Police Probe Cat Killings in Hawthorne

When her granddaughter’s cat Oreo turned up dead in her neighbor’s Hawthorne frontyard, Patricia Cheatham assumed it had fallen victim to the dreaded neighborhood pit bull.

Rick Villafana thought his mother’s cat, Pretty Boy, missing for two weeks, had found better digs.

Roger Martinez figured the dead cat on his lawn had been hit by a car.

But a grimmer picture has emerged in their quiet neighborhood of neat lawns and well-tended flowers. At least three and perhaps as many as 25 intentionally killed--and sometimes dismembered and decapitated--cats have been left on lawns in the last few weeks, most within a half-mile-square area between 130th and 135th streets around Hawthorne Boulevard, police report.

“This has created a panic,” said Hawthorne Police Det. Joel Romero. “To some people, pets are like family.”

He said police are working to solve the crimes based on some tips, but they are uncertain what the motivation for the killings might be. “We don’t know if this is a religious ritual, or satanic worshiping . . . or if it’s some kid.”

Students at Hawthorne High School dissected cats in a biology class this spring, Romero said, leading police to wonder if talk of those dissections could have influenced the cat killer. But they are pursuing other leads as well.

“But the most disturbing thing is most notorious serial murderers have animal cruelty in their background,” Romero added.

Police learned of the killings July 1, when a cat was found with its throat slit and its head partially cut off.

On July 3, another cat carcass, this one with its head, legs and tail removed, was found on a lawn a few blocks away. That cat’s legs and tail were arranged around its body “like puzzle pieces,” Romero said.

On July 4, Oreo, a 2-year-old who recently had a litter of kittens, was found half a block from her home in a frontyard. Oreo had also been decapitated, and her detached paws and legs and tail had been arranged in their proper place like puzzle pieces. Those cats were collected by police, their carcasses taken to a lab for further investigation.

Police deduced that the cats were being killed elsewhere with a sharp implement, either a surgical tool or a knife, and placed in the yards in the early morning.

As news of the killings spread through the neighborhood, the Police Department was flooded with calls from more than 20 people who said they, too, had found dead and, in most cases, dismembered cats on their front lawns but had discarded them without reporting them to police.

Police are following up on several tips received over the last week.

Many neighbors, meanwhile, said they are keeping their cats indoors.

“A lot of people up the street were devastated,” said Martinez, who found one of the cats on his frontyard as he went to work last week.

“This means someone crazy is running around the neighborhood,” said Cheatham, who said her granddaughter could not stop crying after learning what happened to her cat. Now the 10-year-old spends her time tending the orphaned kittens.