Saving Gracie (4 page)

“Did you know there are more dogs in the back of the kennel?” the patrolman asked Shaw.

“Are you sure?” she said.

Two days earlier, while examining the two front rooms of the kennel, she’d spied a door to the rear. The door was locked, and when Wolf told her there was nothing behind it—that he had shown them all there was to see—she’d believed him. Now, though, the officer was telling her that behind the door was a room with a window, and on the other side of the window were more dogs, dozens of them.

Shaw and Beswick jogged down the steps of Wolf’s residence, across the yard, and up the steps to the kennel. They brushed past Hills, who was inside cleaning. “We’ve got a warrant,” Shaw told her. “You need to get out.” The officer walked through the front room and opened the door on the far side, into the hidden room where Wolf had insisted there were no dogs.

Shaw’s heart pounded. Before her were dozens of crates lined up in rows, full of dogs. On the left were Cavaliers, four to six to a crate. On the right, English Bulldogs, in cages stacked two high. This couldn’t be happening. She had orchestrated the rescue on the assumption that Wolf had 136 dogs, no more. Now it looked as if there could be 200.

A room at the rear of Mike-Mar Kennel revealed dozens more dogs confined to crates, along with an overpowering stench of ammonia. (
Cheryl Shaw
)

At the sight of Shaw, the dogs hopped up on their hind legs, wagged their tails, and erupted into a frantic chorus. Her blood pressure rising, Shaw shut the door and strode back to Wolf’s house.

“Look, I need to know,” she said to him. “Do you have any more dogs on this property?”

“No,” Wolf told her flatly.

This time, she knew better than to believe him. He’d lied to her before, and her instincts told her he was lying now. With a feeling of dread, she stepped back outside and walked in the direction of the third building, Trottier’s house. Beswick fell in line behind her and Hills followed them. “Don’t just stand there staring,” Shaw told herself. “Check out the back.” At the rear of the building was a deck, and beside the deck was a basement door. Next to the door she noticed a small window completely covered, except for a sliver of light along the bottom edge. A poop scooper rested beside the door. “What’s that doing there?” Shaw wondered.

She turned to Hills and said, “You need to show me the basement. Right now.” Wordlessly, Hills unlocked the door. “Watch your step,” she warned as Shaw stepped inside, Beswick and Hills close behind her. They entered a room inhabited by three cats and a Mastiff. “Thank goodness that’s all there is,” Shaw thought. She was ready to turn around and leave the basement when she noticed a doorway blocked off by a baby gate, a sheet tacked up over it to hide the view. Behind the sheet came a muffled yelp.

Crates stacked three high were covered with dried feces, despite Wolf’s claims that his kennel was cleaned daily.

Shaw whipped around to face Hills.

“What was that?”
she demanded.

Hills shook her head. She hadn’t heard anything.

Shaw turned to Beswick. “You hear that?”

“Yeah,” Beswick replied.

The gate was there for a reason—but surely not to fence off more dogs. Shaw hesitated, then stepped forward and drew back the sheet. The room was filled with dogs—butterfly-eared Papillons—packed into crates, running loose on the floor, and clambering on top of a futon. There had to be dozens of them. In the middle of the room stood Trottier, glowering.

Shaw turned to Beswick. “Go get Dennis,” she said.

Beswick hurried past Hills. Shaw turned back to Trottier. “You need to leave,” she told him. Trottier punched the ceiling defiantly, then reached down and swept up a disheveled and sickly looking Papillon. “You’re not taking my f——dogs!” he yelled.

Within seconds, Beswick and McMichael returned with a police officer. Trottier was now standing outside the baby gate. “Give me the dog,” Shaw told him. He refused. The officer reached forward to take the dog out of Trottier’s hands. Trottier threw a punch. A scuffle ensued, spilling from the hallway outside. The next thing anyone knew, Trottier was on the ground with the trooper, Shaw, Beswick, and McDevitt pinning him down. As blows were exchanged, the trooper somehow managed to hold the Papillon away from the line of fire.

A second police officer had arrived. He called for backup. Within minutes, fifteen marked and unmarked state police cars barreled onto the scene, lights flashing and sirens blaring. Officers arrested Trottier, charged him with assault, resisting arrest, and obstructing the administration of law, and took him away.

Shaw had no right to enter his house, Trottier shouted as he was trundled off—the search warrant she’d obtained was for Wolf’s house, not his. With a start, Shaw realized that Trottier could very well be correct. The warrant authorized her to raid 1746 Baltimore Pike; the street address for Trottier’s residence was 1748 Baltimore Pike. This was a major snafu. If the paperwork was not in order, a judge might disregard any evidence gathered at Trottier’s address. By calling Shaw’s attention to her mistake in time to correct it, Trottier had done her a favor.

She used her cell phone to call Finnegan and explain the situation. “What do we do now?” Shaw asked.

“Come back to West Chester, type up another warrant, and send it over to me,”
Finnegan said.

Shaw fought back a surge of panic as she climbed into one of the vans and floored it onto the highway. Here she was in charge of this raid, and she was leaving the scene just as rescuers were beginning to comprehend the enormity of the problem. Wolf had many,
many
more dogs than anyone had suspected.

She made it to West Chester in record time. Hastily, she drew up a new warrant and faxed it to Finnegan. It was 5:15 p.m., past quitting time. Finnegan called in a favor from district judge James Charlie, who agreed to sign the new search warrant. By 6:30 p.m. Shaw was back in Lower Oxford. The sun had long since set and the temperature was dropping. The rescue work had gone slowly during the two and a half hours she was gone. There were three buildings full of dogs to rescue, and staffers were still working in the first.

“What are we going to do with all these dogs?” Beswick asked Shaw as they headed inside Wolf’s residence.

“We’ll take care of it,” Shaw said, but she had no idea how.

Chapter 5: Filth and Fear

Shaw had never been part of an operation this massive. From time to time that evening, she stepped away from her other tasks to carry out a couple of dogs herself. “Okay, punkin, we’ll get you taken care of,” she said to one scared-looking Havanese as she held the dog to her chest. “See, I told you I’d come back. I promised, didn’t I?” But the workers lacked radios to communicate back and forth, so she had to keep making the rounds, issuing one snap decision after another and praying she was making the right calls. There wasn’t enough of her to go around.

Shortly before 7 p.m. she took a moment to phone her husband, Bobby, to let him know she was in for a long night. He could tell she was stressed.

Did Shaw need help? he asked.

“I’m fine,” Shaw told him, but she didn’t sound fine. She sounded exhausted.

He said he was on his way.

The hours ticked by. Shortly after Bobby arrived at around 9 p.m., someone delivered a pizza and left it on the top of a Jeep. “Go eat something,” one of the officers said to Shaw.

For a moment, she took her colleague’s advice, climbed inside the Jeep, and took a couple of bites of pizza. But this was no time to rest; there were too many dogs left to process. She stepped back out of the vehicle and returned to work.

While Shaw oversaw the rescue effort, the task of reaching inside many of the crates, pulling a dog out, and holding him or her before the camera fell to other SPCA staffers. One of them was fellow humane society police officer Beswick. A less seasoned officer might have winced at the prospect of handling unfamiliar and distressed dogs, but 53-year-old Beswick had done police work since she was 18. She’d been exposed to every horrendous situation imaginable, or so she thought. Despite her experience, she wasn’t prepared for the size of Wolf’s kennel or the degree of misery that permeated it
.
As she worked to remove the dogs, mice scuttled up walls and space heaters scattered about the rooms worked overtime. She felt as if she’d stepped inside a furnace.

Humane society police officer Mike Beswick. In all her years at the Chester County SPCA, she had never encountered this many neglected dogs. (
Carol Bradley
)

Cages lined the walls of every room. The rescuers started with a listless red and blue parrot, one of two found on the property. Then came a tan and white Bulldog, followed by a puppy who looked to be a Havanese-Cavalier mix. Next they brought out a female Yorkshire Terrier, a Pomeranian, two Havanese, three Bulldogs, three more Havanese, and then Cavaliers, seven of them, all but one a female. Every one of the dogs looked anxious and scared.

The animals also looked scruffy and ill. The dogs were flea-bitten, covered with lice, and suffering noticeably from scabby skin and runny eyes. Beswick struggled to remain composed as she carried out number 24, a red and white Cavalier puppy whose left eye was so cloudy and swollen it was ready to fall out of its socket. A half hour later she lifted up a tricolor Cavalier whose eye was gone entirely. Number 113, a Löwchen, had such a bad case of mange that raw, open sores covered his torso. Number 215, a Bulldog, sported an enormous hot spot—a raw, oozing open wound—on her left flank. The coats of some of the Havanese were so filthy that it was nearly impossible to distinguish their faces. One Havanese had no hair at all. The dog was covered with mange and shivering.

Beswick’s heart ached for these animals. They lacked any ability to make sense of their deprived lives and had no means of escape. The mere act of extricating them from their crates required delicacy. The dogs fled to the rear of their cages and cowered. With as many as six to a crate, Beswick had to maneuver around a handful of frightened dogs to pull one out.

Green, the SPCA’s office coordinator, processed the dogs while animal control officer Baxter waited at the end of the line. Once a dog was photographed, he placed it in a carrier and walked it out to a van. Baxter was new to his position—he’d been employed by the SPCA less than a year—and the suffering he saw was too painful to ignore. He stared in disbelief as the dogs, covered with fecal matter, struggled to turn around in their crates, their paws splayed and tender from standing on the thin wire bottoms. He’d never seen or smelled anything so sour, and the high thermostat setting only exacerbated the conditions. It was the dead of winter, but the heat was so intense that he quickly shed his wool jacket and turtleneck and long underwear. Before long, he was down to a T-shirt.

Chester County SPCA protective services officer Craig Baxter. He was new to animal-welfare work, and struggled to cope with the squalor that stretched before him at Mike-Mar Kennel. (
Carol Bradley
)

The first van was filled up in a matter of hours, two dogs to a crate. As soon as the vehicle was full, Baxter climbed into the driver’s seat and headed for West Chester, a forty-five-minute trip. The noticeably ill dogs would bypass the SPCA shelter and go directly to an animal hospital.

Inside Wolf’s house, when the noise briefly subsided, Green heard the sound of clinking glass. She searched the room and found, tucked in a corner, a laundry basket covered by a towel. Underneath, two English Bulldog puppies stretched in their sleep alongside a hammer, a box of nails, and two glass bowls. Had someone deliberately tried to hide the newborns? It certainly looked that way.

•  •  •

No one can say for certain what the tricolor Cavalier with the swoosh on her front leg saw or heard, or what she must have thought when the door swung open and light flooded the dim room. The bright light probably stung her cloudy, irritated eyes. And the voices she heard were different from the voices she was accustomed to hearing.

The people left. Then, several hours later, they returned. This time a man knelt and stuck a finger inside the Cavalier’s crate. “Hang in there, little one, we’ll get you out of here soon,” he said. The other dogs watched with apprehension as the man picked up the laundry basket and carried it outside. When he returned, he reached up and unlatched the door to a crate on the top row. That dog, too, was carried outside.

This time the man made his way across the feces-covered floor to the Cavalier’s crate. He unlatched the door, reached in, and wrapped his hands around another Cavalier, a female. “Come on, baby, come on,” the man said. He disappeared with the dog. Minutes later he was back.

The tricolor Cavalier stood, frozen. Four dogs were left in her crate and the other three were huddled together, pressed as far to the rear of the cage as they could get. The little dog stared straight ahead as the man returned once more, lifted her off the urine-soaked newspapers and hugged her close. “Let’s get you out of here,” he said.

He carried the dog into the next room, where a woman sat at a table and a third person held a camera, waiting. The woman jotted down the barest of details about the dog. Breed: CKCS, Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Sex: female. Color: tri.

The Cavalier was the 132nd dog to be rescued from Mike-Mar Kennel. The woman at the table wrote the number 132 on a card and handed it to the man. He held the dog on his left arm, picked up the card, and posed for a picture. The dog was still frightened, but a part of her was also curious. The instant the shutter clicked she glanced up, her melancholy eyes staring straight into the lens.

A frightened Cavalier stared into the camera as Baxter helped tag her as dog number 132. (
Jill Green
)

The dog had to be carried out to the van—she had no concept of a leash and refused to walk on one. An hour later, when the van left for West Chester, she hunkered down in her carrier, the same as the other dogs. For a dog who had never left her kennel, the sensations of movement must have been disorienting and scary.

Baxter had braced himself for a noisy ride, and it
was
noisy at first—the dogs yelped loudly as the journey began. Before long, though, almost all of the dogs experienced motion sickness and the smell of vomit filled the van. After that the barks subsided, and for most of the ride there was no noise at all except for the rumble of the engine. The silence, Baxter decided, was the eeriest sound of all.

As rescuers went about the grim task of documenting his dogs, Wolf remained inside his house, sitting on his couch or at his computer and chatting with anyone who passed by. He appeared frail: Earlier, walking from his residence to the kennel, he’d grasped Green’s arm as they climbed a set of steps. While other workers set up equipment, Wolf was happy to show Green decades-old photos of his prize-winning dogs and the Best in Show trophies that decorated the front room of his kennel. He claimed to have a name and a pedigree for every dog on the property.

To Green’s surprise, Wolf was completely nonthreatening. He seemed calm—stunned, perhaps, by the raid, but composed. Later in the day, when Beswick slipped on a pile of feces in his living room as she was passing through, Wolf asked politely if she wanted him to clean up the mess. “Why?” Beswick responded. “There’s plenty more where this came from.”

Outside, Chuck McDevitt scrolled through the Rolodex he’d brought with him. Before he’d gone to work for the SPCA, McDevitt was a reporter for the
Philadelphia Inquirer.
He knew the heart-tugging rescue of dozens of frightened animals would appeal to the media. He also knew that to care for these dogs indefinitely, the SPCA would need public support—lots of it. His job was to get word out about the raid as quickly as possible. As soon as the rescue effort got under way, he began calling newspapers and TV stations.

A reporter and a photographer from the
Daily Local News
in West Chester were the first to arrive. They pulled up at about the same time as the backup troopers from the Highway Patrol. Five TV stations out of Philadelphia—6ABC, NBC10, WB17, FOX29, and CN8—showed up shortly afterward.

While McDevitt was getting word out about the raid, workers at the SPCA shelter were on the phone with neighboring shelters, asking for help. The SPCA could barely house 136 dogs, much less twice that many. The Delaware County SPCA, the Delaware State SPCA, the Pennsylvania SPCA, animal control in Coatesville, and the Applebrook Inn Pet Resort in West Chester all agreed to pitch in.

Rescuers had expected to find Wolf’s kennel overrun with puppies. To their surprise, most of the dogs were adults, which was worse. These animals had languished for years with untreated afflictions, and over time minor problems had developed into major ones. Some dogs had broken legs or were visibly ill and needed immediate care. Baxter transported them to the West Chester Veterinary Medical Center. McDevitt drove to the clinic himself a Bulldog who had become violently ill after ingesting rat poison. Veterinarians at the clinic accepted thirty or so of the dogs before pleading for relief. They couldn’t take any more.