Cat Slayings Alarm W. Hollywood Pet Owners

Mildred Maiorino had just returned from a family outing last November when a neighbor came over with the bad news.

Her pet cat--a 2-year-old, part-Siamese she had rescued from the streets of West Hollywood as a kitten and named Squeeky--had been found dead on a neighbor’s front lawn.

“Its body was cut neatly in half, as if sliced by a surgical knife,” recalls Maiorino, her voice cracking with anger. “Only a fiend would do something like that.”

Since then, authorities say, the carcasses of eight other pet felines have been found in roughly the same area of West Hollywood, between Fairfax and La Brea avenues on the city’s east side.

Most of the cats were mutilated, and a few had their hearts and other organs removed, said Sgt. Finn Petersen of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Animal Predators

After performing necropsies on two of the animals, a county veterinarian concluded that the deaths were probably the work of a coyote or other animal predator.

The findings, by Dr. G. H. Ford, were apparently enough to convince sheriff’s investigators--who had explored the possibility that the killings might be related to a satanic cult--that they were not dealing with a serial killer.

“We’ve turned up no evidence to suggest that some crazed person is going around killing these cats,” Petersen said.

But in the 10 months since the killings began to attract public attention, alarmed pet owners and others in West Hollywood who suspect that the acts are the work of humans have not been convinced otherwise.

After the City Council recently voted to offer a $2,500 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever is responsible, the debate appears to have intensified.

Pet owners and animal rights advocates quickly praised the reward as holding out a possible breakthrough in solving the killings, saying it reaffirms their long-held suspicions that humans are responsible.

“I never bought the idea of a coyote doing the killings for a minute,” said Barbara Hameker, a magazine writer whose pet cat was found mutilated in a neighbor’s yard in May.

“The manner in which my cat died, the precision of the cuts beneath the neck and down the body, always told me that this wasn’t the work of an animal, at least not the four-legged kind,” she said.

Councilman Paul Koretz sponsored a resolution in July declaring West Hollywood a “cruelty-free zone” for animals and suggested the reward. He said it “provides a chance to pry loose some information, if the killings are the work of humans and there is anyone out there who knows anything.”

Keeps Open Mind

Koretz described himself as having an open mind on the matter, but added, “I think you have to face the fact that, regardless of what the (Sheriff’s Department) investigation has turned up, a lot of people believe that someone out there is killing these cats.”

However, Ford, the county veterinarian, criticized the reward as “an ill-advised idea” that “serves only to elicit paranoia on the part of cat owners and others when there is no evidence to suggest these are anything but predator-related deaths.

“These things tend to get blown out of proportion,” he said. “I’ve seen it happen in Montana when I worked there, and most recently, we’ve seen it happen in Orange County.”

Despite widespread speculation that satanists were responsible for the deaths of 67 cats in Orange County during June and July--36 of them in the city of Tustin--federal wildlife officials have concluded that the killings were the work of animal predators.

West Hollywood’s Coyotes

Sheriff’s deputies say that it is not uncommon to spot coyotes in densely populated West Hollywood after dark.

“They come down out of the hills looking for water and food. You see them roaming from time to time,” said Rod Shanks, who investigated several of the West Hollywood incidents.

He said that in each of the incidents, the cats appeared to have been killed during the night, and that their remains were usually found on yards and driveways.

The first two deaths were reported last November, with the others occurring at irregular intervals since then, the latest in July, investigators said.

“We don’t see any patterns,” Shanks said. “We even consulted an expert in the occult to try and determine if the dates the cats were killed had any significance, but there was nothing.”