The Brutal Slaying and Mutilation of Bebe Has Reaffirmed Edmonton's Longstanding Claim to the Title of Being Canada's Most Violent, Sadistic, and Murderous City When It Comes to Cats

Bebe Was Just Eight Years Old

"There was no predator. By the way the cat looked, there was no ripped skin. Everything was nice and smooth."
-- Bebe's owner Don

Don and his wife used to own six cats but an eight-year-old, jet-black female named Bebe was his favorite. One of the major reasons for that was her endearing personality.

"Bebe was a shy cat, liked to be petted," he related to Global News of Vancouver on July 15th of last year. (See "Edmonton Man Distraught after Cat Attacked: 'Watch Out for Each Other's Animals'.") "It (sic) had a really raspy voice when it (sic) wanted to be petted. She was almost like a child to us."

All went well for her and Don, who has chosen not to divulge his surname, until July 6th of last year when she mysteriously disappeared from the home that they shared in the Montrose section of northeast Edmonton. Unlike most disappearances of this nature, Bebe was soon located the following day but by that time it was much too late for her.

"My wife phoned me. Some children had found the cat in a field here," he told Global News. "Somebody had taken a knife and skinned it (sic)."

Once he had gotten over his initial shock, Don telephoned the Edmonton Police but that proved to have been not only a total waste of time and effort but also a case of rubbing salt into his already gaping emotional wounds. That is because Cheryl Sheppard of the department cavalierly dismissed his assertion that Bebe had been mutilated by an individual and instead ludicrously postulated that she had been killed by another animal.

"There was no predator. By the way the cat looked, there was no ripped skin. Everything was nice and smooth," he countered to Global News. "If a dog had ripped the cat apart, there would be gouge marks around the cat. There was nothing -- there was just nice, smooth skin."

A necropsy more than likely would have been able to determine either who or what had killed Bebe but Don elected, for unspecified reasons, not to have one performed. Given the intransigence of the Edmonton Police, the matter died there and Don and his wife were left to lick their emotional wounds and to mourn Bebe in private.

Earlier on February 14, 2014, an even more dastardly deed was committed against an elderly brown cat named Pudge. On that occasion, nineteen-year-old Zachary McKinnon stole him from the residence of his nineteen-year-old owner, Derek North, by stuffing him into his backpack and then nonchalantly waltzing out the door.

Once he had Pudge at his mercy, McKinnon took him to the remote Mill Creek Ravine between Kass Road and Thirty-Fifth Avenue in northwest Edmonton where he was joined by eighteen-year-old Wendell Mack Mah and an unidentified fourteen-year-old male. They then methodically proceeded to stab him to death with a pair of scissors.

The Edmonton Police Insist That an Animal Did This to Bebe

Afterwards they dismembered him with a knife and cooked his remains over an open fire. It is unclear from press reports if they actually ever got around to consuming any of his flesh owing to the fact that their repasting was interrupted by an unidentified individual who telephoned the fire department after seeing the smoke rising from their campfire.

As it is usually the case in such instances, the Edmonton Police accompanied the fire brigade and, unlike with Bebe, they were unable to purposefully turn blind eyes to the evidence in plain view underneath their long, dirty noses. Consequently, they were forced into arresting the trio.

McKinnon initially claimed that Pudge was a coyote that he had killed. When that ridiculous bit of malarkey was dismissed, he changed his story and claimed that he had killed him in order to put him out of its misery.

He perhaps came the closest to the truth when he later said that he had acted out of boredom. For whatever it is worth, it additionally has theorized in the press that he killed Pudge in order to get back at North for allegedly stealing his iPod®.

When his case finally came to trial in early October of 2014, Provincial Judge Donna Groves gave him a good tongue-lashing. "The allegations are gruesome. The cat was killed, its neck was broken and its body was dismembered," the Edmonton Sun reported her as lecturing him in its October 8th edition. (See "Edmonton Cat Killer Has History of Killing Animals and Setting Fires.") "This was a brutal and senseless killing of an innocent and defenseless animal."

That was all, however, that McKinnon received from her in that after having given her tongue a good flapping she turned around and let him off with a measly ten months in jail. Moreover, if she thought that her lecturing of him accomplished anything other than providing him with a few moments of levity she is off her rocker.

Her asinine ruling was made all the more absurd given that he is not only a well-known serial abuser of small animals but a firebug to boot. For example, he makes a habit of killing squirrels and gophers by stepping on their necks.

He additionally is an admitted Wiccan with known anti-social tendencies. It is, however, the naked abuse of cats that thrills devil worshipers like him the most. (See Cat Defender post of September 27, 2010 entitled "Caged, Shot Thirty Times with an Air Gun, and Then Tossed into a Bay to Drown, Lovey Is Rescued in the Middle of the Night by a Good Samaritan.")

Furthermore, a psychologist who evaluated him even went so far as to inform Groves that he was a high-risk to commit additional crimes as well as a moderate risk to harm animals in the future. None of that proved to be sufficient, however, to dissuade her from turning loose this monster in order to continue to prey upon additional cats.

Zachary McKinnon

"It was like losing a brother," North, who got Pudge from a farmer as a boy of three, related to global News on October 7, 2014. (See "Edmonton Teen Who Mutilated Cat Sentenced to Ten Months in Jail.") "It's like I'm missing half of myself without him."

If North and his parents can be blamed for anything it was in allowing McKinnon to reside with them for four months. Bringing strangers into one's home is always a risky proposition to begin with but that is especially the case whenever there are cats involved. (See Cat Defender post of February 22, 2017 entitled "The Months of Unrelenting Abuse Meted Out to Elfie by a Roommate Graphically Demonstrate the Advantages as Well as the Limitations of Using Surveillance Cameras in Order to Protect Cats" plus the Northwest Florida Daily News of Fort Walton Beach, articles dated June 7, 2013 and July 3, 2013 and entitled, respectively, "Roommate Gives Cat Away; Owner Searching" and "Cat Given Away by Roommate Found: 'As Soon as He Meowed, I Knew It Was Him'.")

When Mah was finally forced to face the music in late July of 2016 he fared even better than McKinnon in that Provincial Court Judge Elizabeth Johnson gave him only six months in the can. Like her fellow lackey on the bench, Groves, she ladled on the self-righteous moral indignation but that is about all.

"The circumstances are horrific," she superfluously declared according to the July 25, 2016 edition of the Edmonton Journal. (See "Edmonton Man Gets Six Month Jail Sentence for Killing and Cooking Cat in River Valley.")

If North was disappointed by the polite tap on the wrists meted out to McKinnon by Groves, he was even more stunned by Johnson's decision to let off Mah so easily. "It actually breaks my heart," he told the Edmonton Journal.

It is not known what became of McKinnon and Mah's juvenile accomplice but it is a sure bet that he never spent so much as a minute behind bars. He might have been forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation and perhaps some counseling but that most likely was the extent of his punishment.

Far from being an isolated case, the refusal of courts in Edmonton to punish Pudge's kidnappers, torturers, and killers is merely par for the course. For instance, humane groups and the police seldom even bother to investigate cases of cruelty to cats.

Even on those rare occasions when arrests are made and prosecutors lay charges knuckleheaded judges, such as Groves and Johnson, invariably set them free. It accordingly does not take any genius to understand why that atrocities committed against the species not only do not show any sign of abating but rather continue to escalate at an epidemic rate.

Wendell Mack Mah

If the law enforcement community dealt with homicides in such a complacent fashion nobody's life and property would be worth so much as a plug nickel. The only logical conclusion to be drawn from such an abhorrent and ingrained attitude is that its members fully approve of the abuse and killing of cats.

The law enforcement community's blasé attitude toward the killing of cats was, perhaps, nowhere more poignantly on display than in its reaction to the killing and mutilation of a cat that was discovered in July of 2017 on a trail that runs alongside Highway Twenty-One near the intersection of Ninety-Fourth Street in Fort Saskatchewan, thirty-eight kilometers northeast of Edmonton.

"This type of an incident is very disturbing to the community members of Fort Saskatchewan and to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)," Corporal Michael Robitaille told Global News on July 27, 2017. (See "Mutilated Cat Found Dead on Walking Trail Northeast of Edmonton.") "We are asking for the person or persons responsible to come forward and deal with this situation."

That is not about to happen in a million years and he is fully cognizant of that petit fait. On the contrary, it is precisely his job to get off his fat ass and to apprehend the perpetrator.

On August 22, 2015, a mutilated cat was found in a field near the Elmer S. Gish Elementary School in St. Albert, fifteen kilometers northwest of Edmonton. Two days later on August 24th another mutilated cat was found in a park near Salisbury Avenue. The St. Albert RCMP supposedly looked into both killings but, as best it could be determined, no arrests ever were made in either case.

Shortly before that between August 13th and August 15th another cat was slashed from its stomach to its spine near One-Hundred-Twenty-Third Avenue and Eighty-Second Street in Edmonton. Miraculously, it somehow survived thanks to prompt veterinary intervention.

The Edmonton Police supposedly looked into the matter but, as far as it has been reported, no arrest ever was made in the case. All totaled, during the first eight months of 2015, the force responded to forty-three complaints of animal abuse.

"We are shocked and dismayed to learn of these recent severe animal cruelty cases in our region," Miranda Jordan "Smitty" Smith, chief executive officer of the Edmonton Humane Society (EHS), told the Edmonton Journal on September 1, 2015. (See "Edmonton Humane Society Concerned about Mutilated Cat Claims.") "How we treat animals is a reflection of our culture, community, and humanity. It is evident to us that we must continue the work that we do in delivering humane education focused on building kindness, compassion, and empathy toward all living things."

Au contraire, the absolute last thing on earth that scumbags like McKinnon, Mah, and their juvenile accomplice need is compassion; rather, they should be lined up against a wall and shot. Plus, it was not long before Smitty's highfalutin, hypocritical  rhetoric came back to haunt her and the organization that she runs. (See Cat Defender post of August 8, 2018 entitled "Under Fire for Allowing Three Cats to Languish in an Unheated Vehicle for Twenty-Three Days Without Food and Water, Staffers at the Edmonton Humane Society Are Now Attempting To Save Their Own Miserable Hides with a Trumped-Up Outside Inquiry.")

Earlier on May 31, 2010, a beautiful longhaired brown and white cat named Remington was cut in half at 37a Avenue and One-Hundred-Seventeenth Street in the Greenfield section of southwest Edmonton. His owner, Louise Gunn, made the grisly discovery on a neighbor's lawn.

"It didn't take long to see the birds out there on the neighbor's lawn, eating something so I went down and it was my cat, but my cat had been killed and cut in half," she informed the CBC on June 1, 2010. (See "Mutilated Cat Remains Found in Southwest Edmonton.") "So only the bottom half was there."

Derek North Outside of Court Holding a Photograph of Pudge

It never was determined what Remington's killer did with his head and in that respect his murder bears an eerie resemblance to the killing of Jordana Rebmann's cat, Runa, on November 17th of last year in the city of Oberrohrdorf, thirty kilometers northwest of Zurich, in that her head likewise never has been found. (See Cat Defender posts of December 8, 2017 and February 28, 2018 entitled, respectively, "The Abduction, Brutal Slaying, and Diabolical Mutilation of Runa Leaves Her Owner Devastated and Strikes Fear into the Hearts of All Cat Lovers in a Small Town in Switzerland" and "The Hunt for Runa's Sadistic Killer Takes an Unexpected and Bizarre Turn But, Owing to the Polizei's Refusal to Take this Case Seriously, an Arrest Remains a Long Shot.")

A necropsy performed by Gunn's veterinarian confirmed that a human, as opposed to either a coyote or some other animal, had been responsible for his death. Even so that confirmation proved to be insufficient in order to interest either the police or the EHS into seriously investigating the matter.

That was in spite of the fact that another cat belonging to one of Gunn's neighbors had been beheaded earlier during the spring of 2009. Predictably, the intransigence of the authorities led to yet still another unidentified cat being cut in half at nearby Thirty-Ninth Avenue and One-Hundred-Seventeenth Street a few weeks later in mid-July of 2010.

All totaled, from the date of Remington's murder through late August of 2010 at least eight cats were killed and dismembered in Greenfield alone. (See the CBC, August 27, 2010, "Cat Killings Prompt Warning.")

During the first half of 2007, seventeen cats were killed in Edmonton. A joint task force made up by the Edmonton Police, the city's Parks Department, Alberta Fish and Wildlife, the Alberta SPCA, and the St. Albert RCMP failed, as far as it is known, to make a single arrest.

Bebe, Pudge, and Remington are but three of, doubtlessly, hundreds of cats that have been brutally murdered and dismembered in and around Edmonton over the course of the past decade or so. In spite of that horrific death toll, the interminable suffering of cats, and the heartbreak visited upon their aggrieved owners, the law enforcement community and humane groups, whose job it is to enforce the anti-cruelty statutes, cannot be stirred even with a stick into taking action.

Both local and provincial politicians are likewise not even worth shooting. All the while callous and uncaring Edmontonians, who most assuredly know better, continue to not only dutifully pay their taxes but to return to office year after year the same no-account, rotten public officials and bureaucrats.

For its part, the EHS claims that it is killing fewer cats these days but the statistics that it fobs off on the gullible are meaningless in light of how it and Animal Care and Control not only shuttle cats between each other's death camps but also outsource them to multiple hellholes outside of Edmonton. (See the Toronto Star, July 25, 2018, "Edmonton Humane Society Sees Cat Euthanization Numbers Dip by More Than Fifty Per Cent.")

To sum up the entire sorry business in a nutshell, the operators of shelters employ so many dodges and have so little regard for the unvarnished truth that absolutely nothing that any of them maintain has so much as a shred of credibility. The only way to get at the truth would be to require independent ombudsmen to be not only on duty inside these hateful facilities but also to accompany Animal Control officers in the field. (See Cat Defender posts of July 29, 2010 and and August 31, 2006 entitled, respectively, "The Benicia Vallejo Humane Society Is Outsourcing the Mass Killing of Kittens and Cats All the While Masquerading as a No-Kill Shelter" and "An Animal Control Officer Goes on a Drunken Binge and Leaves Four Cats and a Dog to Die of Thirst, Hunger, and Heat at a Massachusetts Shelter.")

Beautiful Remington Was Sliced in Half but His Head Never Was Found

Animal Care and Control likewise claims that it has cleaned up its act and, not surprisingly, it has the CBC in its corner beating a drum for it. "A facility that gives its guests plenty of treats, has heated floors and plays spa music sounds like a vacation fit for a human," that thoroughly dishonest and unprincipled news organization caroled on June 26, 2018. (See "Edmonton's Animal Care and Control Center Not 'the Pound of Yesteryear's'.") "But it's actually Edmonton's lost animals at the city's Animal Care and Control Center that are treated to such luxuries."

Well, Scheiß in den Hut! Few individuals ever would be caught so much as thinking such Unsinn in private, let alone broadcasting it to the world.

No matter how that the Scheißkopfe at the CBC try to spin it, at the end of the day being in jail is still being in jail and a death house is still a death house. In that regard it is just too bad that there is not some way that the tables could be turned on staffers at the network whereby it would be they instead of cats that wound up in cages at the pound in Edmonton.

It would be very interesting to learn if they still felt the same way about the facility's luxurious living conditions after they had spent a few days caged. It would even be worth a million bucks or more just to behold the looks on their ugly maps once staffers approached their cages with syringes loaded with sodium pentobarbital.

Perhaps in that last split-second before death enveloped them they would belatedly wise up to what the ancient Greek poet Bion of Smyrna understood only too well all those millenniums ago. "Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest," he pointed out.

The CBC's disgraceful scraping and bowing for Animal Care and Control in Edmonton is merely one of countless examples of the reams of lies and bullshit that the media pass off as the gospel truth on a daily basis. (See Cat Defender post of July 9, 2018 entitled "The Slimy, Underhanded, and Utterly Despicable New York Times Fabricates Another One-Sided, Scurrilous Screed Against Cats and This Time Around the Target of Its Libels Is a TNR Colony at the Googleplex in Mountain View.")

In conclusion, it is all but impossible to find anything positive to say about either the public officials or the private citizens of Edmonton. The abject failure of both parties to better protect the lives of all cats and to put an end once and for all time to these wholesale killings and mutilations is not only unpardonable but borders upon a criminal offense itself.

Edmonton's failure in this regard cannot be chalked up to either a lack of money or expertise in that the city has plenty of both. Rather, the city's failure is preeminently a moral one.

Although it likes to market itself as the "oil capital of Canada," soon the entire world is going to know only too well that it also is the "cat killing capital of Canada." Being about as patently cruel and morally bankrupt as a people can be without first forfeiting their designation as Homo sapiens, Edmontonians may even revel in their newfound notoriety. They certainly do not have anything to fear from the ever-indulgent Edmonton Police, the RCMP, the EHS, the Alberta SPCA, and the courts, no matter how heinous their crimes.

Photos: Don (Bebe), gossip.thedirty.com (McKinnon and Mah), the Edmonton Journal (North), and Louise Gunn (Remington).