Beloved show horse stolen from barn and butchered
Just before 7 a.m. Sunday, Deborah H. Stephens, a renowned American equestrian, arrived at her horse barn in Palmetto, Fla., to check on some paperwork and prepare for the day’s lessons.
Suddenly, one of the barn workers appeared with unsettling news: The latch on the stall of a prized Grand Prix-level show jumper had been tampered with, and the horse was nowhere to be found.
Within a half-hour, there were signs of an unusual crime, then a brutal discovery: The horse had been led from his stall and taken far from the barn, where he was carved up so professionally that authorities are investigating it as an animal cruelty case carried out by an expert butcher for meat. “He had been filleted,” Stephens said in a telephone interview on Monday. “The slices were so de- liberate and so well done . . . This was a professional.”
The discovery of the horse, named Phedras de Blondel, in a remote pasture near the woods at Imperial Farms Equestrian Center posed a new element in a string of recent crimes that has involved the killing of stolen livestock for meat.
David Bristow, a spokesman for the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office, said it was not clear whether the Imperial farm had been targeted.
Stephens is an acclaimed Grand Prix show jumping competitor. In a career that has spanned decades, she is known for setting an outdoor high jump record of seven feet, eight inches in 1983. Phedras, a 12-year-old chestnut gelding, had just arrived at the farm in Florida on Friday, with a proven track record as a dependable competitor in Europe.
At Imperial, he was not the tallest of the 36 horses boarded there. But of the tall horses, he was the fattest: weighing up to 680 kilograms, she said. Authorities think that is why he was chosen for butchery.
That morning, the barn worker had peered into Phedras’s stall to give him grain. The latch was bolted into the door but unchained: Someone had neglected a crucial step that was the barn rule when closing stall doors. “Your new horse is missing,” Stephens was told.
Stephens, who said she was not a “panicker,” set off on foot to look for Phedras around the farm, which is more than 31 acres of rambling paddocks, training rings and pasture.
As her assistant and others looked around on foot, Stephens decided to drive to the road, thinking Phedras might have run off. As she drove, she noticed a broken fence in a remote paddock. She told her assistant to take a look, and then heard screams.
“She said he was dead,” Stephens said.
Surveillance cameras were scrutinized, but yielded no clues, she said. A length of yellow nylon rope was discarded, believed to have been used as a makeshift halter to lead Phedras from the stall. A set of footprints — and hoofprints — could be traced through bushes and a field, in what appears to be the track of at least one suspect, she said.