Agonizing Memory of Poisoned Dogs Lives On

Somewhere in the upscale neighborhoods that surround the Mesa Verde Country Club in Costa Mesa is a person--probably a man--who on Easter night threw a half-dozen balls of hamburger meat laced with strychnine into the back yard of Sharkey and Nancy Warrick.

His mission was accomplished. Both of the Warricks’ 11-month-old West Highland terriers died painfully and convulsively the next morning after eating the poisoned meat. But even if his conscience allows him, he shouldn’t rest easy. A lot of people, including the Costa Mesa police, would like to see him caught. And they don’t intend to give up looking for him very soon.

In the cosmic scheme of things, the murders of Speck and Maggie may be a tiny footnote. But not to the Warricks or their neighbors. Or to the Warricks’ son, Joel, who considered Speck his dog. “It’s pretty hard to explain this to a 14-year-old boy,” Nancy Warrick says.

She wrote me after my recent column about our weekend at the veterinary emergency hospital in Fountain Valley with our desperately sick dachshund, Coco. The Warricks were there two days later. Coco pulled through; their dogs didn’t.

Her letter--as had Coco’s illness--brought back vividly the memory of a wire-haired terrier named Rowdy who was an integral part of our family when I was 16 years old. Rowdy also ate a ball of hamburger filled with strychnine. My brother and I found him in convulsions on the back porch, and I held him in my arms while my brother drove to the vet. He died in my arms before we could get there, with one last, massive convulsion.

I’m not a violent person, but I think at that moment if I could have faced the person who murdered Rowdy, I might have tried to kill him. There may be human acts more contemptible than dog poisoning but that has to rate right up there with the worst of them.

So when I received Nancy Warrick’s letter, I phoned her. She told me more about that terrible morning. It is her custom to get up very early and let the dogs out before she takes a morning walk. She did that on the day after Easter and the dogs were back in the house when she left. Her husband came down a few minutes later and let the dogs out again. Before he went back upstairs to shave, he called them in. Only one, the male dog, Speck, came. He dragged himself into the house, went into convulsions and died at Sharkey Warrick’s feet.

Warrick rushed into the back yard and found Maggie in convulsions there. Gathering her up, he met his wife coming back from her walk, and they raced to the emergency clinic. “They had Maggie stabilized for a while,” Nancy Warrick said sadly, “and we thought she was going to make it. Then she died of cardiac arrest.”

Joel was waiting at home with the body of Speck. Together, the family searched the back yard and found the balls of poisoned meat. Nancy is a nurse, and she recognized the evidence of strychnine--a deadly poison--in the grass in the back yard. “We have small children in the family who visited on Easter and who play in our yard. If they had come a day later, they could quite easily have gotten into it,” she said.

The Warricks called the police, and the patrol officer who responded walked about the neighborhood interviewing neighbors. Several bits of information turned up that seemed more than coincidence. When the Warricks were moving in almost three years earlier, they lost another West Highland terrier. They found him dead in the back yard.

“We assumed,” says Nancy, “that he had a heart attack. Moving into a new neighborhood and full of enthusiasm, we chose to believe that. We found no poisoned meat then, and we didn’t have an autopsy performed.”

A year later, a neighbor’s dog died under strange circumstances that could have been caused by poison. They requested an autopsy, but the vital parts were lost and so it was never performed.

The only real lead that was turned up by the police came from a neighbor who had looked out her window on Easter night and seen the figure of a man running away very fast from the wrought iron fence that separates the Warricks’ back yard from the golf course--or more precisely from the end of the driving range. The man was dressed all in black, and the witness estimated his height at about 5 feet, 11 inches.

“Pets are a special part of our family,” says Nancy, “and these two were a real joy to all of us. They barked--at people arriving or walking down our street and at those--not golfers--who were illegally using the end of the driving range. But a certain amount of barking is appropriate and desired. They were in the house each evening, all night, and on-and-off during the day. Nothing in their behavior warranted being murdered.”

The case has been turned over to Costa Mesa Police Detective Dale Birney, and he told me: “There is nowhere for us to go at this point until additional information comes in.” He said that over the past year, there had been two anonymous complaints about barking dogs at the Warrick residence, but “they were far apart and there was no pattern of complaints.”

He says he would be eager to follow up new leads, so if you have any information that you think might be useful in identifying this dog poisoner, call Detective Birney at (714) 754-5205. The case number is 90-14961.

According to Nancy Warrick, “this is a neighborhood of dogs, and so far the only response from my neighbors has been shock, fear and sadness. I’d like to believe it was no one in the neighborhood who did this, but whoever it is, they must be very sick. I’ve always been a person who leaves the front door unlocked, but I don’t feel comfortable doing that any more.”

The Warricks say they plan to get new pets one of these days. But they also don’t plan to remove the pictures of Maggie and Speck that greet them each day on the door of their refrigerator. And they don’t plan to give up their search for the man who killed them. Ever.