Strike 1 Is Often Against an Animal

Another serial murderer.

This one juices the plot of “To Serve and Protect,” an NBC two-parter concluding tonight with a clash between the killer and the Dallas cop family he’s now chosen to target.

When introduced to viewers Sunday night, he’d already killed 13 times in 28 months for no known reason, with a bunch more victims about to hit the deck. Says the detective (Craig T. Nelson) heading the police investigation: “I think he’s angry, I think he’s mad as hell.”

At whom or at what, though? And why?

The killer (Kirk Baltz) does appear teed off at the police. All we really learn about him, though, is that he’s shrewd, he paints, he shaves his head and is a master of disguise who lives in a swanky house where he has a closet full of dress-up clothes and pads around in silk pajamas. And of course, he’s a complete fruit loop.

When the head cop asks him on the phone why he kills, he snaps: “What are you, my shrink?”

End of background check. There is no context for the slaughter. What in his background has driven the serial murderer to this crescendo of violence? Did he just awaken in a foul mood one day, put on one of his wigs and begin taking lives? Or was he always a work in progress who much earlier in his life had signaled the evil he was now hemorrhaging?

And one more thing: Why does he keep a stuffed fox in his house?

Jumping from fiction to reality, here’s a thought.

Before killing and mutilating 17 men, Jeffrey Dahmer as a youth stole, then practiced taxidermy on, neighbors’ dogs and cats, whose skulls he kept impaled in his yard.

As a youth, many years before Albert DeSalvo was titled the “Boston Strangler” for murdering 13 women, FBI files say he trapped dogs and cats in orange crates and shot arrows through the boxes.

Before murdering females, that charming rogue Ted Bundy butchered animals as a kid, and buried the remains.

Before abducting and strangling 12-year-old Polly Klaas, Richard Allen Davis as a teenager set cats on fire.

Before Russell Eugene Weston Jr. was charged with gunning down two policemen in the U.S. Capitol last year, he reportedly gunned down 16 of his grandmother’s cats.

Is there a message here?

Count on it, asserts a strong, opinionated BBC-made documentary airing on cable’s A&E; network under the banner of its “Investigative Reports” series. Coincidentally, “The Cruelty Connection” will be on A&E; tonight just as Baltz is extending his lethal activity as the mad baldy on NBC.

When many people hear about cruelty toward animals, says A&E; host Bill Kurtis, they respond by saying, “It’s only an animal” or, “Boys will be boys.”

Yet A&E;’s reality is more horrific than NBC’s fiction, and is often not for the squeamish.

Animal Torture

as a Red Flag

The hour’s most eloquent talking head is Randall Lockwood, a psychologist with the Humane Society of the United States, who is supported by research when saying about homicide that a killer’s “first strike . . . may be against animals.”

In fact, “First Strike” is the name of an ongoing HSUS campaign to advertise the link between animal and human cruelty. And the A&E; program’s bedrock is a 1997 study, commissioned by HSUS, concluding that nearly a third of animal abusers also hurt humans. That’s not to say that every killer has used animals as a warm-up or that every kid who kills or tortures animals is Jeffrey Dahmer in the making, only that such behavior is a red flag that should be heeded.

Too often, it isn’t. Dahmer’s kidhood penchant for carving up animals, for example, was explained away by his father as “some sort of interest in a medical career,” former FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler says tonight as the screen fills with home video of sweet-looking little Jeffrey in his jammies.

We do have strange, contradictory rules governing which animals are fair game and which are not, an issue “The Cruelty Connection” fails to address. What is the difference between shooting a dog and shooting a deer, for example? None to the dog or deer. However, psychologists say, shooting a dog violates the norms of mainstream society--something a criminally disturbed person is apt to do. A hunter shooting a deer does not.

Some offenders may kill or torture animals “because to them, the animals symbolically represent people,” Special Agent Alan C. Brantley, of the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, said last year.

As for such dress rehearsals, “The Cruelty Connection” notes that trigger-kids in a string of recent schoolhouse shootings reportedly had a history of abusing and torturing animals. The program reads from the personal journal of one of them, 16-year-old Luke Woodham. Before murdering his mother in Pearl, Miss., in 1997 and going to his high school and fatally shooting two classmates and wounding seven others, Woodham had written in his journal about joining a friend in beating and setting afire “my dear dog, Sparkle.”

It’s the awful fate of Scruffy the Yorkshire terrier, though, that occupies much of “The Cruelty Connection,” and leaves the deepest impression.

They Laughed

Over Torture

Animal cruelty is a felony in California and 21 other states, but not in Kansas, where in Overland Park, a quiet suburb of Kansas City, three young goons made a videotape of themselves stalking, torturing and setting afire Scruffy in 1997, while laughing about what they were doing.

The three are now in prison, having been found guilty of arson for killing the dog, a felony charge the prosecution brought against them instead of the misdemeanor of animal cruelty that may have gotten them only probation.

Snippets of the video are shown here--they’re tough viewing--along with an interview with one of the trio, 20-year-old Lance Arsenault, whose eyes are dead when he tells an interviewer why he and his pals tortured and killed Scruffy: “We was bored.” And that watching the tape 10 times was a way to relive “the crazy fun we was having.”

A recently enacted California law requires counseling as a condition of probation for anyone convicted of killing, maiming or abusing an animal. Although it’s a terrific concept, you wonder how much effect counseling would have on Arsenault and his fellow “arsonists.”

After all, boys will be boys.

* “Investigative Reports: The Cruelty Connection” airs at 10 tonight on A&E.;