Saving Gracie

by Bradley, Carol

  • • •

  Stories about mike-mar kennel continued to trickle in after the raid. Customers reported purchasing puppies only to discover later that the dogs were sick. In some cases buyers spent thousands of dollars trying to heal their new pets. The calls were interesting, but they didn’t yield anything that could be used in the Wolf case.

  Information gathered during the raid provided ample enough evidence. As they built their case, Finnegan and Wright covered their office walls with charts and photos of Wolf’s compound and piled related documents in stacks around Finnegan’s desk. The fate of the neglected dogs began to consume them in a way run-of-the-mill cases seldom did. Finnegan had handled animal cruelty cases before, but she’d never seen dogs shake with fear the way Wolf’s dogs had. How could a man who’d spent decades lavishing attention on show dogs demonstrate such blatant disregard for his “babies”—hundreds of them left at home in reeking filth?

  Once a week, usually at the beginning of her day, Finnegan drove out to the SPCA shelter to visit Wolf’s dogs. Some days she was content to kneel outside a single run and observe the dogs inside. Other days she walked up and down the aisles, checking on as many of the dogs as she could. When she had the time, she would open up a kennel door, sit on the cement floor, and let the wary but curious inhabitants wander over to her. The visits stirred in her a jumble of anger, sadness, and pity. “If we fail to convict this man of animal cruelty, the lives of his dogs won’t ever change,” she thought to herself. “They’ll live out their days in cages smaller than the ones they’re in now.”

  She tried in some small way to let the dogs know someone cared, and each time she visited she went out of her way to thank the SPCA staff and volunteers for their hard work. One person she almost always encountered was her boss’s daughter, Jennifer Carroll, a college student who was considering veterinary school. Carroll showed up to perform whatever chore needed doing, including scrubbing floors. On the drive to work afterward, Finnegan asked herself if there was something she could be doing to move the case along a little faster.

  Nearly everyone at the shelter had shifted their duties to help care for Wolf’s dogs. Officer Beswick had offered to handle most of the new investigations so that Shaw could prepare for the trial and handle any issue that arose with Wolf’s dogs. Managing the fallout from the case had become a full-time job in itself. Throughout the day, Shaw fielded phone calls from veterinarians and others involved with the dogs’ care. She worked closely to substantiate the evidence Finnegan planned to present in court. If she couldn’t nail the evidence, Shaw worried, the dogs could wind up back at Wolf’s. “No holes,” she kept telling herself. “If I lose, all those animals lose, too.”

  • • •

  Wolf was busy planning his own strategy. He’d hired a team of lawyers led by Eric Coates of Oxford. Coates had a rapport with the judge and would act as the spokesman for the group. The other attorneys—John Alice of Philadelphia and Charles Iannuzzi of nearby Woodbury, New Jersey—had litigation experience. Iannuzzi had a track record of representing alleged animal abusers.

  Publicly, Coates pooh-poohed the allegations against his client. “Michael loves his dogs,” he told one newspaper. “He’d go overboard to treat them as pets. The ones that needed vet treatment, he was tending to. It was not out of control.”

  Behind the scenes, the lawyers asked for repeated delays in the trial. Each time a specific court date was suggested, one or another defense attorney claimed to have a conflict in his schedule. The earliest date the two sides could agree to was April 11.

  Once the date was set, the defense attorneys pressed for a deal that would allow Wolf to keep as many as sixty of the dogs. Finnegan and Wright refused to entertain the possibility. The idea of sending any of the dogs back to Mike-Mar Kennel struck the prosecutors as unconscionable. The dogs had lived in squalor long enough.

  Publicity about the Wolf case continued to spread. In the first couple of weeks after the dogs’ rescue, newspapers and television stations filed dozens of stories about the plight of the dogs. The SPCA fielded 3,000 calls from animal lovers offering to donate money, purchase dog food, drop off supplies, or give the dogs new homes. Animal lovers from across the country wrote to Finnegan and Wright urging them to win justice on behalf of the victimized dogs. The prosecutors taped the letters to the walls of their office; they were a daily reminder that the outcome of the case would have ripple effects not just in Chester County, but nationwide.

  The American Kennel Club also weighed in. AKC board chairman Ron Menaker cited the raid on Wolf’s kennel as an example of the need for stronger federal oversight. Despite disciplinary action by the AKC, Menaker said, Wolf had continued to operate a large-volume kennel “under the radar.”

  “This is a pattern we see all too often,” Menaker added in a statement. “Breeders stop registering with us in order to avoid inspection after we take disciplinary action against them. Unfortunately, however, many of these people continue breeding and sell dogs, and register them with a for-profit registry that has no inspection requirements to monitor care and conditions standards.”

  His comments drew a stinging rebuke from Margaret “Peggy” Mickelson, a breeder and veteran AKC judge. In a lengthy e-mail she sent to an Internet chat site about Cavaliers—which was swiftly forwarded to other sites—she accused the AKC of willfully ignoring the problems at Mike-Mar Kennel while continuing to accept registration fees paid by Wolf.

  “[Wolf’s] facility has been notorious in the dog world for many, many years, AKC inspection or not,” Mickelson wrote. “The only reason AKC is doing anything publicly now is because the world is aware of the conditions. . . .”

  For years, Mickelson added, “it was known that [Wolf] kept Pekingese in rows of wire crates stacked one on top of the other so that the rows were five wide and four high, with no flooring to prevent feces and other excrement from falling from top to bottom. The Pekes were never out of the crates except to be bred and to whelp . . . and when there got to be too many, he simply put them down [himself], in terrific numbers, and started keeping the younger ones in the same fashion.”

  She ended her e-mail with a flourish. “This whole matter disgusts me from any view, and everyone connected with this fiasco should be hung up by their genitals, if they all have them. And that includes the AKC and Mr. Menaker.”

  • • •

  At 9 a.m. on Tuesday, April 11, the case against Wolf, Trottier, and Hills got under way in the town of Oxford. Presiding was judge Harry Farmer Jr., the same judge who had signed the search warrant authorizing the raid.

  The courtroom was so tiny that the defendants had to sit behind their attorneys, in the front row of the spectators’ gallery. Behind them was Trottier’s mother, Wendy. Ten SPCA staffers, representatives of other animal welfare organizations, and a camera operator for a television station filled the rest of the seats. Onlookers unable to find a seat were told to leave. The judge refused to allow spectators to stand in the rear.

  Anyone who came expecting instant fireworks was disappointed. At the outset, Farmer questioned the need to have a separate attorney for each defendant. “You got two counsel. Why do you need him here?” he asked, referring to Iannuzzi. After the judge finally acquiesced, the defense then moved to suppress the search warrant the SPCA had used to enter Wolf’s property. The breeders’ attorneys also asked Farmer to recuse himself from hearing the motion on the grounds that he’d signed the search warrant authorizing the raid and might need to be called as a witness. This was news to Farmer. Nobody had told him they intended to call him to the stand. “Now, all of a sudden, you are alleging I have a conflict and, you know, I’m a potential witness. Am I or am I not?” the judge said.

  Farmer refused to recuse himself, but the rest of the morning was consumed by the motion to suppress the search warrant. Two days before the raid, Coates argued, Shaw and Siddons had reached an a
greement with Wolf whereby he would have a veterinarian examine and vaccinate his dogs, an understanding Coates said Shaw neglected to disclose to the judge when she requested the search warrant. Coates also argued that Shaw took more animals from Mike-Mar Kennel than she had identified in the warrant.

  That point was true, but it didn’t constitute grounds for dismissing the case. Finnegan called Siddons to the stand. She asked her to describe the powerful odor of ammonia that struck her when she’d first stepped into Wolf’s home two months earlier.

  “The smell was overwhelming,” Siddons testified. Throughout the visit, she said, her eyes watered, she had problems breathing, and she had to retreat three times to compose herself enough to continue.

  Inside and outside of Mike-Mar Kennel, Siddons said, she saw heavily matted dogs and feces. Excrement littered the deck outside and overflowed from the dogs’ pens inside. In one of the rooms, soiled newspaper spilled out of a fifty-five-gallon trash can.

  When she first glimpsed Trottier and Hills, Siddons said, they were “furiously trying to clean.” Asked what she meant by that, she said, “trying to clean before somebody else gets in there. In other words, being very quick about it, because they knew it needed to be cleaned.”

  Coates saw an opening.

  “If you have to clean for 137 dogs . . . if you want to do it twice a day, you have to move pretty quickly, right?” he said. “You don’t clean a pen and the dog waits twenty-four hours or forty-eight hours to urinate or poop. It happens all day long, is that right?”

  “Yes,” Siddons responded.

  “But [the defendants] are not expected to stand there and clean up after every waste, are they?” Coates said.

  He interrupted again after Siddons described seeing four dogs each in pens approximately two and a half feet by three and a half feet in size.

  “So it wasn’t a crowding situation?” Coates asked.

  “No, not as far as size of the dogs was concerned,” the dog warden replied.

  Coates asked if Siddons was present when Shaw contacted the veterinarian, Tom Stevenson, to verify that he’d had an appointment with Wolf the day of the inspection, but hadn’t made it for some reason or another. Siddons said she was aware that Stevenson showed up the next day.

  Later, Coates asked, “Have you ever cleaned pens before?” Finnegan objected, so Coates rephrased the question. “Can you tell me which of these dogs appears to be the object of cruelty?” Under questioning by Iannuzzi, Siddons conceded that at the time she and Shaw left Wolf’s property that afternoon, she had no plans to remove the dogs.

  Siddons stepped down from the witness stand. Other than describing the acrid air inside Wolf’s kennel, she hadn’t done the prosecution any favors.

  Finnegan next called Shaw to the stand. The prosecutor walked the officer through the events of February 8—how, upon exiting the van, she’d seen approximately ten dogs in the front yard of the kennel, a handful of dogs in the gated area of the rear residence, several Cavaliers sitting on the couch inside Wolf’s home, and back rooms filled with cages full of dogs. At the rear of Wolf’s house was a deck covered in feces. It, too, was overrun by Bulldogs and Cavaliers.

  “Describe what you noticed about the dogs,” Finnegan said to her.

  “There were several that were heavily matted,” Shaw replied. “There appeared to be feces, dirt imbedded into the mats. A lot of the dogs had clouded-over eyes. There were a lot of dogs that had a green mucusy-type substance coming from their eye area.”

  Some of the crates lacked water. In crates that had water, the insides of the bowl were ringed with slime. The cages were soiled by waste. The smell was overwhelming, Shaw reiterated.

  After touring the house and the kennel, Shaw issued Wolf a notice of mandatory corrections, she testified. He needed to provide all animals with clean drinking water, a clean and sanitary environment, and veterinary care for their skin and eye infections. He needed to remove the matting and the dirt from all of the dogs, and he needed to reduce the number of dogs on the premises, possibly by surrendering some of them each week to the SPCA. In any case, Wolf needed to provide documentation for the animals’ whereabouts.

  Coates cross-examined her. “Do you know what happens to water containers when there is a lot of iron in the water?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” Shaw replied.

  “If I told you that there was high iron content in the water, that it would make containers turn brown—”

  “Objection,” Finnegan said.

  “—It gets brown,” Coates finished.

  The defense attorney noted that in the report Shaw filed the day of the inspection, she described the matting and mud on the dogs, but failed to mention the presence of any feces. Coates accused her of ignoring her agreement with Wolf and instead seizing the animals and filing charges against him.

  Coates also faulted Shaw for failing to obtain search warrants for two separate properties from the outset. “All they had to do was do it right, but they didn’t,” Coates told the judge. “There’s enough taint there to say that everything has to go—all the pictures, all the photographs, all the dogs, everything . . . because they didn’t give you all the facts.”

  The judge didn’t buy it. The inspectors may have had an understanding with Wolf, but that didn’t preclude them from returning to remove the dogs, Farmer said. He denied the motion to end the trial and recessed court until 1:30 p.m.

  Chapter 9: Proving Cruelty

  Michael wolf’s attorneys had failed to stop the trial. Now, finally, prosecutors could get to the heart of the cruelty charges. Assistant D.A.s Finnegan and Wright felt good about their prospects of winning. They were confident Judge Farmer would find Michael Wolf, Gordon Trottier, and Margaret Hills guilty as charged. The lives of 333 dogs, 2 cats, and 2 macaw parrots rested on the outcome.

  Spectators filed in after lunch, and Judge Farmer reconvened court. Finnegan recalled Siddons to the stand. She testified that she had been a dog warden for the state of Pennsylvania for ten years and during that time had inspected 160 or so licensed kennels twice a year. That amounted to roughly 3,200 inspections, if anyone bothered to do the math.

  Finnegan needed to undo the damage Siddons had inflicted that morning when, under questioning, she said she hadn’t initially planned to remove any dogs after leaving Mike-Mar Kennel the day she and Shaw paid their unannounced visit.

  “Have you ever observed the conditions that you saw on February 8 that these dogs were living in?” Finnegan asked.

  Just once before, Siddons said, in a case involving fewer dogs.

  Think back to the afternoon in question, Finnegan said to her, “What is your opinion as to the conditions that you observed?”

  “Overwhelming, unacceptable,” Siddons responded. “Certainly, by the department’s regulations, it would not be tolerated.”

  “And in leaving the premises on February 8, were you concerned for those dogs?” Finnegan asked.

  “Yes.”

  Mission accomplished. Siddons stepped down.

  Finnegan next called Shaw, her star witness. The prosecutor dimmed the lights of the courtroom and turned on Shaw’s videotape of the kennel. She left the volume on at first. As the camera panned room after room stacked with dogs inside Wolf’s residence and kennel, frenzied yelps blared from the speaker. Finnegan waited a minute or so and then switched off the sound. She wanted the judge to concentrate not on the noise but on the squalor: dogs scrabbling for attention in crates draped in dried feces. She wanted him to focus on the overcrowded rooms and the rusty water bowls sitting in the crates. Even without any sound, the footage was powerful.

  As the tape continued to roll, Finnegan turned back to Shaw.

  “How would you describe that cage there?” she asked as the camera closed in on a small plastic crate.

 
“It’s a carrier.”

  “How many dogs are living in that carrier?”

  Wolf’s lawyers objected. No one had said the dogs were living in the crates.

  Finnegan asked Shaw again to describe the cages. She said they were filthy and appeared to be coated with dried feces. A number of the crates lacked any sort of water container, and the water buckets that were present were covered with slime.

  The videotape kept rolling. Minutes later, the camera panned the interior of a different building. “Officer, can you recall what you’re trying to show us in those photos?” Finnegan said.

  “The filth of the cages,” Shaw repeated.

  “What was the condition of the cages that you’re photographing?”

  “Filthy, soiled newspaper. The animals’ waste. The feces that was on the wires and the grates.”

  Outwardly, Shaw managed to look composed. Inwardly, she was wracked with anxiety, certain she would stumble, say the wrong thing, and cost the prosecution the case. “Who knows what might come out of your mouth?” she silently chided herself. “The way you remember things might be different from the way someone else remembers them.”

  Finnegan next called Ravinda Murarka, the veterinarian with the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which had taken in sixty-three of Wolf’s dogs. The organization had spent nearly $8,000 treating the medical problems of the animals over the last two and a half months, not counting room and board, Murarka said.

  “Almost every dog was emaciated . . . the majority were infested with the fleas,” he testified. “Ten of them . . . they have a very serious skin problem . . . allergic dermatitis. And we had to treat for at least two to three weeks.”