Cat Massacre at Iowa Shelter Splits a Town

On the night of the slaughter, 16 cats were bludgeoned to death and a cultural divide was laid bare.

Three high school students, young men who had never been in trouble, allegedly hatched the plot in a parking lot at the Hy-Vee food store. They are accused of driving off to pick up two baseball bats and then sneaking into a certain white house with blue trim at the edge of town--a haven for strays that was founded by a couple who had moved to central Iowa from Pacific Palisades.

The next morning, the shelter’s driveway resembled a triage site, an animal MASH. Veterinarians sorted through the bashed and bloodied, deciding which to treat on the spot and which to rush off for the hour’s drive to Iowa State University’s animal-care facilities.

Feline corpses smoldered on a funeral pyre built by the sobbing shelter director, who sank to his knees to pray.

Within days of the March incident, arguments ignited as well, not just in this hamlet of 10,000 people but also on the Internet and in the pages of animal-rights magazines. The debaters took the measure of the lost lives of Gimpy, Whitey, Little Moe, Pumpkin, Puff and the rest of the victims. They weighed them against the potential of those charged: Chad Lamansky, Dan Myers and Justin Toben, each 18 years old. And they came to very different conclusions.

Some cry out that cat killing is murder and should be punished accordingly, with hard time. Others counter that boys and cats, like foxes and chickens, are natural enemies, made to annoy each other, especially in rural areas. Don’t ruin the suspects’ future, they counsel; let them grow up.

“This is a small town, but this is not a small-town issue. It’s a national issue,” said Laura Sykes, who founded the shelter, Noah’s Ark, with her husband, David. “If it’s taken seriously and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, it’s a precedent.” Officials of the Animal Legal Defense Fund and the Humane Society of the United States agree.

“Cats were killed at a shelter. It’s like going into a church and killing,” said Laura Sykes. “That’s lost on certain people around here.”

Charges Could Bring 10-Year Prison Terms

Jefferson County Atty. John A. Morrissey has announced charges that could lead to 10-year prison sentences if the young men are convicted. Toben, whose lawyer says he kicked one cat but did no further harm, agreed in July to testify against the others in exchange for leniency: 200 hours of community service and three years of probation. David Sykes feels Toben “got off light.”

As a November trial looms, Morrissey’s office has filed thousands of letters and printouts of e-mail from all over the globe into a cache of cardboard boxes.

Nearly every missive clamors for prison for Lamansky and Myers, who have pleaded not guilty and are out on bail. The writers quote the Bible and Gandhi, and refer darkly to serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey L. Dahmer.

Send a message, they urge, that beating animals to death is a serious crime. “I hope some judge doesn’t order community service,” wrote Rita J. Sieg of Cleveland. “I pray they get the max!”

Only a few bear a Fairfield postmark, and those strike a very different chord. “I agree what they did was wrong,” wrote resident Sue Beall in a typical note. “But to go to prison? . . . How many things did you and I do growing up that we wished we wouldn’t have done?”

Rural boys and country cats never have gotten along, another woman, Dixie Haynes, remarked in conversation: “I think it’s a thing that boys have. You used to see them out hunting, targeting cats with .22s.”

Her son, Donny, bears out her claim. He is acquainted with Lamansky, who comes from a prominent farm family and played on the Fairfield High School football team. “If I’d been with him that night, I would have helped,” the younger Haynes said.

On his own, he admitted, he once swung a cat around and smacked it into a telephone pole. “I just don’t like ‘em,” he said. “They scratch me. They bite me.”

Reaction Complicated by New-Age Influence

Local reaction is complicated by the fact that Fairfield is no ordinary tall-corn, light-manufacturing town. It has a distinct New Age overlay, resulting from the presence of Maharishi International University, which bought the campus of Parsons College in 1971.

Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who brought transcendental meditation to the Beatles and tens of thousands more, has visited his school only once. Yet about 2,000 practitioners of TM have not only traveled here, but settled. Among them are Laura and David Sykes.

The old-timers and the significant minority of “meditators,” as they’re known locally, have coexisted peacefully, but the graft never really took hold.

Fairfield boasts a classic town square, complete with a band shell and beds of bright flowers bordering the greensward. But the breeze that flutters the U.S. flags on their poles also drives a whiff of curry through downtown.

Alongside the Elks headquarters, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the drugstore and the bank are Thai and Indian restaurants, vendors of aromatherapy diffusers, organic groceries.

Inside, the worlds seem mutually exclusive: On the bulletin boards of the home-grown institutions are posters that advertise the bake sale and face-painting at Fairfield Fiesta Days. The “meditator” businesses display ads for Ayurvedic health products and yoga classes.

There are two high schools: public Fairfield and the private Maharishi Upper School.

There are two factions on the City Council: meditator and non-.

The relationship is far from hostile. The majority in town watched admiringly as the meditators established high-tech and mail-order businesses. The natives grumble a bit about rising rents but in the next breath mention the boom in construction and remodeling work.

Of course, the newcomers also traipse to the campus each morning and evening to meditate under separate golden domes for women and for men. They tend to eschew meat, even Iowa pork. (The Best Western added a vegetarian menu to accommodate them.)

“They’re . . . [a pause] . . . different,” said Dixie Haynes, an oft-heard refrain.

“Real, real different,” said waitress Tina Blackfore.

Meditators are sometimes just as baffled by the natives.

David and Laura Sykes, for example, were taken aback by the number of stray animals wandering through Fairfield when they moved here in 1983 to be near the university and other meditators. David always had a pet dog as a boy; Laura owned a cat. They certainly didn’t consider themselves animal extremists.

But they were surprised that Jefferson County’s method of animal control is a sheriff’s deputy with a gun. Call in a sighting and an officer is dispatched to dispatch the dog or cat. Of course, if livestock or chickens are threatened, a farmer has every right to shoot the stray himself.

Town Has No Humane Society, No Dogcatcher

As for the town, there is no humane society, no dogcatcher--a common situation in rural Iowa, according to the director of the state’s chapter of the Animal Rescue League. A local veterinarian does take in strays brought to him--and euthanizes them if they are neither claimed nor adopted within seven days.

As David Sykes took on a consulting job for a large company, he found himself scooping abandoned animals off the streets. He and his wife came to believe that many Fairfield strays were refugees from outlying farms.

“Farmers just let their cats breed,” said Laura Sykes. “They are there to keep the rodents down. A lot of them don’t really get much care. The suffering that goes on is just tremendous. Their population control is disease and wandering off.”

Local farmers figure the opposite, that the town is the source of the strays. “When they find a cat or a dog in the fields,” said Jefferson County Sheriff’s Sgt. Joe Smutz, “they tend to think it’s somebody else’s problem that got dumped out there.”

Rebuffed by the county and city governments when they lobbied for more help for homeless animals, the Sykeses resolved to address the issue themselves. In 1990, they bought 34 acres on Fairfield’s outskirts and started the Noah’s Ark Foundation.

There they give cats and dogs another chance at a healthy, happy life. Any stray they take in is vaccinated, wormed and neutered. Cats are tested for leukemia and FIV, the feline equivalent of the virus that causes AIDS.

The animals are nourished with ground turkey mixed into rice and nurtured with an herbal-therapy regime.

The cats have the run of the main residence (the Sykeses live elsewhere). They loll on sheet-covered armchairs and laze on the toilet tank. They scratch against carpeted posts under the bemused gaze of a print called “The Favorite Cat” from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On the grounds, kennels contain heated wood-and-shingle houses for the canine contingent. Apples, pears and cherries grow in the orchard. Fields stretch flat under an Iowa sky washed with light.

“We wanted to create a sanctuary,” said David Sykes, a long-faced man with thinning curly hair. He always carries a Windbreaker and blanket in his pickup truck in case he happens to spot a stray.

The goal is to find someone to adopt each abandoned cat or dog. But if an animal goes unchosen, it is welcome to stay on at Noah’s Ark.

Laura Sykes Was Away the Night of Slaughter

In the spring, Laura Sykes moved from town to a mobile home at the site, in part to provide security at night. But on March 7, she was traveling on the West Coast.

That was the night friends saw Chad Lamansky at the Hy-Vee, a popular Fairfield High hangout, bragging that he’d skinned a cat at his family’s farm. One student who was there told her mother that Lamansky showed off the hide and that the conversation escalated until someone proposed a twisted quest--not to slay dragons, but the strays at Noah’s Ark.

Thomas Walter, Toben’s lawyer, says his client drove Lamansky and Myers to his home to get the bats and then to Noah’s Ark. He stood lookout as the others set to work. Quite soon, the lawyer said, Toben grew sickened by the assault and said he was leaving. The other two came with him, got a ride to a fourth young man’s house and “may have returned” to the shelter, Walter said.

There were about 75 cats in the house. When a Maharishi University student arrived to take the first shift of volunteer duty the next day, he spied the first bodies and, fearing poison, went to summon David Sykes.

It was soon clear that the attack had been brutal. Blood was splattered everywhere, and doorjambs were splintered by the force of the bats. In addition to the dead, seven cats suffered injuries that included a broken leg, a broken jaw, a severely damaged eye--”the kind of trauma they’d have if they got hit by a car or were in a tornado,” said Joanne Graham, an assistant professor of veterinary clinical sciences at Iowa State.

Dozens more cats were hiding, shaking or had fled altogether. One cat refused to leave the basement rafters for weeks afterward.

The memory moistens David Sykes’ eyes and sends him searching for a bandanna so that he can blow his nose.

He spent that day mopping and cleaning. He went home to meditate and then returned to gather wood for the cremation. The fire blazed for five hours. A Catholic priest and the entire men’s club from his church showed up to help. So did some healers, burning incense.

Arrests came quickly. So did interest from animal-rights groups. “Nationally, we are seeing a rise in incidents involving animal rights and juveniles,” said Pamela Frasch, who heads the anti-cruelty division of the Animal Legal Defense Fund. Her examples: Four Texas high school students who beat a cat for sullying their baseball diamond and a group of Oregon high school football players who set a possum afire. Punishments were probation.

The Fairfield massacre, she said, “is a very dramatic occurrence in just the sheer number of animals. It’s really disturbing and quite compelling.”

Northeastern University criminologist Jack Levin agrees. He recently finished a three-year study that compared 153 Massachusetts animal abusers to neighbors of similar age and gender and concluded that those who commit violence against animals are five times as likely to commit violence against humans. They are also more likely to damage property and use drugs, Levin and sociologist Arnold Arluke found.

“This could be a make-or-break moment for these kids,” Levin said. “You don’t want to give these teenagers a slap on the wrist.”

Town Is Split 50-50 Over Punishment Issue

Smutz, the investigator on the case, has watched enough shouting matches to decide that “Fairfield is divided about 50-50,” and not just along the Maharishi fault lines.

He listened to a non-meditator, an older woman with pet cats, hiss to some teenagers that the offenders should be locked away.

And Melodie Pleasant, a meditation teacher drawn by the university from Naples, Fla., said she was appalled by the crime but did not see prison as the answer.

“Their problem is just a bottling of anger,” she said. “They need to change their diet so they keep their thinking level. And they need to cut their stress. They should be practicing TM.”