Saving Gracie

by Bradley, Carol

  For months afterward, Engler savored the memories of how bedraggled the dogs looked the morning before their shampoos and how noticeably improved they looked after. She arrived early for the big job. It was doubtful any of the dogs had ever had a bath, and Engler wondered how they would respond to the billowing suds. Almost all of the dogs had skin infections. In addition, the Cavaliers all had piaderma, tiny red bumps that covered their legs like a heat rash. Instead of a simple lather and rinse, Engler needed to treat them with medicated shampoo and let it work it into their coats for a full ten minutes to flush the hair follicles.

  The groomer lined up the special shampoo on a counter next to the claw-foot tub where she had bathed hundreds of dogs over the past five years. She brought Wolf’s dogs back in twos, one under each arm. Dog 132 and her kennelmate were the second pair to go. When it came her turn, Dog 132 stood quietly while Engler worked the tingling suds into her itchy skin. Ten minutes of wet lather must have seemed an eternity, but Dog 132 didn’t budge. She seemed distant, detached, as if she were trying to block out the experience. As jets of warm water engulfed her, she stood immobile, frozen with apprehension the way Engler had seen other puppy mill dogs react. Some dogs would have thrashed about in the water. Not this dog. She didn’t even twitch. She was resigned to letting Engler do with her whatever needed doing. The groomer was struck by how little trouble the Cavalier gave her, and also how removed she seemed. For the duration of the bath, Engler spoke tenderly to the little dog, but not once did the Cavalier gaze up at her or swish her tail in response.

  Afterward, Engler toweled off Dog 132, placed her and her kennelmate in the same crate, and aimed an industrial-strength hair dryer at their damp coats. Neither Cavalier reacted one way or the other to their small confines or to the dryer’s roar.

  Groomer Gwen Engler gives Dog 132 a soothing bath at the Berks County Animal Rescue League. (Susan Angstadt/Reading Eagle)

  It would be months before the ammonia-laced odor would disappear from her body for good, but for Dog 132, bath day marked a turning point. For the first time in years, the Cavalier had obtained some relief from the eye-stinging fumes. Tears welled in Bair’s eyes when Engler brought the silky-feeling dog back to her kennel. “You can’t tell me that doesn’t feel good,” Bair thought as the rest of the newly bathed dogs returned to their kennels.

  Their cleanliness was short-lived. Within a couple of days of their baths, the dogs reeked of excrement again. They thought nothing of eliminating where they lived, stepping in their own waste and, in the process, daubing fecal matter all over the floor, the walls, and themselves. “They don’t know any better,” Bair and her cohorts told themselves each morning as they scoured the kennels yet again. How could they? All their lives these dogs had lived five and six to a cage, caked with feces. They’d had no choice but to tolerate the muck.

  Still, Bair couldn’t bear to see any dog living in that kind of filth. Every time she or her colleagues encountered a mess, they removed the dogs, disinfected the kennel, and installed new bedding, even if the kennel had already been hosed down that morning. Bair vowed to do seventeen loads of laundry a day, if necessary, to keep the dogs’ living quarters presentable. The lingering smell of bodily waste might stir bad memories for these vulnerable survivors, and that was something she wanted to make every effort to avoid.

  A week after getting their first baths, the dogs were bathed again, and this time Engler shaved them down. It was easier to wash excrement out of a shorthaired dog, she’d decided. Dog 132 acquiesced silently as the groomer ran an electric razor carefully up and down her back and sides, across her tummy, and in and around her stubby legs, lopping off the clean but malodorous hair.

  • • •

  Shelter techs live for those milestones, those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments when they can detect a glimmer of hope in the eyes of an abused animal. It had happened a month earlier, when a Pit Bull who’d been used as bait in a fighting ring was brought in after a raid, bloodied and scarred and lacking any reason ever to trust a human being again. In a matter of days, Prince was lavishing slurpy kisses on Lambert, grateful for the food and water she had given him, for the walks she had taken him on, and for his new and dignified name. Not all dogs rebounded that quickly, however. Some of them never turned the corner.

  Kennel manager Lisa Hill struggled to come to grips with the Wolf dogs’ history of abuse. It infuriated her that people could show such callous disregard for animals. Unlike Bair, Hill was fairly new to rescue work—she’d spent most of her years working in factories—and she’d never learned to move beyond the raw aftermath of cruelty that was manifested at the shelter day in and day out. She often left in tears at the end of her shift.

  Bair grieved, too, for the unlucky dogs, but experience had taught her that their stories didn’t always end badly. Each time a resident of the shelter found a new home, it was cause for celebration. The good news had a way of easing the sorrow of the bad.

  A week passed. Thanks to Hill and Lambert, the dogs now had names. The Bulldogs were Babs and Bubbles. The Havanese was Nicolette. The Cavs were dubbed Charlotte, Thelma Lou, Betsy, Ruthie, Shirley, and Bunny. In an attempt at irony, the pregnant Cavalier was named Jolie after Angelina Jolie, who was as gorgeous as this Jolie was homely. For the next four and a half months, Dog 132 would be called Wilma. Her kennelmate was Patty.

  From the start, the two puppies in the group, Babs and Nicolette, were energetic and cheerful. They hadn’t endured the misery of puppy mill life long enough to be traumatized. Betsy, the smallest of the Cavaliers, had a ravenous appetite for some reason; the techs needed to watch to make sure she didn’t steal her kennelmate’s food. The nine remaining dogs had been penned up for so long that they needed to test their new world cautiously, at their own pace. It was possible to win over a dog who’d been neglected and abused as long as Wolf’s animals had, but it wasn’t going to happen right away. These dogs were as emotionally damaged as any Bair had seen.

  Two weeks after the dogs’ arrival, Jolie gave birth to a litter of puppies and refused to have anything to do with the squirming newborns. Bair found them lying cold on the cement floor of the kennel the next morning. She tried everything she knew to keep them warm, but within a week all six of the puppies were dead. She couldn’t blame Jolie for rejecting her babies. The poor dog had borne litters all her life. She was worn out.

  Still, the death of the puppies inspired Bair anew to demonstrate, over and over, that she was there for these dogs. Whenever she had a few minutes to spare, she stepped inside a kennel, lay down next to its inhabitants, stroked their coats, and cooed to them nonstop. The shower of attention conveyed a powerful message: You’re a good dog. You’re special. Somebody loves you. The payoff would come, she knew.

  Change did come, gradually. By early March, the dogs looked healthier. Their coats were growing back in, albeit slowly. Their bodies had begun to fill out. Their eyes were starting to lose that awful dullness and take on a little shine.

  The dogs also appeared to appreciate their clean kennels, even if they kept soiling them. Once nighttime temperatures crept above fifty-five degrees, workers left the guillotine doors open day and night, and a couple of the dogs took advantage of the arrangement to go potty outside. They seemed to like having clean kennels. They were housetraining themselves.

  Over time, the puppy mill survivors lost their fear of water. For the first weeks at the shelter the dogs were shampooed weekly, then monthly after that. They loosened up in the tub and learned to turn around for Engler with just a little prodding. Back in their kennels, they cuddled up with their blankets. Toys, stuffed or squeaky, were less of a hit. The puppies adored them, but the older dogs couldn’t grasp the purpose of lavishing attention on an inanimate object. The blankets, though, were something else entirely. After years of living on wire mesh, the dogs grew to cherish the soft layers of warmth. They had no idea Bair was color-c
oordinating the blankets with the color of the dogs’ coats, but the tenderness she brought to the task was evident.

  The dogs needed as much socializing as they could get. Bair and her co-workers made it a practice to greet their wards as they passed back and forth during the course of a day. Frequently a tech would kneel down, reach some fingers through a chain-link door and stroke a face or squeeze a paw. The staff addressed the dogs by their newly given names, and in a matter of weeks some of the dogs began to answer back. Instead of retreating to the rear of their kennels, they trotted forward at the sound of someone’s approach, stood up on their hind legs and wagged their tails. To Lambert, watching their personalities emerge was like watching a flower bloom—something you would expect to see in a puppy, but rarely an adult dog.

  Dog 132 hung back. She still soiled her kennel and still stepped in her own feces. Emotionally, she remained maddeningly out of reach. She paced back and forth, seldom responding when staffers greeted her by name. The techs knew from experience that dogs were capable of a wide range of emotion: anticipation, gratitude, anger, fear, jealousy, exuberance, love. But Dog 132 seemed too closed off to feel anything but numb. She was so tiny, so devoid of personality. Some of the dogs came around nicely, Hill noticed. Some didn’t. Number 132 didn’t.

  Veltri later estimated Dog 132 to be 6 years old. She’d been born in a crate, reared in a crate, and forever after confined to one. At last she’d been liberated. Finally she was in a safe place, a place where she was getting plenty of food and, even more special, human compassion. Yet she seemed incapable of deriving pleasure from any of it.

  For centuries, scientists and philosophers debated the capacity of animals to suffer fear and pain. The staff at the Rescue League didn’t need to be told what modern-day studies have concluded: that neglected and mistreated animals do feel pain, and not just physical pain but emotional deprivation, too. The techs saw the effects of abuse firsthand. And they knew that while many dogs were able to get over the past, some never would recover. Which camp would Dog 132, Wilma, fall into? They were starting to wonder.

  Chapter 8: The Case Goes to Court

  Assistant district attorney Finnegan stood aside as Shaw rolled open the wooden doors that led into the Chester County SPCA shelter. The women threaded their way past the wing full of adoptable dogs—the part of the shelter the public got to see—and stepped through another doorway, into the building’s back half. The noise was deafening. Before them stretched a succession of runs, a seemingly endless row of cinderblock and chain-link cells. Inside each kennel were nine or ten Havanese, Cavaliers, English Bulldogs, and Papillons, 200 dogs in all. And those were just two-thirds of the dogs taken from Mike-Mar Kennel. Another 130 or so had been parceled out to other facilities.

  Finnegan had braced herself to see a roomful of animals, but the reality was startling. “Holy s——t, Cheryl, that’s a lot of dogs,” she said.

  Lorraine Marie Belfiglio Finnegan, 47, was a senior lawyer with the D.A.’s office, a mother of four and a dog person. No one needed to explain to her what was wrong with this picture. Her indignation already ran high.

  She’d taken a circuitous career route. After graduating from Southwestern University law school in 1983, she worked for the D.A. for six years before leaving to try her hand at insurance-defense law. She’d returned briefly to the D.A.’s office before the Mommy Track beckoned and she dropped out of the workplace to start a family. For eleven years, between breast-feedings, she practiced law at her kitchen table: family wills, estate matters, that sort of thing. In 2001, she returned to Chester County as an assistant D.A., one of thirty who worked out of the courthouse downtown. Her reintroduction to the courtroom was trial by fire—her first case involved some skinheads who had robbed and stabbed a bar patron to death—and she’d been inundated with assignments ever since. She commuted an hour each way from the suburb of Drexel Hill, and in spite of all the ball-juggling she made it work, somehow, by focusing on her job when she was on the job and on her family the instant she left the courthouse at the end of the day.

  Her husband, Ed, was a public defender in nearby Delaware County and understood the pressures that came with her job. The kids—Danny, 15; Catherine, 14; Emily, 12; and Jacqueline, 8—realized, too, that if Mom could make it to their special events, she would, but those occasions would be rare.

  The first few days after the raid, the atmosphere at the SPCA shelter was chaotic as staffers and volunteers processed dogs, shipped some out to other shelters, and organized provisions for the dogs who remained. Finnegan deliberately waited until things settled down before driving out to meet with shelter officials about the case.

  Six days after the raid, on the morning of February 16, 2006, Finnegan left the Chester County Courthouse, climbed into her Honda Civic, and headed east of town. Ten minutes later she turned left onto Phoenixville Pike. The SPCA was a third of a mile down the road. Before visiting the dogs, she met with SPCA executive director Spackman, operations manager McMichael, animal protective services coordinator Turnbull, and Shaw. They walked her through the details of the raid. Then it was their turn to listen as Finnegan described the options that existed for going after Wolf.

  Chester County assistant district attorney Lori Finnegan was assigned to prosecute Wolf and his partners, to win justice on behalf of the dogs. (Carol Bradley)

  The bad news was that the animal cruelty charges filed against Wolf, Trottier, and Hills were classified as summary offenses. In Pennsylvania, a summary offense was considered less serious than a misdemeanor—more along the lines of a traffic violation—and did not warrant a jury trial. The case would be decided by a district judge instead. Still, the animal cruelty charges were numerous, and they could add up. Each charge carried a fine of anywhere from $50 to $750, imprisonment for up to ninety days, or both.

  The SPCA officials were adamant that Wolf be prosecuted fully and that none of his animals be returned to him. Not one.

  Ideally, Finnegan told them, the rescuers would have confiscated some of the key evidence the night of the raid. The garbage cans full of soiled newspaper, for instance, would have made for a memorable exhibit in court. Wolf’s computer likely contained a treasure trove of information that could have been used against him. Instead, rescuers were focused so intently on removing the dogs that they had overlooked the significance of Wolf sitting at his computer the night of the raid. There was no telling how much evidence he’d destroyed right under their noses.

  At least Shaw had the presence of mind to videotape Wolf’s compound before the raid got under way. The grainy footage appeared dark on the small screen; when Shaw played it for Finnegan, the prosecutor had to lean forward to make out any details. She asked if she could take the tape with her. Absolutely, Shaw said. For the next couple of months the prosecutor would view the tape over and over, determined to document every remnant of filth and rubbish in every room.

  The evidence against Wolf, Trottier, and Hills seemed abundant, yet Finnegan hadn’t lost sight of Wolf’s once-formidable reputation in dog-show circles. Until she was assigned to the case, she’d never even heard of Wolf. She’d never been to a dog show, and she knew nothing about puppy mills. Her family’s Pomeranian and Sheltie were beloved pets, not trophy winners or birthing machines. But people who knew of Wolf spoke of him with near reverence. To win the case, Finnegan needed to peel back his glamorous veneer to reveal the miserable conditions inside his kennel, conditions dog show judges never got to see. She needed to emphasize the lice, mange, and other afflictions suffered by Wolf’s dogs; the untreated broken legs found on several of the animals; and the urine-slick floors that the dogs who were allowed to run loose slid about on.

  The Wolf case had one thing in common with murders and child abuse investigations: The victims were mute, incapable of describing the crimes against them. To compensate, the evidence presented in court needed to be clear, persuasive
, and overwhelming. She needed to nail the coffin shut.

  Because of the enormity of the case, district attorney Joe Carroll assigned Finnegan an assistant, her officemate, Kate Wright. Wright’s family had owned a Husky while she was growing up. She doted on her brother’s Toy Fox Terrier–Jack Russell mix and her grandmother’s Cocker Spaniel, and she still mourned the recent death of her sister’s Husky to Coonhound syndrome, a disease that attacks the nerves near the base of the spinal cord, causing a fast-moving paralysis. For now, anyway, the 28-year-old prosecutor’s life was too hectic to accommodate a dog of her own.

  Finnegan compiled a long list of potential witnesses she planned to call to the stand. She interviewed Shaw, Beswick, Green, and others who had taken part in the raid. She met twice with Siddons, the dog warden who accompanied Shaw on the initial visit to Wolf’s home. Finnegan also wanted to question the veterinarians who’d treated the dogs in the days afterward. She asked Wright to interview the vets by phone and determine which two or three could best articulate their findings on the witness stand.

  Among the vets Wright selected was Ravinda Murarka, a veterinarian with the Pennsylvania SPCA in Philadelphia. Murarka, who was of eastern Indian background, spoke with a deep accent—the judge would need to pay close attention to understand him—but his knowledge of dogs was exhaustive. His job gave Murarka a chance to witness the most egregious forms of animal abuse, and yet even he had been struck by the neglect suffered by Wolf’s dogs. He would make an excellent witness, Wright believed.

  Wright also chose Bryan Langlois, a veterinarian at the Humane League of Lancaster County, which had taken in several of Wolf’s dogs, and Larry Dieter, the veterinarian for the Chester County SPCA. A fourth vet, Amy Parkman of West Chester Veterinary Medical Center, had cared for some of Wolf’s sickest animals following the raid and was able to provide valuable background about the skin infections, the ear and eye infections, and the other diseases and parasites she found in some the dogs.