cat killer – Pain In The Bud

It’s difficult to know what to make of the Croydon cat killer story.

Initially, people from London-area cat rescues said they were looking for a person who had mutilated dozens of cats in the South London area. As the number increased to more than 100 and public outrage became palpable, police opened an investigation.

The story was wild. Newspapers bandied about disturbing figures, claiming hundreds of cats mutilated at the hands of a sick individual or several people. There were reports of feline remains artfully arranged in the driveways and on the front steps of victims’ homes to inflict maximum trauma on the people who discovered them, with allegedly clean cuts indicating a human with a blade was responsible.

Then in 2021, the Metropolitan Police announced they were closing their case after three years and almost $200,000 spent.

Foxes, not cruel humans, were responsible for the cat killings, they said. A study in the journal Veterinary Pathology found fox DNA on the corpses of 32 cats and said puncture wounds on the feline bodies were consistent with fox bites.

London-area animal rescues disputed the findings, saying the study couldn’t account for the mutilation of so many animals. The study’s authors blamed “badly behaved foxes” who were scavenging on the remains of strays and pets killed in traffic or by ingesting antifreeze.

a black and white cat on top of the table — Credit: Fajer u015eehirli/Pexels

Lots of other people refused to accept the Metropolitan Police conclusion, including people whose cats had been victimized. In some of those cases, veterinarians concluded the cats were killed by humans, not animals.

Which brings us to now.

The Mirror has teamed up with the South London Animal Rights Network (SLAIN) to create an interactive map showing the locations where more than 1,000 dead cats were found over the past several years.

“This map shows where incidents have occurred but also and perhaps just as important, where incidents have never happened,” SLAIN’s Boudicca Rising told the paper. “If you know of someone who made journeys to these locations on these dates please do get in touch with us. All information will be treated in the strictest of confidence.”

Documents obtained by journalists in London indicate there was internal tension at the Metropolitan Police over the resources that had been allocated to the cat case, and spokesperson for the force admitted that was a consideration. But the department stands by its assessment and says there’s no evidence a serial cat killer is on the loose.

It’s difficult to believe someone or a group of people could evade capture while allegedly killing more than 1,000 cats since 2015, especially in a city like London where CCTV cameras blanket most neighborhoods.

There are an estimated one million CCTV cameras covering 607 square miles of London, and the commonly-cited statistic claims Londoners are caught on CCTV cameras an average of 300 times per day. Other estimates claim that number is too high, and the average UK citizen is spotted on a municipal surveillance camera 70 times a day.

Notably, those figures do not include private cameras like Ring systems and surveillance operated by private businesses. The point is, it’s very difficult to avoid cameras in London, and if there are human feline killers out there, they must know an awful lot about where the cameras are.

If the phantom cat-killers are real, not only have they been able to avoid appearing on surveillance, they’ve evaded the watchful eyes of neighbors as the story circulated widely in the press. The theory that the killings were the work of animals, mostly under the cover of night and beneath the notice of people, sounded more plausible to many people.

Still, the theory doesn’t neatly fit the evidence.

Not all veterinarians agree that foxes are the culprit. While the veterinary pathologists who authored the study looked at photographs of the mutilated felines, some veterinarians who directly examined the bodies of slain cats concluded they were killed with blades. When experts are at odds over evidence, what can you do but gather more information and hope for the best?

London may have to do what Washington, D.C. did and deploy low-to-the-ground trail cameras and regular surveillance cameras around the city. In Washington, the goal was to get an accurate census on the number of strays and ferals living within city limits. In London, a census could be a bonus as they finally get an answer to the question of who’s been killing all those cats.

Neighbors who live on a quiet street in rural Pennsylvania were horrified when a man in a white pickup truck intentionally tried to run over stray cats last week, hitting at least one.

Now, thanks to one neighbor who captured part of the attack on video, they’ve identified the man at the wheel, and he’s a local politician.

Frank Pagani Jr. resigned from his seat on the municipal council of Galilee, a rural Pennsylvania town with a population of 379. Video shows Pagani Jr. speeding up and swerving to hit one of two cats who were in the road at the time. He was going so fast he blew through the stop sign at the end of the street.

The brazen politician then made a left turn and casually pulled into his own driveway on a side street.

William Bittner, who captured part of the Dec. 1 hit-and-run on video, said Pagani called him afterward, admitted what he’d done, and said he would resign his council seat.

“He thinks that’s the end of it,” said Bittner, who takes care of the cats along with other neighbors on the street. “You just can’t let an act like that go on without someone being charged.”

The Beaver County Humane Society said its humane officers were investigating the incident, but Pagani Jr. hadn’t been charged as of Dec. 6. Neighbors told the Beaver County Times that police officers were going door to door on Dec. 3 to speak to witnesses. Pagani has not returned calls from at least two local media outlets.

Pagani works with his father in their family business, Pagani and Son Trucking LLC, which contracts with the United States Postal Service to shuttle mail in bulk to and from a processing facility to individual post offices in the area. The company has had three USDOT violations in 2020 and 2021, records show.

As for the cats, their fate remains unknown. The video appears to show Pagani’s truck hitting or running over the tail of one cat, who immediately bolted along with the other cat who was in the street at the time. Those two cats took off with a larger group that was on the nearby sidewalk. The injured cat hasn’t been seen since.

“He could have hit the undercarriage of the front, he could have had his tail run over, he could have been bruised,” Bittner told KDKA, the local CBS affiliate. “We’ve been searching and searching and we can’t find him.”

”And when I feed him in the morning and night, he’s not showing up. So we don’t know whether [he] ran off to die or…” Bittner said, trailing off.

In a follow-up post on Facebook, Bittner explained that the strays are part of a managed TNR colony, with neighbors pitching in to help feed the cats and adopt out kittens. So far, 28 cats have been trapped and fixed.

People in the neighborhood believe Pagani was taking matters into his own hands, which follows a disturbing trend of vigilantism toward cats by people who either hate them or think they’re protecting local wildlife by killing cats.

“We don’t need his idea of animal control,” Bittner wrote.