toys,
mannequins, bowling balls, and TV sets, among other objects.) But that morning
in October, Ulseth said, marked the beginning of the Chattahoochee’s
headless-goat era. “After that, I found them there pretty much every single time
I’d go out,” he told me. “Just bodies, never heads. Sometimes dozens.” Ulseth
estimates that in the roughly four years since that day he’s found around five
hundred decapitated goats in the Chattahoochee.

Others have found them, too. “Half the time we boat by the bridge, I smell
them,” Matt Robinson, a local fishing guide, told me. He’s seen hundreds, he
said, including thirty on a single trip. “I’m sure some catfish or some turtles
chew on them once in a while,” he added. “They’re pretty big animals.”

A few years ago, Robinson introduced Ulseth to a man who was living under the
I-20 bridge, who called himself Hot Dog. Hot Dog took pictures and videos of the
goats on a cell phone, sometimes capturing the moment they were flung from the
highway. He told Robinson that the goats were usually freshly killed, and he
shared some of his photos with Ulseth, who showed them to me: headless goat
carcasses falling from the sky. “They just go plop,” Ulseth said. “Could be two
in the morning or two in the afternoon.”



The carcasses sometimes get caught midcurrent by downed trees or underwater
debris; some end up among heaps of trash along the bank. Others have lately
shown up farther afield. “We just found a big pile of them dumped in the
Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area last week, at a boat ramp,” Ulseth
said, referring to a spot about forty miles upriver that paddlers and other
recreationalists have long used to enter and exit the water. “They were all
covered in maggots when I got there. Pretty disgusting.” It was not his worst
encounter: he once found three such carcasses rotting inside a floating burlap
sack, which he had opened “in case it was a body and needed to be reported,” he
said.



The case of the headless goats is a mystery. It’s also a public-health hazard,
and a nightmare for a stretch of river that’s newly safe for recreation—the
water south of Atlanta is dramatically less polluted than it was decades ago,
thanks in large part to C.R.K.’s work. Private developers and local governments
have begun installing boat ramps and other infrastructure to make the area more
accessible. “A family can now have a nice paddle on the river and then take out
right there near Six Flags,” Ulseth told me. “But, as soon as someone paddles
down and sees that crap,” he said, referring to the goat carcasses, “they’re
never coming back.”

One theory about the headless goats of the Chattahoochee focusses on the
Afro-Caribbean religious tradition Santería, also known as Lukumí and La Regla
de Ocha. The practice sometimes involves animal sacrifice. A similar theory was
floated several years ago, when numerous goat heads turned up in and around
Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. In both cases, no one has established a definitive
connection, at least not publicly.

I called former agents with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to see if they
had heard of any leads. One directed me to Robert Almonte, a retired deputy
chief of the El Paso Police Department, who worked a number of narcotics
investigations, then served as the U.S. Marshall for the Western District of
Texas from 2010 to 2016. He has since founded a consulting company that
specializes in the activities of Mexican drug cartels, including how “they
involve the spiritual world in their activities,” as Almonte put it. Almonte
offers seminars, which, he told me, help law-enforcement agents identify likely
perpetrators. (He says that several major arrests of cartel members have
resulted from these seminars.)

I told Almonte about what was turning up in the Chattahoochee. He didn’t sound
surprised. “I’m seeing more and more of the drug traffickers using Santería for
protection over the last couple of years,” he said. “But that’s a lot of goats.
That would mean they’re moving a lot of drugs along that highway.”

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Drug smugglers have long attempted to exploit religion for their own purposes,
Almonte said. “Back in the day, on raids, we’d mostly see shrines and altars,”
he told me. “But it usually consisted of prayer candles related to the Catholic
Church.” Now, he said, “you’re seeing more cartel traffickers using Santería”
and Palo Mayombe, an Afro-Caribbean religious tradition, as well as a Latin
American practice called Santa Muerte. The traffickers are not necessarily well
schooled in these traditions, Almonte noted—he told me that when he shows
pictures of headless goats that have been found to experts in Santería, “They
often say, ‘Yeah, this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing.’ ”

Almonte had just returned from a trip to Mexico, where he was researching a case
involving a drug cartel called La Unión Tepito. The case was set in motion in
2019, by a raid, in Mexico City, of a drug house which had spiritual
paraphernalia inside it. The raid turned up massive quantities of
methamphetamine, plus grenades, a rocket launcher, and items evidently
associated with both Santería and Palo Mayombe, according to Almonte.

Atlanta has long been a major drug-trafficking hub, dating back to at least when
the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar transported cocaine from Miami to
Atlanta and points beyond. “It’s been a plaza for many years for the Sinaloa
cartel,” Almonte told me. “Several years ago,” he added, “you had the Jalisco
New Generation cartel”—Sinaloa’s chief rival—“move in.”

Almonte figures that Mexican cartel operators could be sacrificing goats for
safe passage to or from Atlanta, and dumping them in the river. He said that he
wouldn’t be surprised if the G.B.I. or the F.B.I. is investigating the
connection between the goats and drug trafficking; later, someone with direct
knowledge of the matter confirmed to me the existence of such an investigation.
(“There is no G.B.I. investigation,” a spokesperson for that agency told me.
“I’d recommend checking in with the F.B.I.” An F.B.I. spokesperson told me, “We
can’t discuss or acknowledge the existence of any current or potential future
investigation.”)

After speaking with Almonte, I called up Miguel De La Torre, a professor of
social ethics at the Iliff School of Theology, in Denver, who grew up practicing
Santería and has written extensively on the subject. He describes himself as “a
Roman Catholic–Southern Baptist Santero, who still follows some of the Santería
traditions though I may not believe in it.” I described the situation, and
explained Almonte’s theory. “There are certain religious traditions where animal
sacrifices are made to gain enough power to accomplish something,” De La Torre
said. “The strongest energy, the strongest power, is in blood. But I’m always a
little hesitant when a dead animal is found and it’s connected to Santería.”
Many of those who study Santería are frustrated by the eagerness of outsiders to
connect any unexplained dead animal to the practices of this tradition. De La
Torre did not think that the connection between Santería and smuggling was
clearly established—and the location of the headless goats in the Chattahoochee
struck him as odd. “If it was Santería, the fact that it was by a river means
that it was an offering to Oshun, the goddess of love,” he explained. “Not
exactly the kind of orisha that you want to sacrifice to to smuggle drugs.”




Still, De La Torre conceded that the headless goats could be the work of
spiritual opportunists, “copycatting Santería” for their own purposes. “Drug
dealers who are not part of the religion but are making it up as they go along
based on what they read on the Web,” as he put it. He offered an analogy. “It’s
like not knowing anything about Catholicism and bathing in holy water because
you think it’s gonna help you.”

One Monday morning, earlier this month, I got in a boat with Ulseth. My mom
came, too; she wanted “to see what this whole crazy goat thing is about,” she
said. We put in downstream from the bridge. Motoring against the current, we saw
an osprey, a snowy white egret, a hawk, a great blue heron, a few kingfishers
and buzzards, and dozens of turtles sunning themselves on logs and rocks. We
also saw Styrofoam containers, a plastic chair, two rafts, a basketball, and
discarded tires trapped by downed trees and marooned in the mud along the bank.

We got out at a dock and walked around new apartments built a little ways back
from where junk yards once teetered on the edge of the river. Farther on, we
stopped to marvel at a Six Flags roller coaster rising from river right (the
Mindbender, bane of my anxious childhood).



Then we came upon a decapitated goat, caught in a pile of trash between a downed
tree and the riverbank. “This one was probably dumped over the weekend,” Ulseth
told us.

“Holy fucking shit,” my mom said, overwhelmed by the stench.

“That’s the neck right there,” Ulseth continued, pointing to a fleshy stump.
“We’re a little further downstream than where we normally find them,” he added.
“So probably we’re going to find a lot more.”

In the next hour, we found six headless goats. “I just got punched in the face,”
Ulseth said as we approached the reeking sequel to the first. It was covered in
flies and maggots. “That one’s been there a little longer,” Ulseth said. We saw
a third, and then, every five minutes or so, we’d first smell and then see
another headless goat bobbing in the water.

We reached the highway bridge. Beneath it was a platform and a blue tarp; on a
concrete column, the words “HOT DOG” and “GOD IS GOOD” had been painted. Ulseth
told me that Hot Dog claimed to have confronted the carcass-discarders with a
gun, after one too many goats had been dropped near his camp. “If you
motherfuckers ever come back here, I’m gonna blow your head off,” he supposedly
told them. Ulseth said he later saw the gun in question, under the bridge. (“It
shot those rubber pellets,” he said.) Had Hot Dog, whom Ulseth hadn’t seen
recently, ever shared details about the identities of the goat dumpers? What
they looked like, or anything they said? “Nope.”

A week after our trip up the river, Ulseth went out on the same stretch again
and found fifteen headless goats. “Maybe a few repeats,” he said. “But a lot of
goats.”

When I first spoke to De La Torre, he said that if he were going to use Santería
to gain protection for smuggling drugs, he’d probably sacrifice a black dog,
because that is what Oggun, a warrior deity, would want. He’d leave the dog’s
body by a railroad track, because Oggun is also lord of iron, he added. But he
followed up by e-mail a few days later. “The more I think of it, the goat is one
of the preferred sacrifices of Elegguá,” another orisha, “who ‘opens the way,’ 
he wrote. A sacrifice to Elegguá would typically be “left by a four-way street
crossing.” Goats and highways, in other words, made some sense to him. But a
headless goat, in a river? That was harder to understand. ♦






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Charles Bethea is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

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