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CRIME & CALAMITY
Leduc fluke or satanic savagery?
A farm family suffers a media circus after six cattle die
or 20 years Bossy the cow faithfully
For 20 years Bossy the cosupposed to
do. mind their manners and give milk. She
was more of a family pet than a food source
to Leduc-area farmers Roman and Doris
Verchomin. But that relationship came to
a sad and abrupt end on the morning of
Patricia Verchomin and friend:
Definitely a question of who, not what."
April 14th when they found her lying dead
in the warm morning sun, her intestines
spilling from a gaping hole in her backside
and a bloody 10-inch slash across her neck.
Two weeks ago another cow turned up
dead on the Verchomin farm. It too had
apparently been mutilated. This latest
grisly discovery brings to six the number
of dead cattle found on the 700-acre farm.
four of which were found in one 13-day
period in June. Utterly perplexed and de-
spairing of police help, the Verchomins
phoned the Edmonton Journal. They now
wish they hadn't.
Newspaper reporters descended like
flies. Camera crews showed up in vans at
their gate and calls came from as far away
as Manitoba. Then came the "lay experts."
One old fellow claimed he had studied
cattle mutilations since 1950; he blamed
spacemen. A brown paper envelope arrived
from someone asking if it was somehow
connected to world over-population. A
Lake Wabamun man told the Journal,
"People are killing and mutilating cattle in
bizarre midnight attacks so they can sell
sex organs to American cults in exchange
for cocaine." The Verchomins found the
attention as bad as the mutilations.
Still, they say, with a herd of 140, six
casualties in three months is excessive-
and suspicious. They can't believe that the
deaths occurred naturally, as veterinarians
and police insist.
JIM DEMERS
The autopsy explanation for Bossy was
that the aging cow had died of bloat and
later been chewed up by coyotes. But on
June 14 they found a 275-pound spring
heifer calf dead in the pasture. They
dragged it off to the edge
of adjoining Saunders
Lake. where. oddly, no
magpies, coyotes or dogs
touched it for a week. On
June 21 they found an-
other heifer calf dead.
This time an autopsy re-
ported the presence of the
bacteria that cause the fa-
tal bovine Blackleg dis-
ease. But on June 28 they
found the fourth victim.
also a calf. It had no skin
on its body other than on
its legs, and its head was
simply a skeleton. They
don't know how long it
was there. Two hours after
finding number four they discovered num-
ber five, an 800-pound yearling heifer. It
was missing an ear and its udder apparently
had been removed with a perfectly circular
cut. Finally, on July 16 they found victim
six, again a large heifer, this one with a
four-inch cut in its neck, one teat cleanly
cut off, half its tongue removed and its anal
area partially missing. An autopsy revealed
it had a fatally absessed liver.
Leduc RCMP Sergeant Peter Sopow has
ruled out any human cause-vandals, rus-
tlers or cults. None of the carcases, he says.
showed tell-tale signs of struggle or bullet
wounds, and he hopes local people stop
calling him and telling him their neighbour
is a warlock. As for the mutilations. Leduc
vet Wayne Sereda echoes a Can Vet maga-
zine article detailing how animal scaven-
gers often neatly remove the softest parts
of a fresh carcass.
All of which leaves the Verchomins feel-
ing frustrated, angry and mystified. Their
herd is as healthy as any other, says their
daughter Patricia. She says she has seen
plenty of carcasses that have been seav-
enged by coyotes but never did they look
like what was done to her parents' animals.
"I definitely think this thing is a question
of who, not what," she says. "And we want
it to stop. it's so...senseless."
--Jim Demers