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(Photo: Wolfgang Kaehler/Getty)
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The Hall of Mosses in the Hoh River rainforest, Olympic National Park, Washington State, United States. (Photo: Wolfgang Kaehler/Getty)

The Thieves Didn’t Leave Fingerprints. Detectives Used Tree DNA To Convict Them Instead.

Published:  Updated: 

Timber thieves are a slippery bunch. Here's how cops uncovered an underground criminal ring in spanning the Pacific Northwest and cracked down to protect the state's ancient trees.

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Deep in the night on August 4, 2018, a trio of timber cutters bushwhacked into a steep valley thick with brush, wearing headlamps and carrying a chainsaw, gas can, and a slew of felling tools. Their target, a trifurcated, mossy bigleaf maple, towered above Jefferson Creek, which gurgled down the narrow ravine floor that drains the Olympic National Forest’s Elk Lake. Justin Wilke, the band’s captain, had discovered the massive tree the day before and dubbed her “Bertha.”

Wilke had established three dispersed campsites in the Elk Lake vicinity, some 20 miles from the nearest town of Hoodsport, Washington, over the previous weeks. By day he scouted for the most prime bigleaf maples. He had illegally felled at least three in the area since April, but he considered Bertha the mother tree.

A carpenter by trade, Wilke, then 36, dabbled in odd jobs in construction, as a mechanic, on fishing boats, and in canneries, but like many across the peninsula’s scattered hamlets, he’d been a logger since his hands were sure enough to wield a chainsaw. A tattoo the length of his left arm read “West Coast Loggers,” his tribute to a heritage that began with his grandfather.

Honest work had grown scarce. Wilke and his girlfriend were camping on a friend’s property just outside the national forest to trim expenses and lived on his earnings from cutting illegal firewood and selling poached maple. The situation wasn’t tenable. He was hungry, and he needed a windfall.

Closing in on Bertha in the darkness alongside Wilke were Shawn “Thor” Williams and Lucas Chapman. Thor had just sprung from a stint in prison two weeks earlier. A 47-year-old union framer, Thor had also dabbled as an MMA fighter and debt collector and carried a litany of past convictions ranging from assault and burglary to unlawful imprisonment. He hoped the job would deliver him back to his daughter and sometimes-girlfriend in California. Chapman, 35, was Wilke’s gopher, hired primarily to watch the campsites during the operation. The three were high on methamphetamines.

Though the relative humidity that night hovered around 75 percent, the air a pleasant 60 degrees, rainfall had been unusually sparse that summer. Higher than average temperatures ushered the typically wet Olympic region into a moderate drought. Smoke from various wildfires in British Columbia had clouded the air throughout the summer.

Bertha held a bee’s nest in a hollow at the base of her trunk that made chainsaw work problematic. “I’m not going over there,” Thor, who was allergic to bees, protested. At their campsite two days earlier, he’d been stung on the hand and suffered mild anaphylaxis after he sipped a can of Four Loko with a bee in it. “I’ll take care of it,” Wilke said.

Accounts of who did what next vary, but someone pulled out a can of wasp killer and sprayed the hive to little effect, then doused it in gasoline and lit a match. The offended bees clouded the air. Flames sprouted up Bertha’s trunk and expanded in the underbrush at her roots.

For the next hour, Wilke, Thor, and Chapman beat the burgeoning fire with sticks, kicked dirt over it, and used Gatorade bottles to quench its tongues with creekwater. “Let’s go,” Wilke finally ordered. “It’s out.”

By the time the poachers left, cold and wet from splashing in the waist-deep river, all clear signs of flame had vanished. The first gauzy motes of dawn lightened the sky. In the leafy silence that followed the thwarted thieves’ retreat, beneath the duff at Bertha’s roots, still-hot embers smoldered and crept through the forest, invisible but surging with the breaking day.

An illustration of a man with a magnifying glass looking at tree stumps
Tree poachers are a slippery bunch. Fortunately, forest service detectives have some tricks up their sleeves. (Illustration: Yifan Wu)

Officer David Jacus was driving just south of the Quilcene ranger station on Highway 101 when he got a call from Puget Sound dispatch at 2 P.M. later that afternoon. A fire crew was requesting law enforcement at the Elk Lake Lower Trailhead, following reports of a smoke plume earlier that morning.

Jacus turned up the road snaking into the national forest as soon as he could and radioed Ben Dean, engine boss for Engine Crew 692, the first responders at the fire site. “It’s burning in a bigleaf maple near Jefferson Creek,” Dean told him. He said his crew had also found a gas can and a backpack full of cutting tools, which suggested a wood poaching operation gone awry. “We’re going to hike them out to the trailhead,” Dean added. Jacus said he was on his way.

Jacus, in his early forties, was the sole law enforcement officer assigned to the 628,000-acre Olympic National Forest. He patrolled campgrounds, addressed drug and traffic violations, and assisted with search and rescue. He also probed natural resource crimes and had worked on five felony timber theft cases and investigated well over 100. He’d been with the Forest Service for nearly a decade, after law enforcement stints with the National Park Service in Yellowstone, Glacier, and North Cascades.

“I grew up backpacking and camping,” Jacus told me. “I’ve spent a lot of time outdoors.” To him, investigating and stopping timber theft meant protecting the large, old-growth trees that he’d come to love. “Some of the trees harvested are really irreplaceable.” Now they were burning.

When Jacus arrived at the spur road descending to the head of Elk Lake Trail #805 at 3 P.M., a white Chevy Trailblazer climbing the slope blocked his path and turned up the forest road. He recognized the driver, who had reported the same vehicle stolen a month earlier, though Jacus had helped recover the vehicle a few days later. “I made a mental note of it and then proceeded down to meet the firefighters,” Jacus recalled.

Dean and his crew delivered the evidence to Jacus and mentioned two burnt cans of wasp killer still by the maple, which they referred to as the Origin Tree. The groundfire spanned an area 30 feet square and was spreading. Dean’s crew had been fighting the blaze using five-gallon bladders with hand pumps. Bee-stung to a person, they’d returned to the engine—a ton-and-a-half fire brush truck equipped with a 1,000 feet of hose and a 300-gallon water tank—to retrieve a portable pump they planned to set directly in Jefferson Creek to extinguish the Origin Tree.

A map of the 3,312-acre Maple Fire, created using the Gaia GPS Historic Wildfires map layer.

Meanwhile, Jacus drove up Forest Road 2401 and found the white Chevy next to a tent at a nearby campsite. “Forest Service law enforcement,” Jacus called from the road. “Anybody in the camp?” Justin Wilke and Lucas Chapman emerged from the tent.

Jacus said he was investigating a potential maple theft and a wildland fire. “What fire?” Wilke asked. Jacus indicated the smoke in the air. “What were you doing down near Elk Lake Trailhead?” Jacus asked. Wilke said he was only using the outhouse.

When Jacus asked if he’d been cutting in the area, Wilke denied even having a chainsaw. “You can look around,” he offered. Jacus told him they’d located tools by a burning maple. “I think you were down there cutting,” he said. “Will those tools connect back to you in any way?” Wilke said they wouldn’t. Chapman remained quiet through the encounter.

At the trailhead, Jacus rejoined Dean’s crew and side-sloped down a steep ravine to the fire to collect the cans of wasp spray they’d left behind. It was about 4:30 P.M. “As we were going down there, the winds definitely started to increase,” Jacus recalled. “The weather was changing. There was a lot of heavy smoke.”

Wind lifted the now-three-acre fire into the tree canopy. Dry moss and lichen ignited, floated down the air, and kindled spotfires all around him. Jacus, wearing only his officer’s uniform, felt suddenly vulnerable without fire gear. He yelled ahead to Dean. “Ben, I’m going to hike back out toward the trail. I’ll radio you when I get back to the trailhead.”

The fire was below Jacus to the west and climbing north, and he didn’t think he could make it across Jefferson Creek. “I could clearly see fire up in the trees,” he remembered. “And at that point, I ran uphill to the trail.”

Dean ordered a helicopter and a 20-person hand crew that camped at the trailhead to continue fighting the fire.

Over the next three months, the inferno, christened the Maple Fire, charred 3,300 acres of the Olympic National Forest and cost the feds over $4.5 million to suppress. But Jacus thought he might already have his prime suspect by the first day’s close. He just needed to prove it. Before long, he would land on an innovative approach that, if his hunch bore out, could render the case against Wilke watertight.

Bigleaf maple trees in the Hall of Mosses Trail, Hoh Rainforest, Olympic National Park, Washington.
Bigleaf maple trees in Olympic National Park, Washington. (Photo: Getty Images)

For as long as the concept of a forest as a woodland parcel to be owned and managed against the ancient lifestyles of commoners has existed, so have all forms of poaching, from its wildlife to its timber. Tree theft has needled forest managers across the United States at least since the nation by that name formed on one coast and spread like fire to another.

One of the earliest documented cases in Washington state, dated September 27, 1904, decreed that a man named Arthur Egbert from Barron, Washington, “pay the sum of $19.50 for 5,500 feet B.M. of timber and 3 cords of shake bolts cut in trespass from timber on lands in the Wash. Forest Reserve.”

An Associated Press report from 2003—the most recent estimate—puts the annual worth of wood poached in North America at $1 billion. A similarly outdated but unimproved Forest Service study from the 1990s figures the yearly value of timber stolen from its lands at $100 million. Globally, illegal logging ranks as the most profitable natural resource crime, with an annual value up to $199 billion.

Yet the true amount of theft in American forests is hard to estimate, given inconsistent reporting, jurisdictional isolation, and the way data is collected. “There’s no category that you can check so that it goes into a system to give you a definitive report on what’s actually happening,” explains Anne Minden, a retired U.S. Forest Service special agent who has for decades trained other agents to investigate environmental crimes.

The opportunism of small-scale timber theft, too, demands backwoods secrecy and the cloak of night, yielding a mysterious percentage of felled trees never seen. “These are difficult things to police or disrupt,” Jacus, now a special agent, says.

Washington state’s Specialized Forest Products Act was updated in 2005 to include cedar, spruce, western red alder, and bigleaf maple among woods that require a specialized forest products permit to harvest and sell. In 2008, Minden helped rewrite the law to render falsifying such permits a Class C Felony. To obtain one for felling these species on state or private land is free at county sheriff’s offices. But permits for bigleaf maple are almost never issued for National Forest land, and maples are never included in commercial timber sales there. Aspiring maple cutters can do legitimate business through contracts with private landowners. Trees in the Olympic National Forest, where most prime specimens live, are off limits.

Targeted species vary across the country, but in the Pacific Northwest, high-dollar trees like western red cedar, Sitka spruce, and bigleaf maple comprise the prime marks for poachers. Among the region’s loggers, maple is generally considered a weed tree not worth cutting. Occasionally, though, the 100-foot coastal hardwoods with foliage the size of dinner plates proffer sizable payouts. Only a few bigleafs in hundreds bear the mesmeric figured patterns that luthiers covet for their instruments’ prized veneers, for which it’s sometimes called “music wood.” Grammy-winning musician Carlos Santana famously plays custom Paul Reed Smith guitars topped with figured maple, boosting the wood’s popularity in recent decades.

No one knows why one maple figures and another doesn’t. Figure can manifest in curling waves, quilted crosshatch, or tongues of flame. The best music-grade wood demands $400 per boardfoot—100 times the rate for unfigured maple—and a single well-endowed tree might fetch as much as $20,000.

Discerning observers unveil these patterns by peeling back strips of bark with a hatchet, termed “checking,” to reveal the psychedelic grains of the cambium layer beneath. Justin Wilke considered himself especially skilled at detecting maple figure, sometimes even sans hatchet. “If it’s got good enough figure, you’ll see it in the bark,” he told me. “And I usually do. I don’t want to take a tree down just for fun. That’s not cool to me.”

The day the Maple Fire ignited, engine boss Ben Dean had spotted big checking marks on the Origin Tree that indicated an intention to steal its wood. Four days later, Jacus went into the forest with a Washington State Department of Natural Resources investigator to determine the fire’s cause. Not far from the scorched Origin Tree, they discovered two felled, partially harvested maples. Whoever cut them had likely sold the wood and, Jacus suspected, set the Origin Tree ablaze.

Maple Fire
The Maple Fire burned more than 3,300 acres of Olympic National Forest. (Photo: US Forest Service)

In the weeks that followed, Jacus conducted a series of interviews that pointed circumstantially to Wilke nested at the center of a messy woodcutter’s web. Yet damning evidence remained elusive. Jacus scouted Whale Bay Woods, a mill in Quilcene, but found no pertinent names in their logbook that connected to the Maple Fire.

On the evening of August 23, three weeks into the fire, Jacus had a breakthrough when Alan Richert, a neighbor and friend of Wilke’s who taught him to cut maple, said he and Wilke had sold wood to a mill in Tumwater throughout the spring and summer on a fraudulent permit bearing Richert’s name. By then, Wilke had disappeared. Thor had fled to California, where he’d soon be booked for possessing a firearm as a felon. Chapman was speaking with law enforcement and would gradually cooperate.

A few days later, Jacus pulled into the Tumwater mill as owner Jason Roberts was getting into his van to pick up a load of walnut. “Do you know Justin Wilke?” Jacus inquired. Roberts said he did. He showed Jacus a ledger bearing 21 dates on which Wilke, sometimes with Richert, had sold him maple using Richert’s misleading permit and a second one issued to “C.B.,” totaling $13,990.

The wood supposedly came from private property, which on further inspection grew no maple trees. Wilke’s name hadn’t appeared on either permit. Two stacks of the wood cut into blocks sat in the shop behind Roberts’s house. Roberts primarily dealt such wood to guitar makers once it dried. “Don’t sell it,” Jacus instructed him, “and don’t let it leave the premises.”

“I felt that it was not coming from the private property, that in fact it was coming from the national forest lands,” Jacus told me. He wondered if he could match DNA from the wood blocks at the Tumwater mill to the poached trees, much in the same way human DNA might link a suspect to a murder. “That’s when I reached out to agent Phil Huff.”

Two years earlier, Forest Service special agent Phil Huff had concluded an investigation that quietly managed to accomplish what Jacus was after. Jacus dialed Huff’s number and explained his situation. “How did you get the DNA for the case?” he asked him. Huff told him it was a complicated process. That didn’t bother Jacus. In fact, he wanted to know if they could do it one better.

All citizens in the U.S. own those forests. So when someone takes it in their own hands to claim this shared resource, they are taking it from the American people. They are taking it from all of us. And we should be outraged by it.
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(Photo: Peter Robbins via Unsplash)

The clearing known as the “Slaughterhouse” sat beyond a fence of hemlock and cedar near the Iron Creek Campground in the Cowlitz Valley, at Gifford Pinchot National Forest’s northwest corner, and it was aptly named. A dozen cruelly hewn old-growth maples, powdered in sawdust, lay scattered on the forest floor, their most valuable segments pilfered.

Agent Huff was assigned to investigate the case in early 2012. He ultimately pinpointed Harold Kupers, owner of J&L Tonewoods mill in Winlock, as the mastermind behind an elaborate ring of maple poachers methodically assailing the forest. Over two years, Kupers had trafficked more than $800,000 of figured wood, largely to PRS Guitars and North American Wood Products. At his peak, he sold PRS 300 bookmatched sets—which make the iconic mirrored woodgrain on the face of its guitars—each month, though the portion that was illegal maple is unclear.

During his investigation, Huff learned of Double Helix Tracking Technologies, a Singapore-based company that was using a cutting-edge technique to extract DNA from processed timber in order to determine the provenance of ancient shipwrecks. Huff enlisted Double Helix, which matched DNA from wood at Kupers’s mill to stumps in Gifford Pinchot. Kupers pleaded guilty. It was the first domestic enforcement of the Lacey Act, which bans illegal wildlife and timber trafficking.

After the call from Jacus about the Maple Fire case, Huff rang a U.S. Forest Service geneticist named Dr. Rich Cronn. Cronn had been interested in forensic applications of his work, which involved analyzing natural genetic variation in plant populations at the Pacific Northwest Research Station in Corvallis, Oregon. When Huff explained Jacus’s intentions, Cronn said he wanted in.

In the Cowlitz Valley case, attorneys had found Double Helix’s report too confusing and never introduced it to the court, according to Cronn. Since the company hadn’t released its findings, Cronn would have to start from scratch. But he’d already used a similar DNA extraction process for Douglas fir, Spanish cedar, and other species. He thought he could improve upon their methods and, if he raised a match, present them clearly enough to suit a federal criminal trial, where tree DNA had never been used to convict a poacher.

Cronn first needed to create a genetic database for bigleaf maples in the eastern Olympic region. That required boots on the ground, a bonus. “When I get to spend time in the field, there is nothing better,” Cronn told me. “It’s just wonderful to be outside in these forests.”

Early in October 2018, Jacus escorted Cronn and three members of his team into the forest to collect maple leaves—like a human’s, a tree’s entire genome resides in all of its cells, from root to leaf—from 230 trees near the Maple Fire’s origin, up the Hamma Hamma River and adjacent drainages. Jacus and Huff had already collected samples from one stack of the blocks Wilke had sold to the Tumwater Mill, along with the stumps of the two felled maples near the origin site.

Using the leaves he’d collected, Cronn identified 117 genetic markers, known signposts on the bigleaf genome where high variability creates a sort of fingerprint for individual trees. (Human forensics uses only 20 such markers.) Once established, a “fingerprint” from the felled maples could be checked against samples from the wood Wilke sold.

The test proved more powerful than it needed to be. “If there were a trillion bigleaf maples on planet Earth—and there aren’t,” Cronn explained, “and if there were a trillion identical Earths—which I don’t think there are—the chance of finding a perfect match between any two trees is still less than one in a trillion.”

Cronn set up in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife forensic lab in Ashland, where Jacus had sent his bagged samples. There, they ground the wood to sawdust with a Dremel tool, extracted its DNA in a detergent wash, and sent the captured material to a genomics contractor called Neogen for analysis. They repeated the process in the fall of 2019 with the rest of the Tumwater blocks and a third felled maple of which Chapman had later informed Jacus. All told, 83 blocks of the 217 they evaluated from the mill came back with an exact match for the three poached trees.

At Wilke’s trial in July 2021, the jury found him guilty of six counts ranging from conspiracy to theft of government property and trafficking in unlawfully harvested timber. He was sentenced to 20 months in prison, one of the longest sentences for a tree thief at the time.

Still, the jury wasn’t convinced, as Jacus had been, that Wilke struck the match that started the Maple Fire. Testimony concerning the night Bertha sparked didn’t always square. Thor had taken a plea deal a year earlier for his role in the fire, though Chapman was never indicted, and both took the stand against Wilke with divergent tales.

Cronn’s science, though, told a clear enough story. It clenched the essential case against Wilke that Jacus’s dogged investigation made. “When the DNA evidence matches the hunch and the hard work from law enforcement officers, that is really gratifying,” Cronn said. But he knew that bigleaf maple was just the beginning of the tale he’d begun to reveal. Uncounted tree thefts were plaguing other forests across the country, and Cronn hoped to cut short the chapters still being carved in public timber.

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Figured maple is highly sought after for high-end guitar making. (Photo: Stephen Pate)
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No one knows why some maples figure and others don't. (Photo: Richard Cronn)

In October 2019, witnesses tipped off a law enforcement officer to an illegal timber harvest near Siloam Springs in Missouri’s Mark Twain National Forest. A Forest Service special agent named Scott (who requested that only his first name be used) found eight freshly cut black walnut stumps and began sleuthing at a nearby hardwood sawmill.

U.S. attorney’s offices had never expressed much interest in pursuing timber cases, which involved trees of low monetary value. But when Wilke was convicted in the Maple Fire trial, timber theft was suddenly getting press. Scott had found a log at the mill that jigsawed perfectly with a stump at the poaching site. “The prosecuting attorney asked me a simple question: Was there any way that we could do a DNA match on this stump and the piece of wood from the sawmill?”

Cronn, it turned out, was already in the midst of establishing a genetic database for black walnut, which fueled a lucrative illicit trade that spanned 32 states across the eastern U.S. “Black walnut is really black gold,” Cronn told me. “My gut-level impression is that eastern black walnut theft is where the real action is in terms of frequency and value lost.”

Working in tandem with the citizen-science organization Adventure Scientists and Mark Twain’s staff, Cronn found an identical match between the walnut stump and Scott’s log. Todd Patterson, the man who sold it, pleaded guilty to depredation of government property and was sentenced last April to five months of time served.

Cronn and Adventure Scientists have since added rangewide genetic databases for western redcedar, Alaskan yellow-cedar, Douglas fir, and white oak, poached for stave bolts to forge whiskey barrels. “This technology is sitting on the shelf, waiting for law enforcement to use,” Cronn said. On short notice, he can analyze evidence samples for thefts of those species anywhere in their range.

Further applications for these databases include breeding vulnerable tree species for resilience against our shifting climate, identifying threatened and endangered trees ahead of proposed logging projects, and solving other crimes. In 2022, geneticists at the Missouri Botanical Garden helped convict a man of killing his wife by extracting DNA from juniper needles stuck in the man’s muddy boots and matching them to trees at the burial site.

Jacus expects that the Forest Service will increasingly use tree DNA where thieves steal high-value trees from public lands. Scott finds it to be a sharp tool but noted that “it’s not going to stop all timber theft.”

Since his black walnut case against Patterson, Scott has taken it a step further in directing his team to estimate not just the market value of the felled walnuts’ timber, but their entire ecological worth to a complex web of forest life. “When these trees are cut,” Scott pointed out, “they’re high-graded. These are the biggest and best trees in the area, no longer producing walnuts or acorns. You lose their dominant genetic diversity.”

Using these greater ecological values, U.S. attorneys have begun to prosecute more timber theft cases. “This is a great development,” Cronn says, calling the approach innovative. Because any forest is worth more than its weight in lumber.

powdered maple sawdust in a test tube
Geneticists have learned to solve crimes by extracting tree DNA from powdered wood samples. (Photo: Richard Cronn)
Laura Hauck extracts DNA from timber wood samples.
Laura Hauck extracts DNA from timber wood samples. (Photo: Richard Cronn)

While engine boss Ben Dean was fighting the Maple Fire in 2018, he told the Kitsap Sun that “as far as resource benefits go, this is doing very well for the forest.” He found beauty in the flames’ advance across the landscape. In an age of megafires, this was a low-intensity burn. Bertha, the Origin Tree, still stands, charred but alive. Six years after the Maple Fire, one local hiker from Quilcene said Elk Lake Trail #805 was growing back nicely. “Bambi and his little forest friends are enjoying the new habitat created by the fire.” Life from death in the face of flame and saw.

In her book Tree Thieves, Lyndsie Bourgon writes that she has “begun to see the act of timber poaching as not simply a dramatic environmental crime, but something deeper—an act to reclaim one’s place in a rapidly changing world, a deed of necessity.”

Wilke, like so many tree thieves, was caught in a cycle tough to escape: out of work, bedeviled by drugs and poverty, a forgotten plank in a crooked social scaffolding. And yet, Wilke made a choice difficult to justify. For him, cutting maples morphed into an addiction, even a right.

“What transpired up there is not what the government led everyone to believe,” Wilke told me just before he went to prison. Though he never took the stand in his own defense, he now maintains that he wasn’t even present when Bertha caught fire and admits to cutting only one tree, both dubious claims.

“I don’t feel bad that I did the government wrong. I feel bad that I did the people wrong,” Wilke said. “I mean, the government can take down hundreds of acres up there of prime timber, and what do we get out of it? That’s our land up there. We should be able to…” He trailed off, suddenly careful of his words, but it was clear what Wilke meant. Those were his trees to cut.

As a scientist, Cronn prefers to let the wood speak above the voices in his own heart. Still, he has always loved the trees. “All citizens in the U.S. own those forests,” he said. “So when someone takes it in their own hands to claim this shared resource, they are taking it from the American people. They are taking it from all of us. And we should be outraged by it.”

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Lead Photo: Wolfgang Kaehler/Getty