A North Sioux City Police Officer Who Stole and Shot Cats Is Shown Nothing but Love by a Morally Depraved Good Old Girl Jurist Who Is Not Even Fit to Clean Toilets

Derek McIntosh Is Now Even More Full of Himself Than Before

The prosecution is "making a mountain out of a molehill" and it is "unthinkable" for McIntosh to go to jail. "He was ordered to take that cat out to the country and get rid of it."
-- defense attorney Richard Scott Rhinehart

Contrary to popular opinion, death and taxes are far from being the only sure things in this wicked old world. For instance, every time that a cop steals and kills a cat it is a foregone conclusion that his handsomely paid protectors within America's thoroughly corrupt legal and political establishment are going to close ranks behind him and pull out all the stops so as to guarantee that he gets away scot-free with his heinous crime.

To that ever growing list of publicly-licensed cat killers the name of Derek McIntosh of the North Sioux City Police Department (NSCPD) must now be added. No one in and around that small South Dakotan town has been willing to speculate as to either exactly how long that he has been at it or how many cats that he has killed with his trusty service revolver, but the strong suspicion is that his victims number in the dozens if not indeed the hundreds.

It had been clear sailing for him until May 5th of last year when an unidentified black and white cat belonging to John Cleary and Morgan Bernard mysteriously vanished from their residence. Press reports are unclear but the cat apparently was trapped by either McIntosh or the couple's next-door neighbor, forty-year-old Matt R. Vanderpool of 2 Alcoma Drive.

Although McIntosh thereafter lied his ugly, fat face off in an amateurish attempt to save his rotten hide, the truth about what transpired afterwards eventually emerged. As was his modus operandi with all the other cats that he got his hands on, he took their cat to McCook Cemetery where he put a bullet in its tiny head and left its remains above ground to be consumed by a flock of turkey buzzards.

This time around, however, he slipped up by informing Cleary that the NSCPD sometimes took cats to McCook and released them which, by the way, is in violation of a city ordinance that mandates that those with tags be either returned to their owners or delivered up to the Siouxland Humane Society (SHS) in Sioux City across the border in neighboring Iowa. Still living in the Dark Ages, the diabolical monsters who call the shots in North Sioux City allow for homeless cats to be shot on sight.

It is not believed that Cleary and Bernard's cat was tagged but it could have been microchipped. Even so, that latter expedient would not have saved it given that the NSCPD is so thirsty for feline blood that it does not even bother to check for implanted microchips.

On May 8th, Cleary ventured to McCook where he made a simply horrifying discovery. There was "a pile of two or three cats and it was hard to tell because of the turkey vultures," he afterwards told KMEG-TV of Sioux City on May 14th. (See "Investigation Underway Following Reports of Dead Cats in North Sioux City.") "My cat was on top with a whole hole from a gunshot wound I imagined."

On May 9th, officers Stephanie and Andrew Ryan, who had known of McIntosh's criminal conduct for some time, informed Captain Dustin Sharkey of his activities. Later that same day he and Chief of Police Richard Headid went to McCook where they did not have any difficulty in locating the corpses of two dead cats which they subsequently bagged as evidence and took back to headquarters with them.

At 3 p.m. on that same afternoon McIntosh was summoned to a meeting with Headid, Mayor Randy Fredericksen, and city administrator Ted Cherry. At first he denied having killed Cleary and Bernard's cat but when pressed on the matter he finally fessed up and Cherry, to his credit, immediately fired him on the spot.

On May 15th, McIntosh was charged with killing Cleary and Bernard's cat and falsifying police records by Aaron J. Bates, deputy State's Attorney for Union County. (See Cat Defender post of June 14, 2019 entitled "A South Dakota Police Officer Is Unmasked, Fired, and Arrested for Shooting Cats but It Is Highly Unlikely That Either He Will Be Punished or That This Will Be the Last of These Illegal Executions.")

When his case finally came to trial on October 18th in the First Judicial Circuit Court of South Dakota in Elk Point, twenty-five kilometers northwest of North Sioux City, a jury took slightly over three hours in order to convict him of one count of killing Cleary and Bernard's cat, a class one misdemeanor in South Dakota, and one count of misconduct by a municipal officer, a class two misdemeanor. He was, however, acquitted on two charges of filing false police reports.

Earlier in the proceedings, presiding judge Kasey Sorensen had dismissed one count of falsifying public documents. (See the Sioux City Journal, October 21, 2019, "Ex-North Sioux (City) Officer Found Guilty of Shooting Cat.")

Judgment day for McIntosh came on November 1st but before Sorensen had time to pass sentencing his attorney, Richard Scott Rhinehart of Sioux City, moved to have his conviction set aside and a new trial scheduled because, in his view, the jury had been coerced into finding his client guilty. To put the matter succinctly, having failed to convince the panelists of his client's innocence, he reversed course and charged that Sorensen had attempted to starve them to death.

On that point the particulars are not in dispute. Voir dire began at 9 a.m. and then following a mid-day lunch break, testimony continued before wrapping up at 6 p.m. Rather than returning on a Saturday in order to deliberate McIntosh's fate, the jurors instead decided upon soldiering on and at 9:15 p.m. they returned their guilty verdict.

Noting that they had been served pizza for lunch and that at the end of their deliberations there were still slices left over, Sorensen wisely rejected Rhinehart's nonsensical motion. (See the Leader Courier of Elk Point, November 7, 2019, "McIntosh to Spend Thirty Days in Jail: Attorney Will Appeal.")

That momentary setback should not have caused either McIntosh or Rhinehart much in the way of angst because, as things eventually turned out, it was the only one that they were destined to receive from the ever-obliging Sorensen. She started out on the right foot, however, by giving McIntosh a good old-fashioned tongue-lashing.

"Simply because you were on duty does not absolve you of criminal liability," she thundered like Zeus from the bench according to the November 1st edition of the Sioux City Journal. (See "Ex-North Sioux (City) Officer Sentenced to Thirty Days in Jail for Killing Cat.")

Her highfalutin rhetoric was only for the consumption of fools and the naïve, however, and as soon as she had gotten that off of her malignant chest she turned around and proceeded to do just the opposite. Although under the law she could have given him a year in jail and fined him US$2,000 for stealing and killing Cleary and Bernard's cat, she instead gave him an insignificant month in the slammer and fined him a minuscule US$750. Not that it makes any real difference other than to hoodwink the public into falsely believing that the ends of justice had been served in some obscure fashion, she tacked on a thirty-day suspended sentence for his having engaged in official misconduct and placed him on probation for a year.

The only matters that she overlooked were to award him a medal, to order that a parade be held in his honor, and to commission a statue of him to be built in downtown North Sioux City. Most likely those omissions were simply oversights on her part and that she soon will get around to rectifying them.

Despite her willingness to bend over backwards in order to save the skin and career of a serial cat thief and murderer, Rhinehart returned the favor by giving her the spit in the eye that she so richly deserved, albeit for an entirely different set of reasons. The prosecution is "making a mountain out of a molehill" and it is "unthinkable" for McIntosh to go to jail, he bellowed to the Sioux City Journal.

Whereas it seems perfectly clear that he does not give so much as a hoot for the sanctity of all feline life, it would be interesting to know if he would apply that same brand of language to the Iowa Supreme Court's suspension of his license to practice law for sixty days back in 2013. (See Iowa Supreme Court Attorney Disciplinary Board v Richard Scott Rhinehart, decided February 15, 2013.)

In particular, the board found him guilty of, inter alia, perpetrating a forensic fraud upon a family court judge, engaging in fraud, deceit, dishonesty, and misrepresentation, engaging in conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice, charging and collecting a clearly unreasonable fee, failure to maintain disputed fees in a trust account as required by law, and during his divorce he intentionally concealed from his wife and the court a number of contingent-fee cases that he was pursuing.

"As a consequence of his misconduct, the Patron Saint of Attorney Misfits sitting on the Iowa Supreme Court Attorney Disciplinary Board punished him with a complimentary sixty-day suspension of his law license," is how that the watchdog group, The Committee to Expose Dishonest and Incompetent Judges, Attorneys and Public Officials, sarcastically summed up the corrupt practice of law in Iowa. (See www.noethics.net, an undated article entitled "Attorney Richard Rhinehart of Sioux City; Ethical Leprechaun.")

It thus would seem fair to conclude that McIntosh's retention of Rhinehart to represent him is a classic example of birds of a feather flocking together. They do, undeniably, make quite a pair.

Interspersed with his load of malarkey Rhinehart did, however, manage to come up with one thought-provoking argument. "He was ordered to take that cat out to the country and get rid of it," he swore to the Sioux City Journal in the November 1st article cited supra.

Whether or not McIntosh was specifically ordered by his superior officers at the NSCPD to shoot cats there can be little doubt that practically every member of North Sioux City's power elite knew what he was doing and that includes not only Stephanie and Andrew Ryan, who have admitted as much, but Headid, Sharkey, Cherry, and Fredericksen. Moreover as the area's receiving shelter, the SHS undoubtably knew that the NSCPD was killing cats the very moment that it stopped sending over any new arrivals. Staffers probably were even crying in their beer over the loss of that source of revenue.

Besides, there are very few secrets in small towns like North Sioux City and that goes double for police departments and courtrooms everywhere around the world. C'est-à-dire, practically everybody knows the intimate details of everyone's life including the scams that they have going, how much they drink, who that they are shacking up with, and how well or poorly their bladders are functioning on any given day.

Those individuals who reside in small towns are not necessarily morally superior to their counterparts in the big cities. It is only the distance afforded them by privilege, money, and class augmented by an outrageous hypocrisy and the ability to behave in a Janus-faced manner that provide them with the facade of being better people. In short, shit stinks everywhere but in a small town it smells to high heaven.

It therefore ultimately does not make much difference whether or not McIntosh was ordered to steal and kill cats. The mere fact that the NSCPD and, most likely, Fredericksen and Cherry as well knew what he was up to and did not fire him a long time ago makes them complicit in his crimes. The behavior of the NSCPD from top to bottom also proves conclusively once again that there is not any such thing as an honest and law-abiding cop.

Left to their own devices it is remotely conceivable that there could be a few honest and halfway decent cops but once they begin to look the other way and to not only cover up the crimes of their fellow officers but to perjure themselves in court as well they are no longer fit to wear badges and to carry guns. Upon assuming office they take an oath to uphold the law and accordingly their allegiance must be only to it and not to either the rotten apples in their departments or the politicians who sign their paychecks.

Richard Scott Rhinehart Once Had His License Suspended 

That petit fait never has been able to penetrate their thick craniums and as a result their polar star always has been anything and everything but the law. That in turn places all American cops in the same category as those that belong to Central American death squads.

Blood, sweat, and tears, three-ring circuses, and all sorts of other things are said to come in threes and that sometimes is also how that the law works as well. In this particular case, McIntosh's gross official misconduct and Rhinehart's attempt to absolve him of all guilt have been augmented by Sorensen's unconscionable hijacking of justice.

Anyone even remotely familiar with the litany of crimes that are perpetrated every day of the week against cats knows only too well that arrests of their abusers are about as rare as hens' teeth. Secondly, it is ever rarer for prosecutors to take such cases seriously even when arrests have been made and the incriminating evidence has been delivered to them upon silver platters.

Thirdly, even when cases actually go to trial juries seldom convict. That is especially the case when the defendants are cops. That in turn makes the verdict handed down by the members of the jury in Elk Point rather extraordinary and they are to be commended for their forthrightness and dedication to seeing to it that justice prevailed.

Therefore, for an old political hack like Sorensen to turn around and nullify their good work by setting McIntosh free is not only despicable but totally unpardonable to boot. If there were any justice in this world, she would be promptly kicked off the bench and sentenced to spend the next fifty years working on the chain gang.

Although theories of jurisprudence abound, all serious thinkers on the subject agree that justice is the linchpin upon which all legitimate legal systems turn. In this particular case, however, it is impossible to see how that any of the numerous cats that McIntosh stole and killed have received so much as an iota of justice.

The same most definitely can be said as well for Cleary and Bernard. Their cat was stolen from them and brutally murdered by McIntosh but his buddy Sorensen does not care about any of that.

Rather, the only thing that she cares about is maintaining her status as a solid and dependable good old girl within the corrupt-as-hell South Dakota legal establishment. In that regard, it is a sure bet that she tingles from head to toe with delight at her own cleverness as she sticks it to cats and their owners all the while dispensing protection and shelter to low-life, scumbags like McIntosh and other rogue police officers.

Her online biography states that she is a Black Hills' native who studied psychology, criminal justice, and political science at South Dakota State University in Brookings before being awarded a law degree from the University of South Dakota in Vermillion in 2007. All of that makes her living proof that when it comes to instilling any sense whatsoever of decency, compassion, morality, and justice in their graduates that America's degree mills are every bit as morally and intellectually bankrupt as the forty thieves who so bedeviled Ali Baba.

It additionally is suspected that she, like McIntosh, is a dog lover who factors that bias into her rulings from the bench. As most people realize, many fans of the canine species have little or no regard for either cats or their owners.

In fact, many of them get their perverted jollies by siccing their charges on cats and then laughing as they tear them apart. (See Cat Defender posts of September 22, 2019 and July 18, 2015 entitled, respectively, "Sparkle Is Killed on the Front Stoop of Her House by an Unleashed Dog in the Latest of Centuries-Old Deadly Attacks That Bear the Unmistakable Imprimatur of the House of Commons" and "A Blackpudlian Thrill Seeker Who Sicced Her Pit Bull on Regi and Then Laughed Off Her Fat Ass as He Tore Him Apart Receives a Customary Clean Bill of Health from the Courts.")

For example, on December 13th Sorensen awarded Elisabeth Maurus of Rock Island, Illinois, US$1,675 in restitution after her eleventh-month-old Bouvier des Flandres, Ned, died of a heatstroke after having been negligently left for twelve hours in a minivan owned by local dog trainer Christopher Railsback of Midwest Dog Training at 300 North Derby Lane in North Sioux City. By contrast, she did not give Cleary and Bernard so much as the time of day.

After a jury had found him guilty of misdemeanor animal neglect, Sorensen gave Railsback a sixty-day suspended jail sentence and fined him an additional US$500. Even though McIntosh's crimes against cats were both greater in number and intentional, as opposed to Railsback's offense having been a singular event and accidental, in Sorensen's perverted view of justice they merited only an additional US$250 in fines and thirty days in jail. (See the Sioux City Journal, December 16, 2019, "Judge Fines North Sioux City Trainer Convicted of Animal Neglect.")

Perhaps most detrimental of all, Sorensen's love letter to McIntosh is not destined to produce any positive effect on his future conduct. Au contraire, he will go on killing and abusing cats in either his capacity as a police officer or as a private citizen.

Furthermore, other than McIntosh no one employed by either the NSCPD or the city itself has been fired. Nothing therefore has really changed in North Sioux City and if the bloody corpses of cats with their brains blown out no longer litter the grounds of McCook that only means that the officers of the NSCPD have found a new and far more secure venue to serve as their cat killing fields.

For that, Sorensen is to be thanked. She thus has joined her colleagues McIntosh and Rhinehart as an integral member of a burlesque troupe known as the "Three Stooges of Justice." Perhaps billboards bearing their ugly mugs should be commissioned and an agent employed in order to secure gigs for them on the road. Their schtick is almost guaranteed to bring down the house wherever they perform.

As for McIntosh, he is planning to appeal the light, loving tap on the wrists given him by Sorensen. It therefore is questionable if he entered jail on November 18th as scheduled.

Thanks to the slipshod effort put forward by the local media, which hardly broke so much as a sweat covering this important case, it is not even been reported where he was to have served his sentence. Nonetheless, it very well could have been at none other than the North Sioux City Police Jail where he used to rule the roost as a grinning, sneering, and swaggering officer of the law who gunned down defenseless cats.

If so, that must have been a real hoot. It would have been like old home week as he graciously received the well-wishes, backslaps, high fives, and handshakes of his former officers. Perhaps Cherry and Fredericksen even stopped by in order to pay their respects.

Since none of the regular jailhouse slop that is served up to run-of-the-mill lawbreakers would ever do for such a distinguished guest of the city, all of his special dishes likely were lovingly prepared just for him. Smokes, beer and, possibly, even a whore or two were procured for his enjoyment.

A steady stream of police chiefs from nearby forces as well as a slew of private businessmen likely also stopped by in order to offer him jobs. It is unclear, however, if he will be expected to steal and shoot cats in his new sinecure.

As thoroughly corrupt to the core as it may be, North Sioux City is far from being the only city in the United "Bullshit" States of America where marauding, lawless gangs of scum-of-the-earth cops murder cats and, quite often, unarmed individuals with impunity. Although the lion's share of their abominably criminal behavior goes unreported by the equally sleazy and corrupt capitalistic media, such official misconduct is pretty much the norm from sea to shining sea.

For example, on November 11, 2011 Jonathan N. Snoddy of the Harrisonburg Police Department was summoned to Settlers Lane in order to attend to a forever nameless cat that had been run down and seriously injured by a hit-and-run motorist. Instead of procuring emergency veterinary assistance for it, he first attempted to bludgeon it to death with his night stick.

When that totally uncalled for brutality failed to produce the desired effect, he bashed its brains out against the side of a townhouse. So violent was the attack that the rockwork later had to be repaired. All totaled, local resident Wayne Meadows, who had telephoned the police, overheard Snoddy assault the defenseless cat at least twenty times.

Although he eventually was charged with animal cruelty, the entire political and legal establishment in Virginia quickly closed ranks behind him. As a result of the hard work and long hours put in on his behalf by Judge Steven Helvin, the mayor and city council of Harrisonburg, chiefs of police Donald Harper and Stephen Monticelli, prosecutors Marsha Garst, Cristobal Opp, and Kenneth Lee Alger III, as well as the Virginia State Bar, he not only beat the rap but was allowed to retain his job as well.

Even Daphna Nachminovitch of the cat-haters supreme at Virginia-based PETA rushed to his defense. (See Cat Defender posts of March 22, 2012, April 26, 2012, and August 23, 2012 entitled, respectively, "In Another Outrageous Miscarriage of Justice, Rogue Cop Jonathan N. Snoddy Is Let Off with a $50 Fine for Savagely Bludgeoning to Death an Injured Cat," "Virginia's Disreputable Legal and Political Establishment Is All Set to Acquit Jonathan N. Snoddy at His Retrial for Brutally Beating to Death an Injured Cat," and "Cat-Killing Cop Jonathan N. Snoddy Struts Out of Court as Free as a Bird Thanks to a Carefully Choreographed Charade Concocted by Virginia's Despicable and Dishonest Legal System.")

By comparison, the legal and political establishments in North Sioux City and South Dakota as a whole do not come off as looking all that shabbily. At least Cherry had the bon sens to belatedly fire McIntosh and unlike Snoddy his photograph was released to the public. Bates did prosecute him and he was forced to face a jury of his peers whereas Snoddy only had to put up with a brief hearing before a friendly judge. Reprehensibly, that old slug Sorensen voided all of their efforts by setting McIntosh scot-free.

With the deck stacked so heavily against them, there is little hope that Cleary and Bernard are going to be able to secure any measure of justice for either their murdered cat or themselves. Even so, it would be cathartic for them if they could somehow summon the will power and resources in order to at least bring civil lawsuits against Vanderpool for illegally trapping their cat and North Sioux City for McIntosh's crime. At the very least, they should demand that the NSCPD return their cat's remains so that they can provide it with a memorial service, a fitting burial, and a tombstone.

The utter moral depravity of all those involved in both the commission of this heinous crime as well as the absolution of those responsible for it is nowhere more vividly exemplified than in their steadfast refusal, unlike as with Ned, to even publicly identify Cleary and Bernard's cat. Without a name, a photograph, a history, and a personality it, like the one killed by Snoddy, has been relegated to the dustbin of history as being nothing more than just another nameless cat and, by extension, therefore unworthy of living in this world, receiving justice, and of even being remembered.

It is devoutly wished that all of them will one day meet with the same violent end that it did. If that should come to pass, it would be nothing less than what each and every one of them so richly deserves.

Photos: North Sioux City (McIntosh) and Rhinehart Law (Rhinehart).