IN FOREST PRESERVES, CHICKEN, GOAT HEADS COULD BE SIGNS OF RITUAL
In forest preserves, heads of chickens, goats may be signs of Santeria ritual
Beyond where their front lawns end, just across the road, amid the tangle of buckthorn, maple and cottonwoods — that’s where they find them.
In cardboard boxes, plastic sacks or at the base of a tree clustered with tokens of ritual — a swatch of red cloth, a little wooden box — they’ve been finding chicken heads with their eyes gouged out, dismembered goats. Just last weekend, blood stained the newly fallen snow where residents found two baby goat heads and a number of chicken parts, wrapped up in red bandanas.
Kathy Kajari lives here. Her front yard slopes down to the edge of Forest Glen Woods in Edgebrook. She began finding dead animal parts in 1976, when she and her husband moved here to start a family. She doesn’t scare easily. She’s a retired Chicago Police Department deputy chief.
“I never let my children play in the woods unaccompanied by an adult because of that,” Kajari says. “If there were people who would do that to an animal, I don’t want to imagine what they would do to a child.”
Residents think it might be the work of practitioners of Santeria, a derivation of a West African tradition brought by slaves to the Americas — in which animals are sacrificed to honor and seek help from ancestral spirits.
Animal parts have shown up in Cook County forest preserves to the west, south and northwest of the city, according to half a dozen police reports filed this year and last year and reviewed by the Chicago SunTimes and Fox 32 Chicago. Most of the time, it’s just the parts. But in June, a caller reported seeing five people “dressed all in white” who
“I NEVER LET MY CHILDREN PLAY IN THE WOODS UNACCOMPANIED BY AN ADULT BECAUSE OF THAT. IF THERE WERE PEOPLE WHO WOULD DO THAT TO AN ANIMAL, I DON’T WANT TO IMAGINE WHAT THEY WOULD DO TO A CHILD.” KATHY KAJARI, who began finding dead animal parts in Forest Glen Woods in 1976
appeared to be “doing animal sacrifices on chickens and roosters.”
Willy Jefferson, who has worked in the forest preserves for 36 years, was out last week clearing debris from a road winding through LaBagh Woods on the Northwest Side. He’s seen cat, skunk and deer carcasses and numerous headless chickens during his time on the job.
“We don’t know what they’re doing [ with them],” says Jefferson, who disposes of what he finds. “Anything we say, we’d just be guessing. I’m American, I don’t know nothing about that ritual stuff.”
Talk of Santeria sometimes conjures thoughts of black magic and curses. A North Miami Beach police officer made headlines in 2011 when, according to news reports, she concocted a plan to sprinkle birdseed as part of a Santeria rite outside the office of the city manager who was slashing the police budget.
Joseph Murphy, a Georgetown University theology professor, has studied Santeria for 40 years. He says the traditions are frequently misunderstood, often filtered through a racist lens.
“The animals are sacrificed under very strict conditions,” Murphy says. “It’s a lot like kosher. Prayers have to be said. The blade has to be a certain style and sharpness. It’s as humane a killing of an animal as can be.”
Murphy, though not familiar with the remains found in Cook County, says that, in general, animals are sacrificed to summon ancestral spirits to help with matters of “health, wealth and love.”
He suspects the remains are left in woods because such spaces are considered sacred among the hundreds of thousands across North America estimated to be in some way connected to Santeria.
“All kinds of people are involved in Santeria, from domestic workers to postal employees,” Murphy says. “I’ve met doctors. I know a surgeon who is involved in this.”
Still, sacrificing animals is illegal in Illinois, according to Cherie Travis, an animal rights lawyer who is a former executive director of the city of Chicago’s Animal Care & Control Department. A 1993 U. S. Supreme Court decision voided a Florida city’s ban on animal sacrifice because its ordinance singled out Santeria. But Travis says Illinois’ Humane Care for Animals Act is a “neutral” law, not singling out a religion.
“It’s not targeting religious activity,” she says.
The Cook County forest preserves encompass about 70,000 acres — 11 percent of the county. About 100 officers police the area. Only once in recent memory — the June incident — has a report come in of someone being caught in the act of a suspected ritual sacrifice. By the time the police arrived, though, there was nothing to see, says Lambrini Lukidis, a forest preserve district spokeswoman. Dumping is illegal, and anyone caught sac- rificing an animal would face arrest, she says.
“We respect everyone’s freedom of religion, but if we see someone, we could take action under the state law,” Lukidis says. “If they are arguing that it’s for religious purposes, it’s something they would have to argue before a judge.”
Behind dusty windows covered in a red- metal grating, Alyce Colon, 63, runs Botanika Chango Universal on the South Side. Ritual candles crowd her shelves, along with tiny bottles of colored oils, a sprinkling of which can bring health, love or even bad luck, according to Colon, a Santeria priest.
She says she participates in ritual killings of animals, though she doesn’t kill them herself, and is confident that the 1993 high court ruling in fact permits them.
“A lot of people, they misunderstand us,” says Colon, who grew up in Puerto Rico but was born in Chicago. “They think we work with the devil, but it’s not that.”
Colon says the sick and those plagued with bad luck come to her. Sometimes, she says, a ritual with flowers or fruit helps. Something more serious might require the kill- ing of a chicken, she says, or, for the most stubborn problems, a bigger animal.
Asked whether what she does is cruel, she says that people should keep an “open mind.” And does the ritual work? “Yes, it does,” says Colon, who travels the country practicing her craft. “I see it many, many times.”
Dumping the carcasses in the woods gets rid of the “bad energy” that’s been released from the afflicted, she says.
“You can dump it because other animals in the forest can eat it,” she says. “It will be like food for the coyotes. But they should be more careful to do those things.”
Not long after moving to Edgebrook in the mid- 1970s, Kajari, the retired police deputy chief, was a stroller- pushing mother. Back then, finding a box of chicken heads a stone’s throw from one’s home was unsettling, she says. Now, it’s mostly annoying, particularly in the summer, when the rotting flesh draws flies.
“I won’t judge your religious rituals, but clean up after yourself!” says one of Kajari’s longtime neighbors, Cheryl Targos.
Not all of the chickens in their North Side neighborhood come headless. “Rudy,” a handsome cream- and- iridescent green rooster, is living proof. He showed up in the neighborhood in February 2015, and residents suspect he dodged a sacrificial blade.
“I feed him, much to the chagrin of some of my neighbors,” Kajari says.
She says she comes across decapitated remains about once a year.
“Every time you see it, it brings a little horror back to you . . . because you always feel for the animals,” Kajari says.
But in 40 years, she says she’s never seen any evidence of the culprits. Other neighbors say they’ve sometimes heard distant drums.
“My sense is that they do it deeper in the woods, and then they just dump the stuff on the way out,” Kajari says.