Cat Killer Gets Hung Jury

Cross Posted: Pax Parabellum

(I caught this story by accident on one of my local channels and once I heard part of it, I had to know the whole sordid tale)

"Would be actor" gets new girlfriend, but he doesn't like her cat. One night he decides to kick her cat Norman to death with very heavy, steeled-toe boots. He claims that he woke up to find the cat biting his fingers and it was a defensive kick. The girlfriend got scared when "Would be actor" woke her up raving about her cat, and she left for the night. She came back the next morning and found Norman, her seven pound, declawed tabby, curled up in a ball in his favorite spot dead. The Vet that examined Norman said it was a goal making kick to have done the kind of damage the cat suffered. The Vet says "Would be actor" may have smashed the cat's head against a piece of furniture before drop kicking him. Norman both bled to death and suffocated as his chest cavity filled with blood.

"Would be actor" it seems is a nasty drunk, but the judge in the case wouldn't let testimony from a previous girlfriend come in. Testimony about how the defendant slammed a door on the previous girlfriend's finger while he was drunk: she lost the tip of that finger. Norman's owner and "Would be Actor" had been drinking before the killing occurred, and she had broken their relationship off.

The vote on the jury was 11 to 1 to convict the defendant of Animal Cruelty. The Prosecution has not decided on whether to retry the case.

I used to have a declawed cat from hell, and he would never bite you unless you tried to hold him. Pyewachet had other means of terrifying and intimidating people. Pyewachet was a black kitten with green eyes and a broken hip when he showed up at my house on Halloween. After he came to live with me, several people stopped coming in the house because he scared them too badly. He would get really close to those people he didn't like and yowl like a Siamese at them. One friend spent the night once and he sit outside her bedroom door and yowled all night. He just wanted her to leave. Sometimes if someone came to the front door, he'd walk out and spit at them. I had a boyfriend for a while, and he would sit on the dresser and yowl or spit at him.

When Pyewachet bit it was usually me, and it was really teeth marks--not a little scratch or two. He mellowed in later years and just ignored people. He was just short of 19 years old when he died.