Brutal Cat Slayings ~ Pawprints and Purrs, Inc.

October 31, 1997 - Chicago Tribune©
By: Larry Fruhling

Town Wants Cat-Killing Furor To Run Out Of Lives

FAIRFIELD, Iowa

The funeral pyre burned brightly into the chilly spring night. David Sykes and some friends gathered around the roaring fire, commending the spirits of 16 battered and broken cats to some better and gentler place.

Sykes, stunned by the slaughter of the animals at the shelter he and his wife run, prayed for the cats that, early on March 7, had been beaten to death with baseball bats, allegedly by two local teenage boys.

"I asked God to please receive the souls of these dearly departed friends and please extend them all love and kindliness and please help them in their passages," Sykes recalled this week.

Much has happened since the cats were cremated on a huge brush pile behind the Sykes' Noah's Ark Animal Foundation shelter at the edge of Fairfield, an unusual town of 10,000 where a strong New Age influence overlays what is still basically a typical Iowa farm community - one in which animals are taken for granted as economic assets and cats are generally thought of as ordinary barnyard creatures.

Nearly all of Fairfield was deeply troubled by the cruel killings at the Sykes' "no-kill" shelter, where stray dogs and cats live out their days in pampered comfort.

But in the months that have passed, this southeastern Iowa town has split down the middle on the question of whether the two young men scheduled to go on trial Tuesday should be subjected to prison terms if a jury finds them guilty.

The case has stirred up so much publicity and such intense passion that a judge decided to move the trial 30 miles from Fairfield, where the Jefferson County prosecutor has been bombarded by thousands of petitions from animal lovers across the country.

Almost without exception the missives demand the harshest possible punishment for the young men, who have pleaded not guilty to felony charges of burglary and breaking into the shelter and killing the cats.

"These vile people should be punished to the fullest extent of the law!!" wrote a Pennsylvania woman who described herself as the "mother of two beautiful orphaned baby kittens."

Many of the writers don't think the fullest extent of the law is adequate for dealing with the two defendants, who could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

"It's a shame that they'll never know what it feels like to be woken in the middle of the night and massacred with baseball bats," Linda Conley of McCall, Idaho, wrote last week in a letter to the prosecutor.

There is, however, much more unanimity in the boxes of petitions at the prosecutor's office than in Fairfield itself.

"All they did was kill cats--not just all--but that's what they did," said a 17-year-old Fairfield High School student who didn't want to be identified. "It's not like they killed a person.

"There are boys in school who live on farms and they say, 'Yeah, we kill cats every day,'" she added.

Kyle Sloan, 35, who runs a day-care center and calls herself "a total animal lover," says she was initially sickened by the killings at the Noah's Ark shelter. Now she says she is equally sick of the controversy, which she maintains has been kept smoldering by David and Laura Sykes for the sake of raking in donations for their shelter.

"I was devastated by what happened," Sloan said. "Now I hope these guys get off. These are cats we're talking about. I feel like prison would not do anything but waste the taxpayers' money for what is a measly crime."

Sloan also said she was glad the trial was moved out of Fairfield because of the town's many practitioners of Transcendental Meditation.

The "meditators," whose number includes the Sykeses, began moving to Fairfield 23 years ago, when bankrupt Parsons College in town was purchased by the Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and rechristened Maharishi International University.

Sloan is concerned that "meditators" on a jury in Fairfield might condemn the young defendants out of hand, although she concedes that some "townies" also favor a harsh punishment.

In the years since the maharishi's followers began landing in Fairfield - bringing high-tech businesses, vegetarian restaurants and a bevy of New Age ideas - relations have waxed and waned between the "roos" (for gurus) and the townies.

The upcoming trial, scheduled to begin on the same day a roo challenges the incumbent townie mayor in a city election, has helped diminish the two groups' tolerance of each other to an even lower level than 20 years ago, when Maharishi International University began advertising that advanced meditation techniques could train people to fly and to disappear into balls of blue light. The townies could only shake their heads.

"For the first time since I've lived here - and that's 23 years - I detect a certain lack of tolerance," says LaVergne Dunn, a Chicago native who came to Fairfield with the first wave of the Maharishi's followers.

Dunn said the town's "misconception that all the roos are peculiar and rich" may have been the root cause of the attack at the Noah's Ark shelter, where dogs live in spacious, heated dog houses and the cats have the run of an old, two-story farmhouse furnished with chairs, couches, scratching posts and toy mice.

"Some town people would say, 'Look at that shelter - a regular house with furniture in it. Those roo cats are living better than people,'" Dunn said.

William Pollak, a Fairfield veterinarian, said there is a reason for the maharishi's followers to have more tender feelings toward cats than might be found among some residents of an Iowa farm town that routinely witnesses truckloads of hogs and cattle being taken off to slaughter.

The great majority of the meditators came to Fairfield from big cities in which the only personal links to nature are a pet and maybe a potted tomato plant, Pollak said. "The pet may be the last vestige of natural harmony, and the value of a pet is indeed powerful," he added.

The cat killings have far transcended Fairfield. Besides the outpouring of rage expressed by pet lovers, state and national humane organizations have seized the situation to call for stricter laws against harming animals.

Every television account and every new letter to the editor in the Fairfield Ledger stirs the controversy anew.

"People are very divided about this and very emotional and intense," says Imal Wagner, 47, a telecommunications company publicist. "We've had murder cases in this country that haven't gotten this response."

Wagner said the uproar may simply suggest that the question of animal rights has bubbled to the surface of people's conscience, in Fairfield and the nation. "It's an issue whose time has come, perhaps," she said.

On the southwest edge of Fairfield, David Sykes and supporters of Noah's Ark Animal Foundation have just finished a memorial to the 16 cats that were killed. Under the flowers, shrubs and a granite stone - "In memory of those departed ones, we shall love and remember them always" - lie the bones Sykes retrieved after the pyre burned itself out.

Sykes, 49, has no ambivalence about what should be done with the cat killers.

"I have heard for months people say, 'They're only cats' and 'They're only boys who still have their whole lives ahead of them,'" Sykes said. "Those people weren't here that day and they didn't get down on their hands and knees and scrub the blood and pick up the bodies of little creatures I couldn't even recognize."

One young man, Justin Tobin, 18, avoided prison by agreeing to testify at the trial of the other two defendants, Chad Lamansky and Daniel Myers, who also are 18 and graduates last spring of Fairfield High School.

Lamansky and Myers could get 10 years in prison and $7,500 fines. The young men and their families have not spoken to reporters.

Handling pretrial matters, District Judge Daniel Wilson has ruled the jury could hear evidence that Lamansky allegedly shot and skinned his mother's cat and showed the carcass to friends before the killings at Noah's Ark shelter. Wilson rejected a prosecution attempt to show an alleged photo of a bumper sticker on Lamansky's pickup truck reading:

"Missing your cat? Look under my tires."

Reprinted with permission of Chicago Tribune.