Dog Killer

I’m on the last leg of my daily walk with my dogs, just two-minutes away from home when I hear running. I turn to see one of the neighbourhood kids, dressed in school uniform, smiling from ear to ear. She usually accompanies me on my walks along with her older sister and two brothers. Within the first week of meeting her she would ask me various questions about myself with such childlike wonder. By week two she was telling me that she wished I was her mum, auntie or blood relative of any capacity. That if we lived next door instead of three houses apart, she would implement a masterplan of hollowing out the piece of wall that separates the dog box houses to connect our floorplans. Almost every time I see her, she shows me various dances from Fortnight and tells me about quirky videos she’s watched on the internet. From her content descriptions they sound much like the one’s I used to see every Saturday night, watching Australia’s Funniest Home Videos. She’s kind and bursting with life, seemingly always in a good mood. Her older sister is an oddball, somewhat likeable but less so. I used to mark this up to her being in a less adorable life stage, as she was amid the awkwardness of puberty. I look back on this judgement now and wonder if my intuition played any part in this, or if I was just annoyed by her somewhat hoarse voice and her preference for yelling. Her sense of logic confused me more than her social skills, I quickly realised she had obtained both from her dad after meeting him.  

I was never able to have a proper conversation with him. Partially through my own fear of men and the narrative that if a man pursued me, it was because of something I had done. A few years ago, I had come home to a letter in my mailbox from my next-door neighbour. It was a hand-written request for him to come over to my house, with his number attached so that we could organise plans to be intimate. I called the number ready to put him on blast, to verablly tear a man almost three times my age, “a new one.” He didn’t answer on account of his wife's presence. While I thought it was absurd that my friendliness had invited this perversion, I still blamed myself for welcoming such behaviour. I stopped waving and smiling to neighbours. The other reasons for never being able to connect through conversation with this particular neighbour (the one who lived three-houses down from me, not the old man who was keen on fulfilling some porno fantasy), was because he seemed somewhat socially inept, more so than I. It became a silent mutual agreement that talking was an unnecessary feature of our short interactions. Neutral facial expressions were exchanged with a simple “hello” while I would continue on my mission of walking the dogs while his children followed.  

A few months ago, something happened that gave me a deeper insight into the home life of these children. The youngest daughter walked with me and the dogs, only this only this time she was alone. She confided in me that when she was living with her mum, everyone in the household saved their money to buy a chihuahua. She had always told me how much she loves my chihuahua’s, gleefully admiring the way their eyes bulge out of their heads and the softness of their fur coats. The information that she had once owned a chihuahua herself, was news to me. The story of her first dog was delivered in such an abrupt and matter of fact way that I had no reason to believe she was saying anything but the truth. She continued on, telling me that the dog became sick not long after taking it home, within a few weeks it had died and was buried in the backyard. She told me that her family was so set on having a chihuahua, that they pulled all their excess funds together again to buy another. This time, the puppy was killed by her older sister, in a fit of anger because she was “super into makeup and stuff and wanted to spend some of the money (that was spent on the puppy) on makeup at the shops.” I wanted it to be a lie. She told me that the police visited the household to investigate and that the puppy was buried alongside the first. I asked how long ago that this happened and she repeated that this had all unfolded when she was living at her mum’s. This didn’t help the timeline I was trying to mentally map. As far as I know this could have happened as long as five years ago or as recently as six-months ago.  

I tried to ask questions to harvest more context but she swiftly changed the subject and tone to flattery. She asked me if the shoes I was wearing were also made for kids. I politely shook my head with a verbal no and she persisted excitedly, telling me she was going to grow her hair out to be long like mine, dress in all black and buy the same shoes that I was wearing. The subject changed again, with the topic circling back to animals and her homelife. She tells me she once watched her mum pick up dog poo with her bare hands and that the floors of her house are covered in skid marks and cat faeces due to an untrained house cat. 

My head was still spinning trying to make sense of the revelation. That a young girl who had asked so many times if she could look after my dogs, was capable of ending their lives. For Christ’s sake, her first name directly translates to “emotional restraint or self-control.” 

This is unfortunately not the first time I have brushed paths with someone so cruel as to end the life of a helpless animal.  

Last year I was told of the disturbing events of someone I had worked alongside. She was a troubled woman with a history of substance abuse and clear signs of spiritual psychosis, but nonetheless we got along in conversation for the most part. She was incredibly well spoken and undeniably beautiful, but had an air of darkness about her. I opened up to her about an ex that was actively harassing me in a defiant refusal to let me go, and she offered to chase him away with household objects that wouldn’t have been threatening in anyone else hands but her own. We bonded over our shitty experiences with men and talked about current events of the world. We were polite with each other, even when our political views did not align. My peacekeeper tendencies served me well in that dynamic as I never pushed back too hard on any of her more extreme talking points. I wished some of our coworkers followed suit, as I watched controlled chaos breakout in her conversations with others. There was always a clear fight to prove herself as an intellectual. Finding a faux sense of confidence in sparring via debates, claiming victories in vocally pushing others down. A behaviour I have since seen reflected in many individuals as a way of feeling powerful whilst combating internal-conflict fueled by insecurities. What I failed to see in my interactions with her were warning signs that she was so unstable that she put the safety of others at risk. At a work christmas party I opted not to attend, she left a highly intoxicated individual in the back of an unsafe person's vehicle. This intoxication was a case of alcohol poisoning and she was left to lay in her own vomit.  

Socialising with the other occupants of the event took priority over caring for her friend who was medically in trouble. Had this friend not been covered in the pungent smell of her stomach contents, she would have most likely been violated by the owner of that vehicle. He had a history or harassing and stalking women, even following them home and having no shame in visibility, standing outside their homes. Additionally, there is one incident that I am aware of that he used his vehicle to corner and rape a young woman, but this journal is not about rapists, it’s about dog killers. There was talk in our workplace of an event involving black magic. A woman who broke the neck of her new puppy to partake in a ritualistic sacrifice. The troubled woman I described was the perpetrator of this event. It was reported by her housemate at the time that she held the limp body of this animal surrounded by lit candlesticks in a circle formation. Her whole body shook while holding the corpse close, as she mumbled words that were inaudible. This happened over a period of hours, in which she was described as swinging from different emotional states, going from hysterically crying to a calm but disorientated state. I’m not sure how to end this one, there’s no comfort in the accounts of disturbed individuals. In forcing myself to find some consolation, I can at the very least say “I can count on one hand the number of individuals I know who have harmed an animal.” Grim, I know but that’s the reality.