SERIAL DOG KILLER COLLARED AT LAST!
12-foot gator feasted on pets during 20-year reign of terror
ATWO decade–old South Carolina dognapping mystery was solved when a monster alligator’s gullet was cut open and name tags belonging to five missing pooches were discovered inside!
The 12-foot armor-plated, 445-pound serial dog killer met its match in Adams Run, S.C., when hunter Ned McNeely bagged the critter and hauled the carcass to Cordray’s butcher and taxidermy shop in Ravenel to be carved up for meat and skinned for a trophy.
Kenneth Cordray notes his company doesn’t normally inspect a gator’s stomach, but they did it at McNeely’s request.
“What we found was five dog tags, a spark plug, a bullet casing and bobcat claws,” tattles the taxidermist.
Curious Cordray called a number on one of the tags and spoke to “an older gentleman, and he said that he had a lease down on the other side of the river from where the gator was killed about 24 years ago.”
Because of the number of gators lurking in the Edisto River, when a pooch went missing “they always figured … the dogs got eaten by the gators.”
McNeely also had a chilling reason to hunt the ravenous reptile.
The older man’s missing dog weighed about 80 pounds, easily as big as the potential gator bait on McNeely’s land.
The bloodthirsty brute “was big enough to eat [full-grown hunting dogs] 25 years ago,” notes Cordray — and was a menace to McNeely’s seven-year-old twin girls, three Labrador retrievers and penned ducks.
McNeely says he had to shoot the beast “several times” before it died and needed a tractor and chains to haul the carcass from the water.
Cordray’s staff are turning the gator meat into steaks, summer sausage and jerky. It will take nine months to dry and mount the hide.
While the puzzle of the missing dogs has been solved, one mystery remains.
“I’ve always known alligators will take a dog,” McNeely says. “But how does the spark plug get in there?”