by Sean Flynn
Lucky lived for another thirteen years. His holdings in the end were so vast that all or part of fourteen San Gabriel municipalities—Monrovia, Baldwin Hills, Sierra Madre, West Covina, and so on—would be built on them. Lucky incorporated one, the city of Arcadia, made himself the first mayor, and built a horse track, Santa Anita Park.
His original six peacocks multiplied year after year. There were at least fifty of them on the ranch, and they killed the snakes and ate the snails and raised a honking ruckus when predators skulked about. And those birds continued hatching more peacocks, and now, more than a century after his death, descendants of Lucky’s birds still roam his former lands. Hundreds of them, too, the largest enclave at the Arboretum in Arcadia, which incorporated a peacock into the city logo. There are smaller musters in Pasadena and Glendora, and farther southwest, in places Lucky never owned, like the Palos Verdes Peninsula. At this point, it’s impossible to determine which birds are directly related to the Rancho Santa Anita flock, but that’s not terribly important. Lucky introduced peacocks to Southern California, and it is not unfair to consider all of them part of his legacy, and possibly the most visible and enduring part.
Which is fitting. They are a gift in one sense, so much beauty and magic. Yet they are also noisy and entitled and leave distasteful messes for others to clean up. Shrieking showboaters, if one is so inclined to consider them as such, taking over whole neighborhoods, shitting all over the place. Wretches, really, deserving of retribution, and certain people will think like that long enough and hard enough until one day they’re Emma Ashley, slipping up from behind and hoping no one notices.
* * *
During the Depression, Frank Vanderlip, Jr., gave all of his birds to William Wrigley, Jr., who made a fortune in chewing gum and had a bird park on Catalina Island. Except the peacocks. Those Vanderlip let roam on the peninsula. Over time those birds made more birds, and the flock spread beyond the estate, which for many years was mostly undeveloped chaparral and scrub canyons: Palos Verdes Estates, incorporated in 1939, was the only municipality on the peninsula until Rolling Hills and Rolling Hills Estates came along in 1957 and, in 1973, Rancho Palos Verdes. By then, people couldn’t help but encroach on established peafowl territory. For many, it was part of the charm; indeed, in the early sixties, the mayor of Palos Verdes Estates was suspected of loosing his own peacocks on the peninsula.
Not everyone was charmed, however. Peacocks are noisy in the breeding season, and several dozen of them in close proximity are extremely noisy. Peacocks and peahens also poop prodigiously, and they enjoy young, tender plants and dust baths that may or may not be in a groomed planting bed. The males pick fights with their own reflections in the sides of well-polished cars, and the feet of either sex will leave scratches in the paint. Palos Verdes Estates had a management plan to keep the flocks in check with humane trapping and relocation as early as 1986, and the other cities over the years restricted the birds to certain neighborhoods and periodically hired trappers to remove a few dozen.
For decades, there has been a low tension between those who adore the peafowl and those who find them a destructive nuisance. That tension is almost perfectly balanced between the pro-peacock people and the anti-peacock people: Neighborhood surveys about whether the flocks should be thinned or left alone have almost always come back evenly split. So there was a kind of détente, not quite a peace treaty but a cessation of open hostilities.
Until the birds started dying.
The notes concerning the first dead bird on the list are sparse because at the time, which was May 30, 2012, it seemed to be of no particular significance. The death was recorded only as a bird, sex not specified, found dead in an unknown location by an unknown person, who called animal control to pick up the carcass. It happens. The peacocks and peahens in the Lanes are feral. Animals die. A dead squirrel doesn’t make much of an impression, either.
But a peacock turned up dead the next day under a bush in Virginia Gerisch’s backyard on Buckskin Lane. Two days later, Virginia, who goes by Gini, saw another one in the yard across the street. Her neighbor said it just fell out of a tree. By the end of July, ten more peacocks were dead on Buckskin Lane, and four of them were on or near Gini’s property. Neighbors, ones who like the peacocks, packed six of the bodies in ice and took them to a veterinarian for a postmortem. All six had been shot by pellets or BBs.
At that point, it seemed prudent to mark when the killing spree began.
That was also about the time, midsummer 2012, that Captain Cesar Perea got involved. He’s a cop (a lieutenant then) with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles. A real cop, too, a former sheriff’s deputy and police officer in San Diego who wears a badge and carries a gun and has the authority to arrest you for felonies, which people sometimes don’t understand because animals typically are not associated with serious crime. In fairness, much of Cesar’s job involves education, like, say, reminding people that it is illegal in California to keep your dog tied to a fixed object for longer than three hours. But he also investigates nightmare incidents, such as a dead possum, beaten and stabbed and burned and left hanging from a noose on a chain-link fence, the seriousness of which is less about justice for a dead marsupial than it is about curtailing the person who tortured it to death. People who inflict such cruelty on animals are often just practicing. The connection between animal abuse and domestic violence, child abuse, violent crime, and full-on sociopathy is well established; Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Albert DeSalvo all maimed and killed animals before they started on people. And Cesar’s cases are investigated with the same vigor and forensic sophistication as any with a human victim: In the possum case, he used DNA evidence lifted from the rope to find a young felon and his unsettling collection of homemade daggers, swords, and hatchets.
“We jokingly say we’re the pre-crime unit,” Cesar told me, “because we’re gonna get you before you start doing this to people.”
The peafowl killings slowed after Cesar showed up. An appearance by a law enforcement officer can have that effect, especially if he takes off his jacket at a community meeting and everyone can see the gun he carries, which isn’t meant to intimidate but does remind those in attendance that murdering peacocks is a serious felony. Just two birds were killed in August, a peahen on Dapplegray and a peacock in Gini’s yard, both shot with pellets, and then only one in each of the last four months of 2012. January and February passed before the next one turned up, shot with a BB and crawling with maggots at the head of the trail leading down to the riding ring. Gini’s house is next to the trail.
Dead peafowl came in clusters after that. Eight in the summer and fall of 2013, six of which were run over by cars. Three were shot with BBs in October, including one that died in Gini’s yard. In November, five were poisoned, though by what was uncertain; four of the bodies were found on Gini’s property and the fifth was on the trail. “I was the pet cemetery, apparently,” Gini said. She’s lived in Palos Verdes since 1972, and in that particular house above the riding ring for decades. She used to keep a flock of chickens in the yard, and the peacocks learned they could poach their feed; there’d be two dozen of them outside Gini’s house sometimes, taking dust baths in the yard and roosting in the pepper tree. A couple of people in the neighborhood set out food just for the peacocks, and the people who don’t like peacocks like the feeders even less.
Cesar focused much of his investigation around Gini’s property. He installed surveillance cameras and lingered on horseback and concealed himself in the greenery at the edge of the trail. “I thought for sure we’d be laying in the bushes doing surveillance and I’d see someone come out and do the act,” he said. But he never did.
The killings picked up again in the spring of 2014, when Beauty and ten other birds died. Cesar thought he caught a break not long after, in July, when a middle-aged guy in a silver Mercedes stopped on the side of Eastvale Road, pulled an air rifle from the backseat, and shot a peacock in the throat.
A teenager saw the whole thing. “He basically did a drive-by on these birds,” Cesar said. “That couldn’t be the first time he’d done it. I mean, who drives around with an air rifle in the back seat of a hundred-thousand-dollar car?”
The kid got a good enough look for a police artist sketch of a square-headed generic white guy in aviator shades. Cesar ran down all the silver Mercedes sedans, even the loaners out from the dealers, knocked on all the doors. All dead ends.
And then the killing was over. “It just completely stopped,” he said. “Went away for the longest time.” Maybe. Cesar visits the Lanes every now and again. He’s never done a formal count, but in 2018 he was sure there were fewer peafowl than there had been four years earlier. Kathy Gliksman and her daughter Mary, who kept records on all the killings, thought so, too. “So the other thing,” Cesar said, “is that maybe whoever was doing it just got better and, you know, went underground.”
* * *
The people who are opposed to the peafowl in the Lanes, or at least to large numbers of them, do not have irrational complaints. They aren’t imagining the noise or the damage or the droppings. They are perhaps more sensitive to those things, but that does not make the squawks in the night any less loud. Still, theirs is not a sympathetic position, for two reasons.
The most obvious is that the peacocks were there first. Anyone who has bought a house in the Lanes during the last sixty years knows that. The birds aren’t hiding, waiting to spring out screeching only after the deed is signed. They’re right there in the open, standing in the street, perching on fence rails and rooftops, picking bugs off the lawns. That’s the appeal: Between the peacocks and the horses, the place is like an oversugared storybook. “People think it’s just the cutest thing ever,” Gini said. “Until they’re here for a day. It’s certainly something you have to get used to, but I equate it to moving next to a busy street or the train tracks. To me, what you do then is you move.” Moreover, the fact that peacocks are noisy and poopy isn’t a secret. Really, it’s a bit like moving to the beach and complaining about the sand.
The other reason the opponents get little sympathy is that they are criticizing peacocks. If wild turkeys were tearing up gardens and kicking off roof tiles, odds are no one would much mind culling the flock. An infestation of marauding raccoons would be trapped at will, and likely with enthusiasm. Rats? The grocery store sells devices and toxins to kill them in all sorts of painful and barbaric ways. If one were to speak out against, say, flocks of beige-and-black Canada geese clogging Buckskin and Sorrel, spectators would nod and murmur and concede that those were all reasonable points.
But peacocks? The ones colored an unreal blue, feathers like the fronds of an especially exotic tropical plant? Most people are charmed by peacocks, or at minimum are pleasantly neutral toward them. Peacocks are beautiful, and pretty birds can get away with anything.
In fact, one of the locals who used to be quoted quite often saying not unreasonable things about how reducing the number of peafowl might not be a bad compromise declined to talk to me. “Do you know how much shit rains down on you when you get pegged as anti-peacock?” that person said. “You might as well hate puppies and babies while you’re at it.”
For all that, it is entirely possible to actively dislike peacocks and also be appalled when they are tortured to death. The birds in the Lanes were not humanely killed (which, for the record, would be a felony). Most of them were injured and left to die lingering, excruciating deaths from lead poisoning or festering wounds or shock and exhaustion. The ones who were killed quickly were also killed painfully, deliberately crushed by tires. Two birds, a peacock who survived and the peahen who died, were shot at close range with bolts from a mini-crossbow. The cruelty was not subtle.
Cesar stayed with the case for more than two years, collecting DNA and pellets dug out of dead birds and running license plates and hiding in the bushes, in part because of that cruelty. There was no practical reason to kill sixty birds. The numbers would not appreciably decline one pellet-shot peacock at a time. The noise would not abate. The males would not whisper among themselves to be more careful about dinging certain cars, and the females would not be more selective with where they incubated their eggs. The killings were an exercise in sadism, nothing more.
Rage killings would at least be understandable. Some guy finds a peacock clawing his brand-new BMW and he swats it off the hood with a golf club that happens to crack the bird’s skull, that sort of thing. Awful and hideous and indicative of poor anger-management skills, but understandable. Those typically would be one-offs, too. Most human murders are committed in the heat of a single deranged moment of anger or panic, and such moments almost never present themselves more than once in a lifetime.
But these were not that. These were vengeance killings, an altogether different category. Colder, meaner, more controlled. Vengeance is what rage becomes when it’s compressed over time, like the way carbon transforms into a hard diamond. Vengeance is cultivated, nurtured, embraced. Rage is a brief in the newspaper; vengeance is on the front page.
Killing peacocks in the Lanes required preparation, and preparation does not occur in a state of rage. Perhaps a few birds were run down in spasms of anger, and those deaths were cruelties of opportunity. But the others were preceded by multiple steps, each of which involved a deliberate decision to continue. There are logistics to contend with, buying the pellets and loading the gun and scattering the poison, and often some amount of labor. Neighbors in the Lanes remember the man who, before the big rash of killings, trimmed branches from the tall tree behind his house so that when the peacocks roosted on the few that remained, he had a clear shot at their silhouettes against the western sky. “Looked like something you’d see at the cowboy shooting range at Disneyland,” one of the neighbors said. For whoever was killing birds repeatedly, there was, after a time, the additional complication of avoiding Cesar Perea and the surveillance cameras and dodging anybody who wasn’t winking and, therefore, complicit.
Finally, there was figuring out how to get all those carcasses on or near Gini Gerisch’s property. It could have been a coincidence, all the birds that used to scavenge her chickens’ feed turning up dead for her to find. The pellet through her garage window could have been an accident, too. Probably not, though.
“My hunch,” Cesar said, “is this might have started out as a kind of ‘screw you’ to a neighbor. But it gave him a little thrill. So now he’s still got the ‘screw you, neighbor’ part, and he’s sticking it to the birds that damaged his property or pissed him off, and he gets another thrill.”
Cesar doesn’t know who he is, or if there’s only one. He might never know. The point is, a person who gets a thrill from scaring his neighbors and torturing animals is operating far outside the range of acceptable human behavior. And over peacocks, which seems almost absurd. How could a creature universally admired for its appearance create such rage, generate a thirst for vengeance? Whoever is killing them is risking prison, and for what? The birds can’t be exterminated by a slow, surreptitious slaughter. So why?
Gini figured it out. “People think they’re cute,” she told me. People drive into the Lanes and it is fairy-tale land. They see in those birds what I saw, elegant hallucinations on a fence rail, cobalt sylphs rising from the dust. They offer, just by standing there, a swirl of wonder, a glimpse of fantasy.
And then they go and act like birds, whooping and pooping and trashing the garden. To a certain kind of person, it feels like a bait and switch, as if they’ve been betrayed. It’s the stuff of pulp fiction and tabloid crime, beauty and betrayal, and it always ends badly.
Chapter Fourteen
Emmett had a day off from school and wanted to visit Carl, who was well into his second week as a patient at the Birdie Boutique because he still had pebbles in his belly and metallic spots in his X-rays. Our allegedly mythical bird had proved himself to be maddeningly mortal.
Emmett hadn’t seen Carl since Uncle John and I threw a
net on him. He brought some quartered grapes with us to Burkett’s office, and he poked one through the bars of the big crate where Carl was sequestered. Carl looked at it but did not move. Emmett dropped it, trying to land it on the grate, but it fell through. So did the next three.
Two cat carriers were stacked next to Carl’s cage. The bottom one had a barred rooster that crowed every six minutes or so, and the top one held a chicken with a badly infected foot swollen up like a catcher’s mitt. When I first met Burkett, he told me he would make a whole practice out of chickens if he could; they’re smart and social but stoic, hard to diagnose sometimes, a challenge for a vet. And tough. He’d sutured roosters without anesthesia.
The one next to Carl was very loud.
On the other side was a green parrot, which one would know only from his head because the rest of him was wrapped in white bandages. Directly above was a blue-and-gold macaw who had plucked all of his feathers from the throat down. His body was completely naked, as if someone had put a macaw puppet head on an unwrapped Cornish hen. There was also a cockatoo with a crooked beak and, in the cages across from Carl, a yellow cockatiel that rapidly paced the floor of the cage like a stir-crazed inmate, and a chatty African gray parrot that alternated between “Come here” and “Oh shit.”
“Kinda cramped, isn’t it, pup?”
Emmett nodded but didn’t say anything. He was focused on getting Carl to eat a grape.
“What do you think we should do, all things considered?” I wasn’t soliciting advice, just trying to gauge his mood.
“Save Carl,” he said, working another grape through the bars.
“Don’t worry, we’re gonna save Carl.”
“We have to. He’s our pet. He’s our responsibility.” He looked around at the other birds, Carl’s neighbors, sizing them up. “And he’s a peacock. Everybody loves a peacock.”