Dead cats trigger alarm in Spanish Fort district

SPANISH FORT, Alabama (WALA) – Several dead cats have been found in the Spanish Fort Estates neighborhood in recent weeks, causing concern among pet owners and sparking a police investigation.

The images of mutilated corpses shared on social media are disturbing and too graphic to show on television.

Elizabeth Mathews said her family’s cat had been missing for just over 24 hours. She said her concern grew when she saw posts on Facebook about dead cats in her area.

“When it rains, he’s always on our porch,” she told FOX10 News. “He can come in the house anytime he wants. So when it rains, he doesn’t like being outside. He doesn’t like being wet. So the fact that we couldn’t find him when it was wet outside was very concerning.”

The cat returned Tuesday, but others weren’t so lucky. One woman told FOX10 News she was heartbroken to find her cat’s body near her home last week. She said the cat had a clean cut and no blood — almost, she added, as if someone had killed the animal somewhere else and brought it to that spot. She said she believes it was the work of a human.

“I’ve seen some pretty disturbing things,” said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous because she fears retaliation if it was a human. “I can tell you that it was not an animal that did this.”

Spanish Fort Police Chief John Barber said police had not received an official report but had begun investigating based on discussions on social media.

“We treated it like any other criminal investigation,” he said. “If someone is out there killing cats in the neighborhood, that’s a crime.”

However, Barber said he came to a different conclusion after consulting with a biologist with the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

“Their opinion on the pictures we sent him was that it was actually a bird of prey that caused this,” he said. “And you know, that was good for us to hear. I think we can clearly see now, when we talk to everyone, that a number of cats were killed in the settlements in a very short period of time.”

Mathews said that explanation made sense to her. She said she once saw an owl “scamper down and run into the window and leave a print the size of the entire back bay window as it tried to get to our dog” on the other side of the window.

Another time, Mathews said, an owl got into a fight with the cat.

“We heard screeching and some loud noises,” she said. “And when we came around the fence, we saw our cat snatch something from an owl that was just running away from our cat. And it was a squirrel that was completely dismembered, no blood.”

Others suspect a coyote may be responsible. Mathews showed FOX10 News a video clip from her home surveillance system in which you can see motion detector lights turning on and off – an indication that something large could have been the trigger, she said.

Monde Donaldson, who has lived in the neighborhood for 30 years, said she saw a dead cat less than two blocks from her home a few weeks ago.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “But it’s almost like the cat hadn’t been touched. It’s a big, beautiful black cat. It wasn’t like it had been touched.”

Barber said if anyone has any information that a person is responsible for the cats’ deaths, they should call police, but he said officers have found no evidence of that.

“We’ve heard a lot of rumors that it could be someone in the neighborhood. We think it could be this person,” he said. “And then as we investigated further, the question was, as always, did anyone hear this person admit to killing the cats? We couldn’t find anyone who actually heard it.”

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