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MARCH 2005

Editorial: The missing link in murder

Voting Republican by a two-to-one margin in each election of this decade, Frankfort, Indiana, will never be mistaken for a bastion of bleeding-heart liberalism. The phrase “animal rights” has appeared in the hometown newspaper, the Frankfort Times, on only three occasions since 1997, according to an electronic search—and has never been used in a positive context.

Yet no one in Frankfort seemed even mildly surprised on December 21, 2004, when Clinton Superior Court Judge Kathy Smith jailed convicted dog shooter William Pierce, 55, for nine months. Pierce on Halloween 2004 shot his own Basset hound puppy. The police said Pierce did it because the puppy defecated on the floor. Pierce said he did it because the pup was barking. Either way, Pierce then wrapped the wounded puppy in plastic and tossed him into a trash can.

“Studies show that a person who tortures an animal is likely to hurt a human being. We want to make sure we get a handle on this,” said Judge Smith.

Following his jail time, Pierce is to serve 21 months on probation, during which he must refrain from all contact with alcohol, pets, firearms, and three persons including his estranged wife.

The most remarkable aspect of the case, from the ANIMAL PEOPLE perspective, is that neither Frankfort Times reporter Janis Thornton nor any authors of letters-to-the-editor seemed to find either the sentencing or Judge Smith’s comments at all unusual.

Pierce was convicted of a felony. In 1992, when ANIMAL PEOPLE debuted, just a handful of states permitted felony convictions in cruelty cases, and no person convicted of cruelty to an animal had served more than a few days of jail time within decades, if ever. The concept that cruelty to animals frequently precedes violence to people, though long known to criminologists, was just beginning to gain currency with law enforcement and the judiciary.

We now hear of similar sentences and judicial lectures to convicted animal abusers several times per week. We picked the Pierce case to cite almost by random draw.

The outcome of the Pierce case demonstrates remarkable progress in achieving societal recognition of the association between criminal abuse of animals and criminally harming humans. Much less progress has been made toward achieving broad recognition that the commission of illegal acts does not define the link.

The inhibition most relevant to the commission of a violent crime, against either animals or people, is not the inhibition against breaking a law, but rather the inhibition against harming a sentient fellow being, especially one who struggles and protests.

If inhibition against lawbreaking really had any strong role in preventing violent crime, the most dangerous members of society might include litterbugs, shoplifters, and significant numbers of people who drive cars.

To be sure, people who drive too fast, drive drunk, and run stop signs kill nearly twice as many Americans each year as all murderers combined, but their most frequent victims are themselves, and neither driving habits nor histories of petty crimes against property have any predictive value in suggesting who might commit assault, rape, arson, or murder.

At least seven of the most publicized recent murder cases demonstrate what the link really is, even though none of the alleged and/or convicted killers had previous histories of criminally injuring animals:

• Just before Halloween 2004, Canadian Press obtained a report produced for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police by Health Canada, which confirmed longstanding suspicion that alleged serial killer Robert Pickton, 54, of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, may have fed the remains of as many as 60 women to pigs who were later slaughtered for human consumption. DNA testing has identified teeth and bone fragments from 22 women who have been named in murder indictments against Pickton. Pickton apparently pulverized the women with a wood chipper––essentially the same method that many factory farmers use to “recycle” into feed their dead livestock and still living “spent” hens, except that the machine used to kill poultry is called a “live macerator.”

• On November 21, 2004, Chai Soua Vang, 36, of Minneapolis, allegedly massacred six fellow deer hunters and wounded two others, after Vang was told to leave private property in Sawyer County, Minnesota. Vang in April 2001 was fined $328 for possessing 93 more wild-caught fish than the legal limit; on Christmas Eve 2001 was jailed for allegedly threatening his wife with a handgun; and in April 2002 failed to pay a $244 fine for hunting on posted land. In the interim police visited his home five times to investigate complaints about domestic disturbances and alleged theft. Chai Soua Vang has pleaded innocent to murder charges, contending that the shootings were self-defense.

• In Oakland, California, an Alameda County Superior Court jury on December 14, 2004 recommended the death penalty for Stuart Alexander, 43, after convicting him in October on three counts of murder. The sentence was affirmed on February 15. Alexander, then owner of the Santos Linguini Factory in San Leandro, in June 2000 turned on a surveillance camera, then killed USDA meat inspectors Jean Hillary, 56, and Tom Quadros, 52, along with California state meat inspector Bill Shaline, 57. Alexander also shot at California meat inspector Earl Willis, 54, who escaped.

• Lisa Montgomery, 36, of Melvern, Kansas, on December 17, 2004 was charged with strangling Bobbie Jo Stinnett, 23, of Skidmore, Kansas, who was within days of giving birth. Montgomery confessed, police said, to killing Stinnett the preceding day in order to cut from her womb and kidnap her unborn daughter––who survived. Both women were rat terrier breeders. Montgomery’s crime was doing to Stinnett what puppy millers routinely do to bitches who may die in labor, to save and sell their whelps.

• Game rancher Mark Scott-Crossley, 37, on January 24, 2005 went to trial in Phalaborwa, South Africa, for allegedly ordering two employees to beat, tie, kick, and threaten former employee Nelson Chisale, 41. Afterward they allegedly tossed Chisale alive to the lions at the nearby Mokwalo White Lion Project. The lions finished him off. Hardly anyone admits to hunting big cats with live bait, but cases often surface, including the recent plea bargain convictions of Jack Shealy, 44, and Richard Scholle, 57, of Ochopee, Florida, for staking out a live goat on June 16, 2004 to lure a Florida panther. A third defendant, Jan Jacobson, 61, videotaped the attack, and faces trial in March 2005. The panther escaped the ambush. The goat, though badly injured, survived.

• On February 1, 2005, the Connecticut Supreme Court indefinitely stayed the scheduled execution by lethal injection of Michael Bruce Ross, 45, for killing eight young women in 1981-1984. Ross apparently threw his first victim off a cliff, then strangled seven more, including two 14-year-old friends he raped and killed in front of each other. Ross also attacked at least three other women. Incredibly, he was fined only $500 for unlawful restraint and release after being caught with a 15-year-old he had tied up and gagged. Raised on his parents’ egg farm in Brooklyn, Connecticut, Ross choked spent hens as a routine chore. He later worked for an egg farm in Licking, Ohio.

• Claude Dallas, 54, on February 6, 2005 was released from the Idaho Correctional Institution in Orofino. Dallas, a trapper, in 1981 shot Idaho Department of Fish & Game officers Bill Pogue and Conley Elms, after they found two poached bobcat pelts in his tent. Wounding Pogue and Elms with a handgun, Dallas then used a.22 rifle to dispatch them like trapped animals, with point-blank head shots.

Blaming the victims feeds denial

Of the seven alleged and convicted murderers, only the hunter Chai Soua Vang and the trapper Dallas had any history of lawbreaking involving animals before killing humans. But their offenses were legally defined as crimes against property: trespassing plus unauthorized possession of the remains of animals who belonged to the state, on behalf of the public.

Accordingly, neither mass media nor animal advocates have made much of the role that routine cruelty to animals appears to have played in both teaching the killers their methods and conditioning them to transgress normal inhibitions against killing.

The very idea that widely practiced and broadly accepted forms of cruelty to animals might be a precursor to violence against humans tends to make most people uncomfortable.

Robert Pickton, for example, was just the sort of small-scale, self-reliant “Old MacDonald” farmer whose image factory agribusiness hides behind. Environmental groups dedicated to fighting urban sprawl and maintaining “green space” subsidize the operations of many farmers whose operations resemble his. People who eat pork like to imagine that their pigs lived like Pickton’s—and are much less disturbed that pigs are routinely tricked into cannibalism, like cattle and poultry, than at the possibility that they themselves might have been tricked into eating an animal who once ate a human.

Some, shocked that a farmer whose whole life was raising animals for slaughter killed people too, have offered in defense of Pickton that most of his alleged victims were prostitutes and drug addicts, likening his serial killing to the routine agricultural destruction of predators and crop-raiding nuisance wildlife.

In a backward sort of way, that is just the point: raising animals for meat is all about killing. As PETA puts it, “Meat is murder.”

Relatively few farmers progress to homicide, but the distance from killing pigs, coyotes, deer, raccoons, and so forth to killing humans is markedly less than the distance to murder from not killing anyone.

Michael Bruce Ross was a latter-day John-boy, superficially straight out of The Waltons, helping to maintain “green space” on the edge of suburbs full of sprawling lawns and shade trees. Even his victims were all young women of sterling repute.

None of the fictional Walton children ever slowly choked the life out of humans, well-reputed or otherwise—but they all had dreams and ambitions taking them far from the farm. That was perhaps the most realistic part of an otherwise grossly idealized depiction of rural living: no one on The Waltons pretended that raising and killing animals was the best way to spend a human lifetime.

Stuart Alexander was a small-time entrepreneur, another occupational definition with a positive public image and many apologists. Purportedly Alexander was driven to murder by bureaucratic harassment—the sort that prevents Americans from dying of meat-carried parasitic diseases at anything close to the rates prevailing in much of the rest of the world.

Lisa Montgomery was a housewife who raised puppies, said to have gone mad from depression after a miscarriage. Only sympathy for her victims seems to restrain her apologists.

And then there are the hunters and trappers: Chai Soua Vang, the immigrant whose Americanization included a metamorphosis from Hmong hill dweller to truck-driving redneck; Mark Scott-Crossley, leading the Great White Hunter lifestyle glorified even in essentially pro-animal films such as Born Free; and Claude Dallas, the anti-establishment country-wester song hero, whose female courtroom coterie were called the “Dallas Cheerleaders.”

People who admire the images these alleged and convicted murderers exemplified do not like to think of themselves as serial killers, rage-killers, or the sort of person who might throttle and hack open a mother-to-be.

Even more, most people do not like to imagine that they are in any way accomplices to such actions by eating meat and eggs, or hunting and fishing, or wearing fur.

In rebuttal to any suggestion that institutionalized cruelty to animals may be a precursor to murder and other forms of violent crime, many will argue that tens of thousands more people exploit and harm animals in routine commerce and recreation than ever engage in any kind of illegal violence.

That misses the point. The point is that all forms of cruelty, regardless of legality and regardless of the species of the victim, contribute to expanding the universe of suffering. All forms of distancing and denial allow the cruelty to continue, afflicting ever more victims and drawing in more participants.

Just a tiny minority of the participants ever choose to inflict cruelty with sadistic intent, but for those who do, work in agribusiness, slaughtering, or vivisection may provide cover for indulgence. Some eventually seek a further rush through torturing and killing humans. Only then do their acts burst the pretense that their sadism is anything else.

Yet, like a “puncture-proof” tire that reseals itself after a leak, the human capacity for distancing and denial allows society to expel and punish murderers without having to acknowledge that they are the ultimate products of layer upon layer of acculturation to killing animals without a twinge of conscience.