The cat killer has struck again. It’s a year since the first body was found, head, tail and organs removed, body placed in its owner’s driveway overnight. They called him the Croydon cat killer, but 100 bodies later he’s been renamed to encompass the entire M25, murdering up to six cats a week across London, with beheaded corpses also found in Nottingham, Sheffield, Maidenhead, Wallington and Westerham. As the tiny corpses pile up in their freezers, police are no closer to catching him.
This is the kind of story that burrows into you, and stays there like a tick. It is horrific, obviously – there’s the suggestion that a person who appears to delight not just in mutilating animals but presenting their bodies in children’s playgrounds and on their owners’ doorsteps will one day move on to torturing people. But there’s another level of sinister to it, too – a sort of terrible appreciation of how to really hurt a human. The idea of a cat (rather than any other animal) being lured to its horrible death with a piece of raw chicken and a stroke of its ears is particularly awful for us because isn’t one of the things that makes them lovable that very vulnerability? They invite affection from strangers, they roll on their backs, exposing the softest parts of them.
There was uproar last month after American bird expert Dr Peter Marra went on Radio 4 to talk about his book, Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, and his solution to the “cat problem” – he called for a nationwide cull. Unsurprisingly, his idea hasn’t caught on. In Britain we love our pets with a devotion that can be almost worrying. We don’t have many serial killers, but when one does emerge, the press often diminishes the victims. Steve Wright in Ipswich, for example, targeted “hookers”, “tarts”, “prostitutes, rather than women”. The implication was that they mattered less, because, well, they were asking for it. Three years ago, sociologists read college students’ fake news reports on a crime wave in Massachusetts, substituting the victim each time – an adult, a child, a dog and a puppy – then measuring the students’ empathy and emotional reactions. Inevitably, the story about the adult being attacked elicited the lowest levels of distress. While some people might read about a fatal stabbing two towns over and feel a sighing nothing, or a shruggy acceptance that it was probably drug-related or the victim was a baddie, or hear about the murder of a “working girl” and raise their eyebrows as if to say, “Well…”, they’re unlikely to express anything but horror at the killing of a cat.
It’s easier to care about an anonymous cat than a complicated person. There’s no rationalising necessary – it didn’t deserve to be murdered, its innocence is built into it. There is no call for a “cat lives matter” campaign. Everybody gives a shit about cats, because they’re everything we aspire to be. They’re dandies. They know how to relax, to sunbathe, to stretch their entire bodies out with complete disregard for who’s watching. They look people in the eye, and climb on to their laps asking for affection. Even watching cats online makes us feel better, a tiny sugar-pilled version of pet therapy that’s led to an internet saturated with kittens pawing at the tennis on their owners’ tellies, or falling asleep in the paws of a bulldog.
Which means we read details of another tiny death through eyes glazed with a hundred different horrors. Who could do a thing like this? And not once but 170 times? Foxes have been ruled out. King Mouse? He couldn’t wield a machete. One of those Twitter eggs who calls us “feminazi cat ladies”? The cat-bin lady?
Ugh. There is a man who even tonight will be driving along suburban roads in search of a cat to kill, not so much because he wants to hurt cats, but because he wants to hurt people. There is a room somewhere filled with tails. Those working on the case with police believe he leaves the cats outside their owners’ houses so he can watch from his car as they find the bodies. Even if he never kills a human being, he’s doing this to see human pain, because it’s in our pets that we keep our feelings, our ambitions for security and comfort, our unquestioning love. The awful thing is, the worst thing is, the cat killer knows us so well.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
