Dispute Over Missing Dog Unleashes Legal Nightmare

Dog gone. It’s been six months since Cassie disappeared from the side yard of a Lawndale home.

But the tale of this 2-year-old black chow mix is more than a typical missing dog story. It’s a legal nightmare--for the delivery truck driver and his family who lost the dog, and for the prominent Lawndale dog lover who found it, refused to give it back and is now criminally accused of hampering efforts to locate the animal.

The People vs. Edie Warwick has yet to make Court TV, but it has become--at least in this tiny South Bay city--the dog custody case of the century.

Consider the cast so far: sheriff’s detectives, the district attorney’s office, the mayor, the City Council, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a lawyer specializing in animals, a local kennel and the evil dognaping villain Cruella De Vil of Disney’s “101 Dalmatians.”

Warwick, who owns two purebred white American Eskimo dogs and many other animals, admits that she refused to return Cassie to Joseph and Vicky French, saying that she feared for the dog’s well-being and doubted that the Frenches were the real owners.

Warwick’s stubbornness has cost her a seat on the city Planning Commission and her child-care business, and may eventually send her to jail. It has cost taxpayers an estimated $30,000 for sheriff’s investigations and a nine-day trial.

And there’s more to come.

The Warwick jury deadlocked on a misdemeanor charge of delaying an investigation and taking lost property, and the judge has ordered a retrial.

The Frenches, a working-class family of four, remain vexed, living with one dog instead of two. Their Cassie is still missing--secreted somewhere, they believe, by Warwick.

The problem started Sept. 11 when the Frenches discovered that Cassie was missing from their yard. After a futile search they placed an ad in the local paper.

The same day, Warwick said in an interview, she found an unlicensed black dog wandering several blocks from her home. She took it home, named it Lady and placed an ad saying a dog had been found.

Days later, when the Frenches saw Warwick’s ad, Joseph and his sons, ages 11 and 7, went to retrieve the dog.

But Warwick refused to release the dog, despite the fact that French produced a picture of Cassie. She said she was suspicious because the dog ran away when called by French and his sons and because French could not provide other proof of ownership such as a license or veterinarian bills. She also contended that the dog was dirty when she found it.

“I just know that he is not the rightful owner,” she said.

Outraged, French called the sheriff’s station. A friend of Warwick’s, hearing about the dispute, called the mayor. Within hours, several sheriff’s deputies, Mayor Harold E. Hofmann and Councilman Larry Rudolph--who appointed Warwick to the Planning Commission--converged on her home to sort out the mess.

The group tried to convince Warwick to release the dog. But Warwick refused, again contending that she feared for the dog’s safety.

Whether this was a logical thing to do depends on how you feel about Warwick. Her detractors say this refusal to budge illustrates an unflattering stubbornness. Her supporters believe Warwick’s tenacity is a virtue, and describe a good-hearted, civic-minded woman with a deep love of animals who volunteers time to worthy causes and prides herself on a strong sense of right and wrong.

Caught in a stalemate, the deputies who came to the house let Warwick keep the dog for the night and turned the case over to detectives, leaving them to decide whether this was a criminal case or a resolvable spat.

But the detectives had no luck either. Detective H. D. Garcia told Warwick to turn the dog over to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals while officials determined who could keep it. Warwick, who said she feared that SPCA officials would give the dog back to the Frenches, refused to comply. The district attorney filed charges against Warwick.

But before the courts could go to work, Cassie--or Lady--disappeared again.

As Warwick tells it, she went shopping Sept. 26, and when she returned she found her two other dogs alone in the back yard with no sign of the black chow.

The Frenches charged that she had hidden it. “Does she really believe we’d believe (the dog) just disappeared?” Vicky French asked.

Warwick denied hiding the dog. “I’m in enough trouble already--why would I do something so stupid?” she asked.

Law enforcement, however, said she did just that. Prosecutors added a charge of filing a false police report, saying Warwick lied when she told police the dog had been stolen from her house. A judge dismissed the complaint.

The plot thickened further when a clerk at a Torrance kennel recognized the animal from a local newspaper story and told deputies it had been kept at the kennel for several days. The kennel register was signed by Cruelly Derille, a crude reference to Disney’s villain Cruella De Vil. The clerk said in an interview that the woman who picked up the dog looked a lot like Warwick.

By the time deputies showed up at the kennel, “Cruelly” and the dog were gone. Cassie has not been seen since.

After a month of searching for a lawyer who would take her case, Warwick hired Michael Rotsten, an attorney who specializes in animal cases. No sooner had the trial begun, however, than Warwick’s husband, Ervin Warwick, was arrested on suspicion of intimidating a witness set to testify against his wife. He was jailed by the Torrance Police Department, then released on bail; no charges have been filed in that case.

The jurors heard six days of testimony and deliberated 2 1/2 days before announcing they were hopelessly deadlocked 10 to 2 for conviction.

The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ted Lamb, vowed to seek a retrial. But before South Bay Municipal Judge James R. Brandlin agreed, he gave defense lawyer Rotsten one week to negotiate the safe “reappearance” of the dog. The dispute was becoming costly. There was not only the expense of the court proceedings but the fact that the Sheriff’s Department had spent more than 60 hours “running around trying to find the darn dog,” in the words of one detective.

The deadline came. Still no dog. The retrial will begin April 25.

Warwick, who maintains that she has no idea where the dog is, says she is stunned at the prospect of going through another trial.

“They’re going to drag me through the legal system until they get what they want,” she said.

In the wake of the controversy, the Lawndale City Council unanimously ousted her from her appointed post on the Planning Commission, ostensibly on grounds that she had overstepped her authority as a commissioner by asking the Sheriff’s Department to investigate an abandoned car in her neighborhood. Worried that the trial would take too much time, Warwick closed down her home child-care business. Rotsten has dropped out of the case, declining to explain why. Warwick said her financial resources are slim and she might represent herself at the second trial.

The Frenches, who say they lack the funds to sue Warwick in civil court, are as disappointed as Warwick. But Vicky French says her family will “see it through to the bitter end.”

Vicky French sat through most of the first trial, at points driven to tears by the system’s inability to bring Cassie home. She says she’s agreed to let her boys testify during the second trial about the night they went to Warwick’s home and she refused to give their dog back, hoping the children’s story will create more jury sympathy for the prosecution.

“We didn’t ask for this, “ she said. “We just want our dog back, that’s all.”