The Croydon cat killer: mystery solved?

If not for Boudicca Rising, the police would never have launched their hunt for a sadistic petmurderer, said Adam Lusher in The Independent. Three years ago, the mutilated bodies of cats began to show up in different areas of Croydon, and it was Rising (not her real name, but “the only one you’re getting while I run around after a psychopath”) and her partner, Tony Jenkins, who first detected a pattern. The cats were found neatly dismembered, with body parts left in places which seemed carefully chosen – on the owner’s doorstep, say, or the penalty spot of a garden football pitch. More than 400 cases were eventually reported; the police warned that the killer might move on to “vulnerable women and girls”, and were keen to interview a man with short brown hair and acne scars. But now they’ve closed the investigation, convinced they’ve identified the true culprit. It has “ginger fur, four legs and a bushy tail”.

The police are right, said Janice Turner in The Times. None of London’s thousands of CCTV cameras picked up a human suspect; and corpses examined by a veterinary pathologist had puncture wounds. Foxes seldom attack cats, but they will eat ones killed by cars, and that’s probably what occurred here. Of course, if you cause a panic and ask every one who finds a dead cat to report it, you’ll end up with a crime map: it’s “a prime case of confirmation bias”. And since Londoners tend to be in denial about the cruelty of the natural world – they don’t like to see foxes as ruthless scavengers – they prefer to point the finger at a psychopath. A petition to reopen the case has already attracted more than 24,000 signatures. The saga has created a kind of frenzy, said Eva Wiseman in The New York Times, and you can see why. Pets symbolise “our aspirations for security and unconditional love”; suburbs are meant to be dull but safe. Told a cat-killer was on the loose, however, people looked at their cats and saw “their own vulnerability”. It’s also the case that human beings love to construct monsters, said Chris Baraniuk in Wired. The countless reports of acts of animal cruelty and of cats being killed by cars don’t stir people to action. But “the idea of a serial killer roaming Britain’s streets” most certainly does.