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“Cat killer strikes again” – that’s how the latest victim was usually reported in the papers. For years, British police have hunted a mystery perpetrator believed to have mutilated hundreds of cats across the UK. But, lacking any tangible suspect, they have now called off the search.
The case of the 'Croydon Cat Killer' started with two animal rescuers in south London. Boudicca Rising and Tony Jenkins, of South Norwood Animal Rescue and Liberty (SNARL), were horrified when they began receiving reports from pet owners who had found their cats dead and dismembered in their gardens. By 2018, the number of reported feline victims was staggering – more than 400 in total.
SNARL’s initial investigations helped to convince the Metropolitan Police and the RSPCA animal charity to take the case seriously, thus launching a three-year probe that sought to bring the prolific killer to justice.
That was until this week, when the Metropolitan Police force announced it had dropped the case. Officers are now convinced there is no foul-play – the cats were in fact killed in collisions with cars and later scavenged by foxes, not mutilated by a human being, they say.
“We are deeply concerned by the police's decision to close the investigation,” Rising says. “Their new evidence does not take into account the returned collars, body parts returned six months later or any of the behavioural aspects of the case.”
In a subsequent statement posted online, she and Jenkins detailed multiple examples, including one case in which a cat’s liver was placed on a stone in its owner’s garden. The next day, the collar was left there and the owner’s locked cat-flap was found kicked in. “That’s not foxes,” the pair wrote.
Early on in the investigation, separate sets of post-mortems were arranged by SNARL and the RSPCA. In several cases, vets concluded that the mutilations had been caused by a knife or similar instrument, not the teeth of a non-human predator.
That opinion has now changed, according to the Met and RSPCA, following re-examination of cat carcasses in August 2018. All of the recorded cases have now been listed as "no crime". The police force said from 25 post-mortem examinations arranged by SNARL it originally believed that six of the mutilations looked to be suspicious. More than 400 extra reports were received about cat deaths following the case's publicity.
A spokesperson for the RSPCA said: “You will see that our public statements printed in media reports on this issue have been consistent in saying that while we have an open mind, we believe traffic collisions and predation were the most likely cause.” But, in April 2016, the RSPCA said the heads and tails appeared “to have been removed by a human, after death.”
A recent article in New Scientist by fox expert Stephen Harris disputed the idea that humans had mutilated the cats. Police cited Harris’s article as having influenced their decision to cease enquiries. It is worth noting, however, that Harris said he had already given his opinion to police – at the outset of the investigation.
There are certainly many who will question why the investigation has now been brought to a close. A statement about the decision posted to SNARL’s Facebook page has been swamped with comments from supporters expressing a mixture of anger, frustration and disbelief. “How has it gone from the vet saying there were clear and precise incisions made, to foxes?!? It's absolute bullshit!!” writes one.
There were always observers who felt that foxes may have had a role to play in the mutilations, but that may not be the whole story, according to criminologist Adam Lynes at Birmingham City University. “I agree the numbers attributed to the killer were exaggerated. At the same time I think we can’t completely rule out human involvement,” he says.
Perhaps we will never know for sure. Nonetheless, the basic circumstances of the case allowed many members of the public to develop a strong conviction that a killer was out there, argues cognitive psychologist Neil Dagnall at Manchester Metropolitan University.
“Even myself, I must admit I thought it was quite plausible, there could be somebody doing these horrible things to cats,” he says. “It accords with this huge database that we have of typical serial killer characteristics.” Plus, Dagnall adds, the mere suggestion that someone had been dismembering pets would have appealed to our affective, or emotion-based, reasoning.
“Clearly the injuring of animals, especially pet cats, which are close to people’s hearts, is a very affective issue,” he explains. We may therefore have been predisposed to believe in the cat mutilator, despite never having hard, conclusive evidence that he or she existed.
Dagnall gives the example of the Manchester “pusher” – a rumoured serial killer who is said to have drowned many victims in the city's canals. Despite a popular urban myth that one individual is behind a string of such crimes, the police have repeatedly denied this.
Conversely, both the Met Police and RSPCA issued statements supporting the theory that a human or humans were to blame during the course of the cat killer investigation. That makes it all the harder for authorities to now push back against people’s belief that those crimes were committed by a sadistic person, adds Dagnall.
In March 2018, information from the Met Police said its investigation involved officers from Hertfordshire, Kent, Northamptonshire and Surrey. The National Crime Agency had also been consulted. It said there had been 59 attacks in Croydon and it had a profile of one suspect. In 2016 it said there had been around 1,600 police hours spent working on its investigation, called Operation Takahe.
For Lynes, though, there is a bigger picture here for those who look beyond the scorching public interest around the cat killer case. There are many acts of animal cruelty reported in the UK each year, he points out. The cat mutilations were different.
“It was treated like a serial killer tale in the newspapers,” he says. Animal cruelty reports don’t usually capture the public’s attention in the same way. “Why is it sort of ignored and why isn’t it treated with the seriousness that it deserves?” he asks.
As his colleagues at Birmingham City University noted in a recent blog post, people often take to the notion of a “constructed monster that causes the harm” – rather than focusing on the everyday activities that cause harm.
And maybe this happened within the cat killer case itself. Hundreds of cats were killed by accidental collisions with cars, according to investigators – but it was the idea of a relentless serial killer roaming Britain’s streets that made the news.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
