Mutilation of Cats Mystifies Denver Police

Bugsy was a tough cat who could stare down a fox and run like a rabbit. But one night the tabby met up with something darker and more menacing than a fox, something he couldn’t outrun.

The next morning Christy Hughes found her bruising 12-pound cat on the lawn.

“I can’t get the visual out of my head,” a shaken Hughes recalled, looking at the spot where Bugsy lay two weeks ago. “It’s sick.”

The cat had been dissected with near surgical precision. No one heard or saw anything.

Bugsy was No. 23.

Authorities in Colorado and Utah are desperately trying to catch the person or people behind the killing and mutilation of 45 cats in and around Denver and 11 in Salt Lake City.

Police have not ruled out that the attacks may be part of an adolescent prank or initiation rites -- although in some cases it may be the work of predatory animals. The most alarming possibility though, is that they could be a precursor to attacks on humans.

Cat corpses are turning up almost every day.

Baffled law enforcement and animal welfare groups have formed a 10-agency task force to investigate the crimes and a reward of $12,000 is being offered for the capture and conviction of the killers. In Salt Lake City, the attacks have occurred in the upscale Avenues neighborhood, with five on the same street.

“It strikes me as odd that no one has seen anything,” said Det. Kevin Joiner, an investigator with the Salt Lake City Police Department. “It could be an animal, it could be a person. We are not ruling anything out right now.”

The Denver suburb of Aurora, with a population of about 300,000, has been the epicenter of the cat killings with 24 since July of last year.

The city’s police chief, Ricky Bennett, told reporters Wednesday that the evidence, which he would not detail, shows humans, not animals, were responsible for many of the deaths. He also said future killings will be treated as crime scenes and fully investigated.

“I am going to be tight-lipped in the future,” he said. “We don’t want suspects to know what we know. And we don’t want copycat situations.”

A psychologist is working with the task force to help determine the kind of person likely to commit such a crime.

The killings began in July 2002, stopped for about four months and then accelerated in recent weeks.

Temma Martin, spokesperson for the Salt Lake County Animal Services Department, said the killings seemed too neat to have been done by an animal and did not appear to be ritualistic.

Authorities are concerned because they know that serial killers often desensitize themselves by killing cats and dogs before turning to people. Well-known murderers like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer tortured animals. Arthur Gary Bishop, a pedophile who raped and killed five boys in Utah, told police he tortured 20 puppies to try to rid himself of the impulse to kill people.

Frank Ascione, a psychology professor at Utah State University in Logan who writes on the link between cruelty to animals and other crimes, said a Massachusetts study of those prosecuted for abusing animals found that they were three to five times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes against people.

If captured, police say, the perpetrators face misdemeanor charges carrying up to 18 months in prison on each count. A district attorney could elevate those charges to felonies, they said.

An arrest can’t come soon enough for Carol DeYoung of Aurora, whose cat Mozart was killed in October. “He went out and I went to bed,” recalled the retired nurse. “I woke up at 5 the next morning aware that he wasn’t back in yet.”

The police located the mutilated cat nearby.

In Christy Hughes’ upscale neighborhood, her daughters have posted signs warning residents to keep their cats indoors. Police say that despite the warnings, many people are still letting their cats out at night.

Like many others, Hughes thinks the culprits could be teenagers because the killings have picked up dramatically since the beginning of summer. She now views adolescent boys with suspicion, wondering if they killed Bugsy. “I don’t know if it’s personal or what but they want you to see what they did and to report it,” Hughes said.

“Someone has to have seen these people,” she said. “They aren’t ghosts. They are out there and the next time it might not be a cat.”