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Please do not suffer in silence.

Hey everyone, it's Michael.

Today's episode is a bit unusual given our usual lineup of true crime stories.

This is actually one I had originally penned for Patreon as a bonus episode, but my family has been hit hard by every back to school virus and pathogen you can think of.

I'm actually still on the mend and we'll have to edit out quite a few coughs from this episode, but we should be back to our normal schedule starting next week.

Anyhow, I just thought you should know.

With that being said, let's roll.

It was a quiet Sunday morning in West Olympia, Washington, the kind of morning that feels like it should be uneventful routine.

Kathy Harrigan stepped onto her porch and called out for Harley, her twenty year old great tabby every morning for years, Harley had been waiting for her deaf but faithful, a fixture of her household.

This time, though he did not come.

Then came the police cruiser.

The deputy walked up to her with that look, the one that tells you the news isn't just bad, it's likely going to change the rest of your life.

Harley, it turns out, had been found on a neighbor's lawn, mutilated, cut open, and laid out deliberately, like someone wanted to make sure the body would be seen.

Kathy could hardly recognize him.

She later recalled, it's completely sick, unfathomable.

I can't get my mind around it.

Her beloved cat had not just died, he had been taken in a way so violent and so cruel that it was impossible to comprehend.

And the worst part was that Harley wasn't the first.

This is the story of the Thurston County cat killer.

The nightmare in Thurston County started months earlier.

The first body appeared on October twenty seventh, twenty seventeen, a mutilated cat in a rural area outside of Olympia.

People tried to explain it away at the time.

Maybe it was a car, maybe coyotes.

Nobody wanted to consider the alternative.

But as winter turned into twenty eighteen, more fragments turned up.

Severed limbs in a field near Lacey, a suburb of Olympia.

Another partial body a week later, no witnesses, no clear pattern, just grizzly remains.

Maybe it was scavengers, some insisted, but the unease had started by summer.

Denial was no longer or an option.

On July fourth, a family's cat named Calli vanished.

Hours later, she was found in a nearby park, cut cleanly in half.

Her owner asked police, was it hit by a car?

No?

An animal?

Again, No, this was done by a human.

The officer said.

That answer hit like a gut punch, and it would not be the last time that happened.

The killings accelerated.

Cats began disappearing from their yards and reappearing in the worst possible ways.

Bodies left on sidewalks, in front yards, near churches, even at a golf course.

They'd been slid open from sternham to tail with precise cuts.

Organs removed and sometimes placed beside the body like a grotesque display.

There was very little blood found at the scenes.

Whoever was doing this was killing elsewhere then dumping the remains where they would be found.

On August first, a fluffy white cat named Ollie became one of these victims.

She had been strangled, then sliced open her spine, removed clumps of her fur DNA under her claws, proof she had fought like hell, but she never stood a chance.

Days later, Harley became another name on the list.

His death hit hard, not just because he was beloved, but because he had become kind of a mascot for his West Olympia neighborhood.

His murder finally forced law enforcement to act.

Sheriff John Snazza formed a task force with detectives from the Sheriff's Office, Olympia PD, as well as officers from Lacey and Tumwater.

Six investigators dedicated solely to finding whoever was doing this.

Each crime scene was treated like a homicide.

Tape, gloves, canvassing, forensic kits were committed to finding this individual.

Detective Ben Elkins vowed, but sadly, whoever this was, they were just getting started.

In the first three weeks alone, at least seven cats were killed.

Some days brought two bodies in different jurisdictions within hours of year each other, as though the killer could not even wait for nightfall.

Residents began to describe what they were seeing in blunt terms, a sick, callous, disgusting psychopath.

Afraid that their children would stumble upon the next body, parents kept their kids indoors.

People started sleeping lightly, jolting awake at shadows in their yard.

Disappearances that might once have been blamed on cars or coyotes were now treated like abductions.

Each family devastated by a loss had a story.

Midnight, A black cat who slept on his owner's lap every night was found dismembered near a corner in Olympia.

Perfect a calico who was good with children was discovered tossed by a roadside.

On August thirtieth, the final known victim.

Families handed over photos to the media, their cat's faces now memorials in a story that they never imagined becoming part of, and the fear began to stretch beyond pets.

One resident said serial killers in the past have often been found to have started with animal torture.

They said what everyone else was thinking.

If this person wasn't stopped what would come next.

The community fought back in the only ways that it could.

Flyers were plastered across neighborhoods.

Social media spread the warning to keep cats indoors and stay vigilant.

Rewards were posted.

Pasado's Safe Haven started with fifteen hundred dollars, then matching funds doubled it.

Then national animal rights groups piled on.

By late August, the reward hit thirty six thousand dollars.

Within weeks, it was over fifty thousand, one of the largest in state history for an animal cruelty case.

The tips poured in, hundreds of them.

Detectives chased them all down, but the killer remained unknown.

The forensics were thin.

DNA scraped from all these claws did not lead anywhere.

A surgical glove found near one body confirmed what everyone already knew.

This was a human predator.

Coyotes don't wear gloves, if you knew that, but the glove was clean of prints.

Detectives speculated whoever was responsible for these crimes knew the anatomy of cats.

The cuts were too clean, the organs removed too deliberately.

Maybe this was a hunter, maybe a vettech, maybe someone who had learned just enough from YouTube videos to be dangerous.

Whatever the case, this wasn't scavenging wildlife.

This was human and the way the bodies were left in yards, on sidewalks, in public spaces, they were taunting.

They were trying to send a message, look at what I've done.

But then, just as suddenly as the spree escalated, it stopped.

After Perfect's body was found on August thirtieth, twenty eighteen, the killings ended.

No more mutilated cats appeared, There were no more calls, no more taped off yards.

The task force kept watch, but the trail went cold.

The silence should have been comforting, but it wasn't.

It was eerie.

Why had the killing stopped?

Had the killer moved on?

Had they themselves gotten into trouble?

Had they gotten spooked by the media frenzy?

Nobody knew.

A year later, the fear came roaring back.

In July twenty nineteen, a girl in Olympia found the severed head of a cat stuck to the top of a chain link fence a missing pet flyer taped just below it.

Law enforcement said it did not quite fit the earlier pattern.

The head was mummified, suggesting it had been preserved, but as you can imagine, that did not calm anyone down.

Whoever did it wanted to hurt, They wanted to shock, and in their attempt they succeeded.

Rumors filled the gap left by the lack of answers.

Some tried to pin the killings on a young man rumored to be violent, who later died by suicide.

The story spread online, neat and convenient, but it did not match the timeline.

That young man had not even been living in Washington during the original spree.

Others clung to the comfortable notion that maybe this had not been human at all, maybe it had actually been coyotes or some other scavengers, but local vets and investigators flatly rejected that theory.

The cuts to the cat's bodies were too clean.

Organs had been deliberately removed, Spines were taken out, bodies laid out tauntingly.

This wasn't a fox, it wasn't a coyote.

It was human.

And that's where the story sits.

The Thurston County cat killer has never been caught.

The reward money still exists.

The files gathering dust in the Sheriff's office, nay samples get revisited from time to time, but nothing has ever broken open.

For the families who lost their pets, the pain hasn't faded.

Kathy Harrigan said of Harley's killer, he laid the cat out for display so that we could be shocked and shocked.

They were horrified, traumatized, left with no closure.

This spree ended as suddenly as it began, but the pain of these families' losses remains in Olympia.

In Lacy and Pumwater, the neighborhoods that lived through that summer still carry the unease.

Pet Owners let their cats outside again, but often with a glance out the window, often with a memory of what had happened.

More than seven years later, the identity of the Thurston County cat killer is still a question without an answer.

The killings have been mostly forgotten about, whispered about like a ghost story from those who remember.

But for the families, it's not a ghost story.

It's a loss that never healed.

And that's because whoever did this, whoever was cruel enough, careful enough, arrogant enough to pose their work like trophies, was never found.

And for that reason, the story of the Thurston County cat killer remains unresolved.