Fishing For Trouble: How Mass Spectrometry Helped Solve The Lake Powell Cheating Case

By John Oncea, Editor

Two men pleaded guilty to tampering to influence a contest, a third-degree felony, nearly two years after the state began investigating their fish catch. Here’s how mass spectroscopy helped solve the crime.

Did I ever tell you about the time my daughter won a fishing tournament? Well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration. What she really won was an inexpensive, adjustable baseball cap for catching the smallest fish during a “Try Fishing Day” hosted by our local state park!

Despite the thrill of winning that cap, she chose to retain her amateur status, never entering a professional fishing tournament. But, if she had turned pro, she might have been competing in the Championship Round of the B&W Trailer Hitches Challenge Cup Presented by Toyota – the first event of the fall edition of the 2024 General Tire Team Series Presented by Bass Pro Shops – which was held recently at the same state park she had fished on all those years ago.

And, if she had competed, she might have won the $20,000 awarded to the winner. Yeah, maybe I should have nudged her a little bit into turning pro.

The tournament held here in Erie, PA was just one of dozens that Major League Fishing (MLF), the world’s largest tournament-fishing organization and premiere outdoor entertainment brand, puts on across the country every year.

And while MLF believes “bass fishing is more than just tournaments – it’s getting outdoors with family and friends, finding the perfect spot, selecting the right gear, dialing in on the bite, feeling the joy of setting the hook, and seeing the smiles on the faces of those around us,” it’s also about $100,000 pay days.

Now, to be clear, as far as I can tell there has never been a hint of scandal around any MLF event. That said, the same can’t be said for tournaments put on by other organizations, including during a two-day largemouth bass fishing tournament on Lake Powell in October 2018.

But it wasn’t the organization hosting the event that did anything wrong, rather it was the two Washington City, UT anglers competing for $2,500 in prize money, an amount large enough to lead them to cheat.

This is their story, as well as how mass spectroscopy was used to help catch them.

The Crime And Ensuing Investigation

In October 2018, about 25 teams of anglers gathered at Lake Powell, UT to compete in a fishing tournament with thousands of dollars of prize money at stake. Two men – Robert Dennett and Kamron Wootton – decided to give themselves an advantage by, well, cheating, according to The New York Times.

The $2,500 prize awarded to the team that turned in the five fish with the highest total weight wasn’t exactly life-changing money. “For them to cheat and do what they did, the risk they took, for the recognition and a piece of wood, a trophy or plaque on the wall, is pretty ridiculous,” said Ron Colby, a professional fisherman who has made more than $100,000 over 20 years of tournaments.

After the first day of the tournament, Dennett and Wootton were in second place so it wasn’t the weight of the fish that did them in. Rather, it was that their fish didn’t look like the others that dew suspicion, according to Lt. Paul Washburn, a spokesman for the wildlife resources division.

“One, they were shaped differently, indicating that they probably have a different diet,” Washburn said. They had some markers of stress – a reddish color in the fish’s mouth and on the fins.

Fish exhibit a remarkable ability to adapt their body size based on food availability, notes ScienceDaily. When food is scarce, their bodies can shrink, but their bony heads remain the same size, resulting in fish with disproportionately large heads and slender bodies.

This phenomenon was observed in Lake Powell, where the native fish population had elongated bodies and larger heads due to limited food resources. In contrast, the fish submitted by Dennett and Wootton were noticeably plumper with smaller heads, indicating a physiological mismatch with the typical Lake Powell fish population.

For their deceit, the two Washington City, UT, residents were charged with and later pleaded guilty to illegally relocating fish to gain an unfair advantage in the competition, The New York Times writes. The case marked the first time someone had been prosecuted for cheating in a fishing tournament in Utah’s history.

Once tournament organizers realized Dennett and Wootton’s largemouth bass looked different from the other fish caught during the event they called a biologist and the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) which sent an investigator for the tournament’s second day.

“Neither one of them were very inclined to talk to our investigator,” Washburn told The New York Times. “One of them started to kind of acknowledge that yeah, the fish maybe hadn’t come from Lake Powell. Then he very quickly asked for an attorney, and the other individual didn’t want to say anything.”

Dennett and Wootton’s fish were sent to a University of Utah lab, along with other fish caught in Lake Powell, where laboratory analysis revealed that the suspicious fish had been caught at Quail Creek Reservoir, UT, not Lake Powell. This scientific evidence provided crucial proof that Dennett and Wootton had illegally transported fish from one body of water to another in an attempt to cheat in the tournament.

To Catch A Criminal … With Mass Spectrometry

According to Criminal, Hal Stout, who worked as an investigator for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources for more than 20 years, was the investigator sent by DWR. When Stout arrived at the tournament, he looked at the unusual fish and then talked with one of the men who had turned them in.

“I told him that I believed the fish had been held in captivity,” Stout told Criminal. “The theory behind the red fins was that the fish were stressed for a period of time, which caused the reddening of the fins.

“I was thinking that it was likely that the fish had been held in captivity and then transported to Lake Powell and then probably released into the lake in cages so that they could bring the fish back up. And he flat-out denied everything and almost challenged us to try to catch him. He said, there's no way you can prove what you're saying.”

Stout told him that the science of stable isotopes could prove his theory.

Stable isotope analysis is used in a lot of different fields, notes Criminal. “Using a mass spectrometer, biologists can measure the types of carbon or nitrogen atoms inside bones, hair, and teeth. To learn more about an animal’s migratory patterns or diet, the FDA also has used stable isotope analysis to detect food fraud, like mislabeled wines or diluted maple syrup. And forensic scientists have used the technique to try to identify unknown remains by narrowing down where a person might have lived before their death.”

Stout had learned about stable isotopes when he was getting his master’s degree in forensic science. “My idea,” he said, “was that we might be able to use something similar from the water where the fish had been living to show that that water is different from Lake Powell, and it would have stable isotope ratios that are different from fish that live in Lake Powell. I didn't know for sure at the time that we could or couldn't, but it was an idea.”

Stout started asking around, talking to labs about testing the fish. “I also spoke with our fisheries biologists who work for the Utah Division of Wildlife, and they told me some interesting things that they had done with fish otoliths and stable isotopes,” he told Criminal.

An otolith is a crystal that forms in a fish's inner ear and looks just like a jagged, clear crystal. They float around in the inner ear of the fish giving it equilibrium and helping it know how to stay upright.

Investigators decided to test the otolith to figure out what body of water the fish came from. “We suspected that the area where they would have caught the fish was probably not terribly far away, and so it narrowed down our list of areas that have largemouth bass of that size,” said Stout.

One of those places was Quail Creek Lake State Park, a park that requires visitors to check their boat at the entrance station. Investigators checked the log for the days preceding the tournament and noticed that the suspect and his boat had been on the lake on Thursday evening, two days before the tournament.

“We sampled fish from Quail Lake Reservoir, had the evidence fish that we had seized, and we also sampled some more fish from Lake Powell, and we sent (all that and) the otoliths in,” said Stout. “We found that it was a very clear isotopic ratio that delineated the fish from Lake Powell and the fish from Quail Creek Reservoir. We also found that the evidence fish had the same isotopic ratio as the fish from Quail Creek Reservoir.”

It ended up being in the neighborhood of a one-in-so-many-billion chance that Dennett and Wootton’s fish came from anywhere other than Quail Creek reservoir.

Pleading Guilty

“In May 2019, after months of waiting, the lab was able to say unequivocally that the fish that Dennett and Wootton turned in could not have come from Lake Powell, based on the level of isotopes in the otolith scale of the fish,” writes The New York Times.

Dennett and Wootton admitted to illegally relocating fish to improve their chances of winning the tournament and, on March 18, 2020, were charged with tampering to influence a contest, a third-degree felony; unlawful release of wildlife, a Class A misdemeanor; and captivity of protected wildlife, a Class B misdemeanor.

 In September 2020, nearly two years after the incident, “both men pleaded guilty to all three counts and were ordered to pay a $500 plea in abeyance fee, complete 48 hours of community service, and pay $2,500 in restitution to the wildlife division’s Help Stop Poaching Fund,” The New York Times writes. “The men were also sentenced to 24 months’ probation, during which they are prohibited from hunting.”

“From our agency standpoint,” Washburn said, “we want to make sure people are following the rules and they’re not taking advantage of wildlife, especially moving fish species to one area or another.”

Dennett and Wootton had to pay a fine and do community service and also temporarily lost their hunting and fishing licenses. “It is a big deal to transport wildlife illegally,” Stout said. “It is basically the same as theft. You know, it may not sound the same, but it’s very similar to stealing $2,500 from someone.”

As for the role mass spectroscopy played, Stout said, “Well, it was fun to put science to work and use something that maybe we hadn’t looked at before. Not so much proud of myself, but it was. I had fun.”