The “Croydon Cat Killer” has, by some estimates, murdered 450 small animals, mostly house cats, in England so far. Despite a vast manhunt, the killer is still at large and has left no forensic evidence or other identifying clues. The murders all have the same characteristics: blunt force trauma to the head, a slit or mutilated throat, and a bloodless corpse, which indicates the killer dumps the animal somewhere other than the murder scene. Often, raw chicken—likely used as bait—is found in the dead animal’s stomach.
The killings started years ago, in 2015 in the London borough of Croydon. The killer then spread out across the country, seemingly moving in concentric circles around the capital along its M25 ring road and reaching as far as Birmingham and Manchester, writes Vanity Fair. Remarkably, he or she has avoided being filmed by the more than four million surveillance cameras that monitor Great Britain. Police for the greater London area have assigned 15 officers to the case, while the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (R.S.P.C.A.), Britain’s oldest and biggest animal charity, has commissioned forensic scientists to perform postmortems on 22 of the victims. PETA is offering a $7,000 reward for information that will lead to the arrest and conviction of the killer. You can find wanted posters across the country.
“Anyone who thinks this is a story that only affects people with cats is sorely mistaken,” said Elisa Allen, the director of PETA in the U.K., to Vanity Fair. “A history of animal abuse shows up in the records of some of the world’s most infamous criminals. Mary Bell, who strangled two children to death in Newcastle upon Tyne, while she was still a child, had previously strangled pigeons to death. Thomas Hamilton—perpetrator of the 1996 Dunblane massacre, in which 16 children and one teacher died—had squashed the heads of rabbits beneath car wheels when he was a child. . . . [American serial killer] Jeffrey Dahmer had impaled dogs’ heads, frogs, and cats on sticks. I could go on.”
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