Saving Gracie

by Bradley, Carol

  Was there a causal relationship between the conditions observed on the videotape and the health conditions of the dogs? Finnegan asked.

  “Yes . . . they are kept in highly unhygienic conditions,” Murarka said. “And what I observed is that that could perpetuate to the skin problem when the dogs were stained with the feces and urine.” The conditions might also cause worms and pneumonia, he added.

  The mood in the courtroom was tense. Under cross-examination, Coates asked the veterinarian how long it would take for a dog to contract fleas. In high temperatures, they could hatch quickly, Murarka said—in as little as four to five days.

  Coates asked Murarka what evidence he had that the dogs he examined weren’t already being treated. They could have been treated for fleas on February 9 and still had fleas on the eleventh, the day they arrived at the Pennsylvania SPCA, the attorney said.

  No, that wasn’t possible, Murarka said. If the dogs had been treated, he would have noticed dead fleas in their coats. “The way the dogs were infested with the fleas, they were crawling all over the place,” the veterinarian said. “If they are treated, the condition of the dog would not have been like that.”

  Coates surmised that perhaps the dogs had acquired fleas on February 10, the same day they were removed. Murarka dismissed that theory, too. “I don’t know how somebody can pour that much quantity of the fleas on the dog,” he said. He added that dogs develop allergic reactions to the fleas’ saliva only after a long infestation.

  The defense was trying to muddy Murarka’s testimony, but the judge was not confused. “It takes the fleas to bite the heck out of the dog until he gets it,” Farmer interjected from the bench.

  Coates moved on. He questioned the cause of a congenital hernia found in one dog. He commented that congenital hernias can develop regardless of how a dog is treated. Murarka agreed, but said that hernias left untreated can cause problems later.

  Coates then asked about a 3-year-old Papillon of Trottier’s who had been taken in by the Pennsylvania SPCA and was described as being dirty and missing hair. “What caused the hair loss?” he asked.

  Murarka responded that a skin infection and allergies to fleas could cause a loss of hair.

  Coates asked about a dog of Wolf’s who died on February 15, four days after the Pennsylvania SPCA took her in. An autopsy showed the dog died of pneumonia, Murarka said. Coates asked if that was an common occurrence when a dog is 10 to 12 years old. “Normally not,” the veterinarian replied. He said the ill dog must have contracted some kind of upper respiratory infection.

  Coates noted that several of Wolf’s dogs were missing teeth. He suggested that older dogs often lose teeth, and this time the vet agreed.

  Seizing an opening, Coates asked, “It is fair to say that with regard to all these dogs in here that went to Philadelphia, there are some of them that were dirty and they needed grooming. Some of them had tartar on their teeth. Some of the older dogs were suffering from congenital whatever or losing their teeth, like we do when we get old. Some of them may have had mange. But mange is a treatable condition, is that right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Murarka responded. “But there are ten dogs that have the skin problem.”

  “When you have that many dogs, is that unusual for skin problems and mange to develop?” Coates asked.

  “Yes.”

  Coates was finished. Prosecutor Wright had just one final question. “How do dogs react to having fleas?” she asked.

  “They scratch. They feel discomfort,” Murarka replied.

  The next witness was Bryan Langlois, the veterinarian at the Humane League of Lancaster County. He described the dry eye condition found in a number of Wolf’s dogs who had been sent to his facility. All but four of the animals had chronic skin conditions that were most likely caused by fleas. A number of the dogs were diagnosed with intestinal parasites, several had diarrhea, and some of the dogs were a little underweight; he would not call them emaciated, Langlois said. Finally, a number of the dogs had very serious and chronic ear infections.

  Asked if he saw anything unusual about the environment the animals had come from, Langlois said, “The feces that is caked on the cage doors is not something that would be cleaned twice a day. Feces do not dry that quickly.”

  Coates pressed him on that point. The discoloration on the cages looked like rust to him, he said.

  “It can appear as rust,” Langlois responded, “but to me, it looked like caked-on feces.”

  The problems he found were all treatable, Coates countered. The dogs were responding to treatment. They were going to get better. “They are not going to die from these things,” he said.

  “There was nothing at the time that I saw them that indicated that they were in imminent risk of death, no,” Langlois agreed.

  Finnegan rose to redirect. She asked Langlois to enumerate the many steps taken to treat the dogs. All of the dogs with lice were shaved down, the vet said. Those infested heavily with mites were dipped with lime sulfur, an insecticide. Their ears were flushed out, they all received dewormers, and they were started on medication.

  One puppy had to be euthanized. “It came in bad shape,” Langlois said. “Cold, hypothermic, in a little bit of shock.” He said the medical issues he diagnosed were directly caused by the unhealthy sanitary conditions found at Mike-Mar Kennel.

  Larry Dieter, the veterinarian for the Chester County SPCA, was the next witness. Dieter had been out of town when the dogs were brought in and didn’t see them until six days after the raid. He found them suffering from a long list of maladies, he said. In his opinion, the dogs had “definitely not” received adequate veterinary care at Wolf’s kennel.

  The veterinarians’ testimony had set exactly the tone Finnegan hoped for. She recalled Shaw to the stand. The prosecutor asked her to describe the conditions Wolf was instructed to remedy by February 10. Shaw ticked off three steps: Wolf was supposed to provide veterinary care for the dogs, clean their kennels, and provide them adequate water.

  “Had that been complied with on February tenth when you reexamined this home?” Finnegan asked.

  “No,” Shaw said.

  Earlier she’d testified that during the initial visit to Mike-Mar Kennel, she phoned Wolf’s veterinarian, Tom Stevenson, and told him he needed to come to the kennel prepared to inoculate 100 dogs. Under cross-examination, Shaw said she had asked Stevenson to vaccinate the dogs because Wolf was unable to produce paperwork showing that any of the animals had been vaccinated. She said she requested documentation from Stevenson but never received it. The veterinarian did not return her phone call until after the raid. When he finally did so, Shaw wasn’t in, so he left a message. She never actually spoke with him, Shaw said, so Stevenson couldn’t confirm how many dogs he saw. Shaw added that she informed Wolf during the initial visit to his kennel that she planned to cite him for having unvaccinated dogs.

  She stepped down, and Finnegan stopped there. It was late afternoon, a good breaking point. The hearing had lasted much longer than anyone anticipated; Shaw alone spent three hours on the stand. The judge adjourned matters for a week, until the following Friday.

  Outside the courthouse, Coates told reporters the case was going about as he expected. “I feel good for Gordon and Michael, but I feel real good for Margaret. I don’t think they have a good case for Margaret,” he said. He reiterated that Wolf loved his dogs and simply had too many of them. The breeder had considered turning the dogs over to rescue leagues, Coates said, but not to the Chester County SPCA.

  “I hope the people at home will wait till all the evidence comes in before they make a decision, which is what the court will do,” the lawyer added.

  A week passed. On April 18, court reconvened in Oxford. Once again, the courtroom was standing room only. The prosecution had four more witnesses to call. The first day of the hearing had given Finne
gan and Wright a better sense of how aggressively the defense team would try to downplay the poor health of Wolf’s dogs. His attorneys would try to make the state prove that every single dog taken from Wolf’s property had been neglected or abused.

  But Wright convinced Finnegan that it wasn’t necessary to parade every dog into the courtroom to prove the prosecution’s case. They could easily show that the environment at Mike-Mar Kennel was so filthy that every dog was at risk. Every single cage was encrusted with feces, the ammonia fumes were pervasive, all the bowls were filthy, and there wasn’t a single dog who didn’t suffer from fleas, dermatitis, and matting. A number of the animals were worse off than that.

  Finnegan called forward SPCA humane society police officer Beswick, who described walking into Wolf’s home the day of the raid. The judge had heard similar testimony, but Beswick was able to paint a fresh image of the misery.

  Opening the door, she said, she was greeted by an odor so pungent, “I felt like a brick had hit my face. . . . It burned my eyes and throat . . . the stench was overwhelming.” The temperatures were so hot she had to escape the building every fifteen minutes in search of fresh air, she added.

  The condition of the cages “was horrendous,” Beswick went on to say. “There were feces, there was dirt, there was vermin in these cages. Dogs were filthy.”

  She told of slipping twice on excrement and how Wolf, witnessing her fall, apologized. She described seeing one Bulldog whose hind legs were splayed on the floor, unable to stand. Later she normalcarried out a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel whose eyes were so infected they appeared ready to rupture. She said Wolf asked her, “Is that dog dead?”

  Many more dogs had paws caked with feces, Beswick testified. The dogs seemed wary and unsocialized. Some were visibly sick. She described seeing mice scurry across the floor, up the door, and down the hallway. By the time she left the site, she felt physically ill. The conditions “broke my heart.”

  At one point during her testimony, Beswick paused, glanced up, and for a split second made eye contact with Wolf. He was seated across the courtroom, behind his attorneys, wearing a black suit, red shirt, and red and white tie. The eyes that stared back at her were vacant. She saw no remorse in them, no concern.

  Beswick turned back to the judge. “All my time I was a law enforcement officer, I have never seen conditions so deplorable, so atrocious,” she said.

  SPCA office coordinator Green followed her on the stand. She, too, described encountering a stench in Wolf’s residence—an ammonia smell “that triggered a gag reflex . . . you could actually feel it burning your lungs. It was very overwhelming.”

  Green conversed with Wolf at length while the rescue effort was under way, she said. She said Wolf tried to impress upon her his concern for the dogs. Hoping to elicit more information from him, she responded sympathetically; anyone in his situation would have trouble keeping up with that many animals, Green told Wolf. Clearly, he had gotten in over his head. She said Wolf described to her his plan to fix up his house and sell the property. She suggested he might be better off bulldozing the house instead.

  “Why was that?” Finnegan asked.

  “Because of the condition of the house being covered in feces,” Green said. “Just filth everywhere . . . a combination of dirt and feces everywhere you looked. . . . I couldn’t possibly fathom how you could get the stench from his residence out.”

  Green had helped process more than 200 of the dogs. Finnegan asked her to step down from the witness stand, walk over to the diagram of Wolf’s property, and mark with an X the two spots where she’d found baskets of puppies. It had occurred to Finnegan that a visual diary, compiled through photos and testimony, might best capture the chronology of the raid. Green pointed out the room in Wolf’s residence where she found half a dozen Cavalier puppies slumbering inside a closed plastic basket, on top of which someone had placed a half-empty bag of dog food. She identified the adjacent room where she found two English Bulldog puppies in another wicker basket covered with linens.

  Under cross-examination, Wolf’s defense attorneys questioned the fact that, although she had no training or expertise, Green had been given the responsibility of deciding the condition of each animal. She only noted obvious problems, she said, and she had assistance with that task. It didn’t take a veterinary license to see pus seeping out of a dog’s eye or that an animal had a bleeding lip, Green said. The defense also noted that she never described any dog as emaciated.

  Suzette Nicolini, a volunteer with the Chester County SPCA, was next on the stand. She testified about seeing a white board in Trottier’s room that said, “Lightening’s Papillons.” Written on the board was an indecipherable list of names and dates—Trottier’s attempt, apparently, at keeping track of which dogs had been bred to which.

  Jennifer Danby, kennel manager at the Applebrook Inn pet resorts and a former SPCA employee, also testified briefly about her role in the rescue. Finnegan saved for last Kimberly Williams, an animal control officer for the Delaware SPCA, who arrived late the night of the rescue to help process the remaining dogs. She dealt mostly with the Papillons—sixty to seventy of them chockablock in an unventilated basement room measuring roughly twelve by fifteen feet.

  “A lot of them had missing fur, skin conditions of some kind, gooky eyes, runny noses, I’ll say birth defects: malformations of how their feet should be and things like that,” Williams testified. She said she saw dogs running loose and stepping in fresh feces, mashing it on top of old, matted excrement. The temperature in Trottier’s basement was “hot and sticky and humid and nasty.”

  Finnegan was elated with Williams’s performance on the stand. Her vivid descriptions left no doubt that Wolf was abusing his animals. She was the perfect witness to wrap up the prosecution’s case.

  Now it was the defense attorneys’ turn. But Coates, Alice, and Iannuzzi called no witnesses. Not Wolf, Trottier, or Hills. Not even Stevenson, the veterinarian.

  In her closing arguments, Finnegan emphasized the neglect that had been the hallmark of Wolf’s operation. By law, she said, Wolf, Trottier, and Hills were required to maintain the health and well-being of their dogs. Clearly, they had not done so. Unable to speak for themselves, the dogs had been forced into confinement, “and not only imprisonment but imprisonment in filth,” at considerable risk to their health.

  She asked that Wolf, Trottier, and Hills be sentenced to a day in jail apiece for each of the 337 animals in their care. She asked the judge to fine the defendants, order them to pay restitution of $256,000, and require them to forfeit the animals to the SPCA so that they could be adopted out to new homes.

  “We need to send a message of incarceration, even if only one day for one dog, or even one ninety-day sentence,” Finnegan said.

  The defense argued that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had failed to identify which dogs were unlicensed or unvaccinated and therefore were unable to prove every element of every charge. The allegations of poor hygiene weren’t shown to be intentional, Wolf’s attorneys said. They said the animals’ ill health could be attributed to old age or other reasons.

  “They cleaned the pens every day, at least once a day,” Coates said of his clients. “When you have that many dogs running around there’s going to be a mess, and you can’t clean it twenty-four hours a day.”

  Attorney Alice described Wolf as “a knowledgeable individual about dogs. It was not his desire to be neglectful or to cause harm.” Wolf had so many dogs because he couldn’t bear to part with them, his attorneys said. He doted on them so much that he fed them hamburger and cottage cheese.

  The attorney for Hills said that none of the dogs belonged to her and asked that charges against her be dropped entirely.

  Wright listened to the defense team’s rationale with a rising sense of incredulity. These dogs had subsisted in filth. They had been mangy and sick. Did that not constitu
te cruelty and neglect in the eyes of the defense? She found it astonishing that anyone would try to argue it did not.

  The hearing was over. Farmer announced that he would issue his ruling the following Friday, April, 28, and adjourned the court.

  Earlier, during a break, Wolf had commented to a reporter that it was natural for his buildings to smell bad. He blamed the SPCA officers for some of the disarray. “They trashed my kennel,” he said. But as he exited the courthouse this time, Wolf avoided reporters, said nothing, and left.

  Chapter 10: The Breeder Appeals

  The next week crawled by. Finnegan and Wright still felt positive they had mounted a persuasive case and would carry the day in court. The question in their minds was whether Wolf and his cohorts would drag matters out by filing an appeal. Finnegan was all but certain they would.

  The morning of April 28, Farmer wasted no time delivering his verdict. He found Wolf, Trottier, and Hills guilty on all counts of animal cruelty against 333 dogs, 2 birds, and 2 cats. He ordered Wolf to forfeit the animals to the Chester County SPCA. And he held Wolf liable for restitution and court costs—the sum of which now totaled $358,357. Trottier was ordered to pay fines and restitution to the SPCA of $85,438. Hills was found liable for $83,499 in fines and ordered to help Wolf pay $240,000 in restitution to the shelter.

  Farmer forbade Trottier from owning animals for sixteen years. Hills was barred for sixty-six years, and Wolf was banned for life from owning animals, the judge said.

  Farmer stopped short of putting the defendants behind bars; that would have been unrealistic, he said later. Even so, he had handed down the toughest sentence in the history of puppy mills, and SPCA officials were ready to celebrate. “We would have liked to see jail time, but we’re very happy with what the judge has decided,” McDevitt said afterward.