Some of the bereaved cat owners accompanied Jenkins, Rising, and a number of SNARL volunteers to an open Q&A with the Met at Croydon College on the evening of Wednesday, December 2. Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, commissioner for the whole of London, fielded questions on community matters as Tarrant moderated. When Tarrant announced that he was about to take the last question, someone pointed out that SNARL’s founders and supporters had had their hands up the whole time. Tarrant called on one of them. “Are you aware that someone is going around London killing cats, decapitating them, and leaving their remains to be found?” asked a SNARL volunteer. Horrified, Hogan-Howe said that he knew nothing about it and, according to Jenkins, shot an admonishing look at Tarrant. “Of course we need to take this seriously,” Hogan-Howe said, adding that someone who harmed animals might very well move on to humans.

Skeptical cops like Tarrant might have been reliving memories of Operation Obelisk, a four-month Met investigation in 1999 focused on a run of cat killings—it produced a frenzy of media speculation about satanic rituals, only to end with an announcement that, indeed, foxes had been scavenging roadkill. But even if the authorities got on board with SNARL’s hypothesis, the law didn’t exactly guarantee a harsh outcome if the killer was found. It’s not illegal to kill an animal; without carefully worded language, such a statute would have the awkward side effect of making every slaughterhouse the site of mass murder. Despite the UK having some of the strictest animal welfare protections in the world, the maximum sentence for cruelty is still only 51 weeks behind bars, a fine of £20,000 (about $27,000), or both. In practice, any sentence is usually six months or less, because crimes involving animal cruelty tend to be treated as minor offenses. The killer, if he existed, might be sued for criminal damages, as pets are property. From a police perspective, the prosecution options, let alone the evidence, didn’t merit the time or money that a serious investigation would require.

According to Rising, Andy Tarrant, the borough commander for the Croydon police, initially refused to test the sample. He told her that Amber’s body had been handled by too many people to produce a conclusive result. When eventually it was tested, the material proved to be carpet fibers. (The Met wouldn’t let individual officers comment for this story.)

SNARL’s founders decided to muster evidence to present to the RSPCA and the Met. They arranged for a vet in Addiscombe, Deane Braid-Lewis, to conduct postmortems on ten cat corpses, including Amber’s. It cost £5,000—nearly $7,000—all of it raised on GoFundMe. Braid-Lewis concluded that only a “large sharp blade” could have made such clean incisions. He found no sign of bite marks that would suggest predation or scavenging by other animals. He couldn’t state with certainty that the same hand had wielded the knife in all ten cases, but he believed that the perpetrator’s skill level had improved over time. Amber had a fractured spine and generalized bleeding in the thoracic cavity, both signs of blunt-force trauma that he found in many of the other animals he examined. SNARL believed this meant that the killer was bludgeoning the pets to death, maybe after luring them with food. Braid-Lewis also found an unknown substance under Amber’s claws: Had she scratched the killer? Might it contain DNA?

In October, there was another suspected cat killing in Croydon. Then SNARL began to get reports from farther afield, one in neighboring Mitcham and two in nearby West Norwood. Nick Jerome’s cat, Oscar, was found headless on his street. “None of us went to pieces over it, but it was obviously distressing at the time,” he said. In Coulsdon, on the southern edge of Croydon, David Emmerson discovered his cat, Missy, decapitated and tailless. His 18-year-old daughter, already struggling with the loss of her aunt the previous year, was devastated. Emmerson never told his autistic son the full story of what happened. The truth was too ugly. “I never grew up as a cat person,” he said, “but maybe because we got her as a kitten, she became one of us. Mine was the lap she chose to sit on when she sat down. I’m not sure why. I adored her.”

It was the first time either Jenkins or Rising had come face-to-face with a suspected cat killing. Neither of them had any forensics training. Unwrapping the towel that held Amber, they noted the clean severing of her head and tail, which seemed to corroborate Bryant’s view that no animal could be responsible. They asked the family to show them the crime scene. There was no blood on the ground, meaning that either her injuries were inflicted after death or Amber was killed elsewhere and moved to the spot in Threehalfpenny Wood where her owners found her. Rising and Jenkins took Amber’s body to a vet for further examination.

As they searched the woods, Bryant’s wife called to him. In a small clearing off a path, sheltered by a cluster of exposed tree roots, the ball of black and orange fur was unmistakable. But Amber was headless and tailless, except for that appendage’s very tip, which had been placed on her belly. The couple were sickened. They shrouded their beloved pet in a towel and took her home. Then Bryant remembered an article in the Croydon Advertiser about a group convinced that several recent cat killings were all connected.

On the afternoon of October 24, 2015, two miles southeast of Addiscombe, 47-year-old Wayne Bryant picked his way over the fallen leaves of Threehalfpenny Wood, named for a 19th-century murder victim found there with that sum of money in his pocket. The dry autumn air kept Bryant alert as his wide-spaced blue eyes scanned left and right and he listened to the wind hissing through the oak canopy. Bryant’s cat, Amber, like many domestic felines, kept regular hours with her comings and goings, but the previous day she hadn’t returned in the mid-afternoon as she usually did. When Amber didn’t show up the following morning, Bryant and his wife, Wendy, formed a search party.

Digging was her forte. Always impeccably dressed, with an ornate gothic kick, and unfailingly in heels, Rising was a multitasking demon on a laptop. By day she worked for an office management company. By night she was part of the global alliance of animal rights activists. She was one of many people who used small details in online videos of a man torturing felines to identify the culprit, a Canadian man named Luka Magnotta. He was reported to police, who didn’t take the allegations seriously, and Magnotta went on to murder and chop up his lover in 2012—a crime recounted in the Netflix documentary Don’t F**k with Cats .

Tony Jenkins, one of SNARL’s founders, had recently become his own master. At 51, with a reassuring, yeomanly face and a golden tinge at the very tip of his long, gray ponytail, Jenkins was laid off after 25 years working for a nearby government council. He hadn’t gotten along with his boss, so getting sacked came as something of a relief. With a year’s severance in his pocket, “I was enjoying my downtime,” Jenkins said. That included being with his girlfriend, a 44-year-old South African who went by the name Boudicca Rising, after the first-century Celtic warrior queen who fought the Romans to save the Britons. Among other things, Rising and Jenkins shared feelings of guardianship toward animals. Their homes at one point housed 34 cats, a dog, two gerbils, and a cockatoo between them. The couple had formed SNARL together.

“Morose and pissed” one night on Facebook, as Jenkins later recalled, he friended Rising—under her real name, not the nom de guerre she later adopted while battling animal abusers, in order to shield her from harassment and threats. With one marriage behind her and fresh out of another relationship, Rising was sick of “creeps” hounding her on social media. Based on Jenkins’s profile picture, she wrote him off. But the pair started chatting, and it became a regular thing. They had a natural affinity—“anti-racist, anti-fascist, kind of unconventional,” as Rising put it. She found his attitude refreshing. “He never tried it on, never showed any dick pics,” she said. They refrained from meeting in person—she wasn’t sure he was her type. Jenkins had his reservations, too. “You’re not going to turn me into some crazy animal-rights person, are you?” he once asked her.

Rising found her way into activism in what was then a world capital of injustice: her birthplace, South Africa. Her father worked in the oil industry and tried to use his power to help others—he once shielded a white employee who was threatened with blackmail after marrying a mixed-race woman. Rising’s father also worked with rescue dogs and occasionally brought them home, including Pingo, a Keeshond mix who walked in circles. Pingo joined a couple of other dogs, plus Suzy, a cat, in the family’s brood of pets.

Rising’s mother was an organizer for the apartheid opposition, the Progressive Federal Party. She also worked with the party’s Unrest Monitoring Action Group, which compiled statistics on state-sponsored violence in townships. Rising got a job with the group at 17, helping people escape the country and sheltering victims of police brutality. “It was really dangerous,” she said. “The only reason we didn’t die is because we were white and well-known.” After Nelson Mandela was elected, Rising moved to London for six months, hoping to take a break. She never left.

It was an odd question coming from a woman who had nine of them. Despite their efforts to keep the kitten in the garden, it slipped past them into the house, hissed at the felines in residence, and made itself at home on Rising’s bed. Discussing the interloper the next morning, the couple noticed that it had no collar and hadn’t been microchipped. Rising speculated that it had escaped from a nearby cat breeder who refused to have her animals chipped—“in which case, fuck her.” If no one claimed the kitten, they decided that Jenkins would.

Detective Sergeant Andy Collin stood in front of a BBC camera crew and stated categorically that a human killer was responsible for the animal deaths reported up to that point. It was 2016, and the toll now included other fauna—foxes and rabbits, for instance. “Whoever’s doing this is good, seemingly, at what they do,” Collin said. “There is planning and thought involved.”

A young veterinary pathologist named Alex Stoll was assigned to look at the cadavers. A high-achieving postgraduate, Stoll had performed his first piano concert at age six, held a pilot’s license, claimed to be learning nearly a dozen languages, and had appeared as an extra in several Harry Potter films. Still he found time to probe around inside dead animals. A paper Stoll coauthored for The Journal of Animal Welfare Law argued in favor of systematic use of forensic expertise in the investigation of crimes involving animals, for which there was little protocol.

Stoll’s verdict on the 22 dead pets was that they’d all succumbed to blunt-force trauma, and that the decapitations and other mutilations had been performed with a sharp knife or, in some cases, a hinged instrument like garden shears. He admitted that he was uncertain about the kind of blunt force that took the creatures’ lives—it could have been, say, a collision with a car. Stoll didn’t test for human DNA, because he believed the corpses had been handled by too many people for that evidence to be useful. He swapped notes with Braid-Lewis, whose conclusions he broadly corroborated. Stoll even went a step further. “I’d be fairly confident in saying it’s the same person performing these mutilations across these animals,” he later told the BBC.

So police, pathologist, and SNARL were united in their opinion about the killings. With the investigation gaining steam, Takahe meetings were convivial and productive. Collin, Jenkins, Rising, and RSPCA chief inspector Mike Butcher met monthly to review recent incidents. Jenkins was amused to suddenly find himself a collaborator with the authorities. “First time I’ve been in a police station without handcuffs,” he joked. His hyperactive rescue dog, Toffee, mauled rugs during meetings and once snuck off to have a stealth poo during a lecture SNARL’s founders were asked to give at the Royal Veterinary College. Meanwhile, a network of volunteers and animal rescue groups were on high alert for reports of pet deaths, and PETA offered a reward of £5,000 (nearly $7,000) for information leading to a conviction.

A surge of attacks around Addiscombe Railway Park in autumn 2016—after the area had gone quiet for most of the previous year—suggested that the killer might have a thing for anniversaries. Other times the perpetrator appeared to go on what SNARL called an anger spree, hitting two or three animals in a single day. The fear that the killer might escalate to targeting people lent the hunt an undeniable urgency. “If this fellow started going out and doing the same thing to humans, I’d get kicked from here to Chelsea,” Collin told the BBC. “It’ll be: ‘Why didn’t you deal with it while it was at a low level?’”

The case also attracted celebrity attention. Martin Clunes, an actor who went to school in Croydon and who is best known for starring in the 1990s sitcom Men Behaving Badly, wrote to the Met early in the investigation. He begged the police to catch the “sick individual” who was responsible and end a spree that was the “stuff of nightmares.” The lead guitarist of boy band the Vamps offered free tickets to anyone who helped catch the killer. Even loudmouthed Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson—a man not exactly noted for his sensitivity—lent support in the pages of The Sun, albeit begrudgingly. “I’m not a cat fan by any means—they give me asthma—and I can’t think of anything worse than spending time in the company of an animal-rights person called Boudicca Rising,” he said. “The case makes my blood boil because I am a dog fan. And if someone poisoned mine, I’d capture him and force him to live for a year with Boudicca Rising.”

There were those who accused SNARL’s founders of trying to get famous or rich. But Jenkins and Rising didn’t ask for a fee when they were called to handle dead pets. The only payment Jenkins received for his media appearances was a per diem when he went on This Morning, a daytime TV program. His severance had run out, and he was financially dependent on Rising and public donations to the SNARL website. Money was tight. “The public don’t cover stuff like clothes. Which is why he looks like shit!” Rising once joked. “We get stuff from charity shops. Neither of us is particularly materialistic.”

A harpist played, and the group sang the hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” Because the killer had hit what seemed like every cultural demographic, Rising didn’t want to alienate anyone in the audience. She opted to speak on a universal theme, telling the crowd, “Love will solve this.” Then she opened the floor to anyone who wished to talk about their pet. “Some owners want to shut the door and move on,” Rising told me. “But I have owners who still do memorial posts to their cats on the Facebook pages years later. The mourning process is different for everybody.”

By August 2017, SNARL had identified around 350 cases it thought could be attributed to Pooboy. To narrow down the scope of inquiry, Rising put her business-consultant cap on. She compiled a list of a dozen criteria, eventually expanded to 26, to determine which cases Operation Takahe should investigate. Incidents featuring blatant mutilations—missing heads, tails, or limbs, or body parts deposited at the scene—were given three points. Most other criteria—little visible blood, signs of the animal having been asphyxiated, the corpse being displayed near the pet owner’s home or in a public place—got one point. Negatively weighted factors were signs of contact with other animals, including bite marks or scratches (minus five) and scuff marks on claws (minus two; cats hit by cars tend to extend their claws in panic). SNARL attended any incident that scored five or more. Cases that seemed suspicious to Stoll or another vet were ultimately counted as the work of the serial killer.

SNARL presumed that Pooboy displayed the corpses and body parts out of enjoyment for the emotional distress it caused pet owners. The scenes sometimes seemed staged with a morbid playfulness—head, body, and tail lined up in a bloody ellipsis, for instance, or in the shape of a triangle. One local man emerged into his garden one day to find his cat set upright, apparently half-buried in a hole. When he picked it up, however, the animal had no bottom half. Sometimes remains were discovered weeks after a pet disappeared from home with few signs of decomposition, suggesting the animal had been kept in cold storage.

Forensics, though, offered few leads as to who the perpetrator might be. There was little to no blood at any of the crime scenes, a fact crucial to the hypothesis that a human and not another animal was inflicting mutilations after death. But nor were there fingerprints or DNA. A suspect had never been captured on CCTV, despite most of the killings taking place in one of the most surveilled cities in the world. The perpetrator’s skill at avoiding cameras was enough to make members of Operation Takahe’s task force wonder if their man was an installer of CCTV, burglar alarms, or some other security technology.

SNARL believed that because the streetlights went out at 1 a.m., Pooboy was given the cover needed to operate without detection. The Caterham police gave Jenkins and Rising the go-ahead to organize a night watch, roping in residents to keep an eye out for strange goings-on after dark. (When it first began investigating Pooboy, SNARL had similarly monitored the streets in Addiscombe, hoping to catch the killer in the act.) Close to 10 p.m. on August 22, 2017, a patroller was walking up the area’s main northbound road. He noticed a man leaning over a wall into a garden, making smoochy, here-kitty-kitty noises. A cat bell tingled nearby. When the stranger realized he was being watched, he hurried off, a dull light casting long shadows as he went—a headlamp, perhaps? The patroller immediately phoned Rising, who told him to follow the suspect, but the stranger vanished.

Caterham went on high alert. In the early hours of August 24, one of Spencer-Hughes’s neighbors spotted someone with a headlamp peering into gardens on Addison Road. “He wasn’t casing properties. It looked like he was searching for something,” the woman later told Rising. When confronted, the man ran off. The woman cried out for help, and the neighborhood erupted into what Rising described as “pitchfork time.” Wielding a garden rake, the woman pursued the man up the street, where he managed to give her the slip somewhere near a connecting alley—but not before being seen by several other people.

Two days later, 11 miles to the northeast in Orpington, a resident saw a man on her street trying to lure her cat with biscuits. When she confronted him, he said he had mistaken her pet for his own, which had gone missing.

Source: Atavist.com

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