FBI file: Animal Mutilation, Animal Mutilation Part 02

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

THE MUTILATION MYSTERY In Utah, a United State Department of Agriculture veterina announced that an animal he had autopsied had been injected with bacteria or a toxin.

rendezvous in August at the Big Bend National Park in south Texas, Makeig contacted the park superintendent, who watched, but no gathering took place. When Hankston promised to deliver a list of mute-mob names, Makeig waited patiently for several weeks, but no list arrived.

Bunkston then compounded his credibility problems by hinting that a stockbroker's daughter he had already fingered as a member of the mute-mob was about to do something possibly baleful to Makeig. Makeig took the veiled threat seriously and gave the Fort Worth police voluminous data on the mute-mob. "If I get killed," Makeig told one in September 1975, "I want the police to have plenty of leads."

Around this time, Captain Keith Wolverton, a very diligent investigator from the Cascade County, Montana, sheriff's department, traveled to Marion Penitentiary to give Bankston a polygraph examination; Bankston failed on important questions. Makeig followed up by calling alleged members of the mutilation mob—including the alleged leader and the woman—and found no indication of involvement.

In early October 1975, Alakeig wrote a scathing article in the Star-Telegram discounting most of Bankston's allegations as self-serving, jailhouse bunk-bubble. Bankston was finished in Texas.

Even in the Star-Telegram article appeared, however, mutilations were discovered in ten more states, and were becoming increasingly weird; in Montana and New Mexico, for instance, wounds were found to have serrated edges. In Utah, a United States Department of Agriculture veterinarian announced that an animal he had autopsied had been injected with bacteria or a toxin; his superiors told him if he didn't shut up, he would be fired.

In Oklahoma—where there had been one mute report in 1974—citizens and officials grey alarmed over the advent of a mute plague in early 1975. Governor David Boren ordered a full investigation under the aegis of the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety, which, after investigating 26 possibly mutilated animals and consulting various pathologists, theft investigators and radiation experts, issued a report dated March 3, 1975.

The report was a masterpiece of accu nation. The animals had died of "natural causes." And who was chopping away at the carcasses? "It was the opinion of the task-force members that the human in volvital can be attributed to individuals attempting to get in on a sad or young

people dissecting dead carcasses for biological or experimental purposes [emphasis added]." The report also stated: "We are of the opinion that the human involvement in mutilations is a fad generated by publicity and is only temporary." A sad! You know: Hula Hoops, phonebooth parking; the twist, riots against the war, and now rectectomy and teenagers with secret dried udder sacs hidden in their closets. The report's prophecy did, in fact, come true; the mutilations virtually ceased until the fall of 1975, when mutilations occurred in the northwest part of the state.

There had been mutilations on opposite sides of Colorado In November 1974. They spread in the spring of 1975, and by the fall, animals were being carved up all over the state. Elbert County, in particular, experienced a summer and fall of terror of the sort that talk-show comedians ascribe to the streets of New York City. People were afraid to venture far abroad in country where helicopters hovered at night and anusless cattle lay stiff and mutilated in the dawn.

Despite the organized efforts of law enforcement officials, the mutilations continued unchecked in Colorado until the First snow fell in the fall; then they came to a virtual halt. The investigators had gotten wiser over the year. They had tended to discount any involvement of.

blood drinkers or sex-crazed Salamands; it such weirdes were involved, the thinking went, it was only peripherally, and as a cover for the real villains in the chop-ups.

I did not want to become involved in this case. In New York, where I live, there had been several small items about the mutilations in the press in early 1975; I had added the clips to my file marked AN-SAC (animal sacrifices)—opened during my investigation of the Blanson clan in 1970 and 1971—and forgotten about them. My mind had been bombarded for too many years with gore data, and I really wanted a respite from the images of violence and snuff-buffery, especially regarding the killing of cattle.

Then one morning—it was June 18, 1975-I received a phone call from the office of my literary agent. The caller said that a package forwarded to me from the publisher of my Manson book was evincing odoriferousness. Upon my urging, the wrappings were removed; inside was a box in which resided a large cow's tongue. I instantly recalled my file of mutilation clips and the fact that tongues were often missing from the animals.

My cow tongue had been postm in Sacramento, California, and the s had used Christmas stamps with robed angels on them. Aha! I thou a clue! For were not Squeaky Fro and her pal Sandy Good running as Sacramento right at that time, annou imminent gore—and were they not attired in red robes and red tennis Had they sent the tongue? It was a tion I was never able to answer. B I could arrange to have someone as girls if they had sent the tongue. Sq had hunged at President Ford with and was in jail.

About a month after I receive tongue, however, I was in Boulder, rado, for a poetry reading and a k and I decided to drive down to County, which had been bauly the 1975 mute wave. My family drove along Colorado's Route 8 area of vast terrain and fences that for miles, broken occasionally by a entrance.

When we arrived in Kiowa, the c seat, I went to the sheriff's office learned that a mutilation had been covered that very morning. As I talking with undersheriff Bill Waugh deputy Bill Orr, sheriff George Y. returned from the Colorado State Laboratory in Fort Collins, where taken the animal—a female Shorty for an autopsy. Layen, an gr. men of the sheriff's police stopped by—dressed men with silver buckled belts. Western shirts, who looked as frankly, as Merle Haggstyra band. The conversation was shout mutilations.

Elbert County had had its first mutilations in early April 1975, and we visited in July, the number was 30; the figure was to swell to arose by fall. The county was a breeze mutilators, as there were only three officers to cover 1564 square miles extremely rugged land. And the hitters—no one could catch them. Tcers would get close, and then the would vanish. The sheriff told me Vietnam the copter pilots had lea bug the landscape even in rugged so as to muffle their own sound.

There was an unrelated attitude the sheriff and his man that, because implications, was careful to think Somehow, in some way, the Gov is involved in the mutilations.

PASSED BY MUTILATORS It was almost dark as we sheriff's office and drove west along the river.