Feline felon with foot fetish prowling neighbourhood
For the last three years Bruno and Kathi Egli have regularly woken up to discover random items of footwear on their property.
‘‘Most of the time it’s just one shoe but yesterday it was two pairs scattered across the driveway,’’ Kathi said.
‘‘Sometimes it’s once a week or maybe twice a week and sometimes it’s fortnightly.’’ She said the footwear, which included shoes and socks, was mostly children’s sizes but there had been a pair of adult’s leather boots.
Bruno said he was usually first to discover the belongings when he went to get the newspaper each morning.
‘‘Then we see if the cat burglar has been,’’ he said.
‘‘On Tuesday I saw two pairs and I thought that that might be too much, it must have had a lot of energy.’’
The New Plymouth couple have never seen the suspected furry culprit but they were both aware of cases where neighbourhood moggies had been responsible for the theft of items of clothing.
‘‘It’s a mystery. It happens during the night, it’s quite interesting and it’s quite random as well,’’ Kathi said.
‘‘We know it’s a cat because cats do that.’’
She said the deposits were more consistent in the summer months and believed the felon liked their driveway because it was brick and held the warmth overnight.
‘‘It then decides to go and do its mischief.
‘‘It drags them down the driveway and when it reaches our place it knows it has gone too far.’’
However, the couple, who live in the New Plymouth suburb of Frankleigh Park, didn’t have a surplus shoe supply outside their front door, as the neighbours were well aware where to find their footwear if it had disappeared.
‘‘They mostly belong to the people across the road so we just put them out on our letter box.
‘‘I was talking to one neighbour and she told me, ‘we know where to come to find the shoes’.’’