Case Details


Case Snapshot
Case ID: 16290
Classification: Beating
Animal: cat
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Cat beaten to death with mallet, vet charged
Panama City, FL (US)

Incident Date: Monday, Mar 1, 2010
County: Bay

Charges: Misdemeanor
Disposition: Dismissed

Person of Interest: Margaret Fowler

Case Updates: 1 update(s) available

Bay County Sheriff's investigators arrested 52-year-old Margaret Fowler Monday on the morning of Monday, March 29 at her home on South Lagoon Drive. The alleged incident happened on March 1.

Authorities say one of Fowler's neighbors saw Fowler hitting what appeared to be a cat with a rubber mallet.

The neighbor claims Fowler then grabbed the cat by the tail, carried it to a privacy fence and laid it down. The neighbor says she walked over to the fence and discovered the cat belonged to her live-in boyfriend.

Animal Control officers arrived.

They say Fowler told them she noticed the cat was suffering from injuries it received after it was hit by a car. She claimed the cat dragged itself over to the fence and died.

The senior director of veterinary forensic sciences for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals performed an necropsy and found that the cat bled to death because it was beaten in the head and stomach with a round blunt object.

Fowler is the owner and operator of Acupuncture & Holistic Veterinary Service of Northwest Florida. She runs the business out of her South Lagoon home, right across the street from the alleged incident.

She also practices at several other veterinary clinics and animal attractions in Bay County.

Fowler is being held in the Bay County jail. She's due in court tomorrow for a bond hearing.

The cat's owner says he is horrified at what happened: "It takes a sick mind, just absolute twisted, sick mind to do something like this to a defenseless animal," said Spike Shipley. "I don't know how to describe it, I just, every day, I think about it."

Shipley says the cat's sister died under suspicious circumstances last Thanksgiving. He says he may turn that incident over to authorities.


Case Updates

Charges have been dropped against a woman accused of beating her neighbor's cat to death with a hammer.

Assistant State Attorney Stacy Sharp filed the legal notice dismissing the case against Panama City Beach veterinarian Margaret Fowler, 52, on Nov. 5. The charges stemming from the March incident were dropped because the only witness in the case, Robyn Petit, left Florida and could not be contacted, according to the notice.

"The State does not have a current address or phone number for this witness and would be unable to compel this witness to return should she be able to be located. Although the State believes that probable cause existed for arrest, the State is unable to prove the case without the witness," Sharp wrote.

The News Herald was able to contact Petit at the phone number listed on the March 18 incident report. She said she has been traveling out of state but is still a resident of Florida and would have been happy to return to Bay County for a trial if asked. She also has not changed her phone number.

"They didn't call me," she said. "There was no message. For something like that they surely would have left a message."

Even if someone hangs up when the voice mail picked up, there would be a record, she said.

But State Attorney Glenn Hess said Wednesday prosecutors dropped the case for several other reasons in addition to the witness being out of state. Evidence in the case did not seem to match Petit's statement and a deposition taken before the proposed trial did not go well, he said.

Petit told Bay County Animal Control officers and Bay County Sheriff's Office deputies she saw Fowler, who lived across the street from her, in her next-door neighbor's yard hitting something with a hard rubber mallet, according to the incident report. When Fowler picked the object up, Petit said she saw it was a cat and she watched as Fowler, holding the cat by the tail, took it to the privacy fence between her and her neighbor's yards and left it there. Fowler then went back across the street to her home with the mallet still in her hand, Petit said. When she went to investigate, Petit found it was her then-boyfriend Michael Shipley's brown tabby cat.

"I don't like being called a liar and that's basically what it looks like," she said of the state attorney's office saying she was unreachable.

Fowler, who ran a holistic veterinary clinic out of her home, told officers the cat had been hit by a car, but a necropsy exam performed by Dr. Melinda Merck, senior director of veterinary forensic sciences for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, showed the cat's injuries were not consistent with being hit by a car. The cat died as a result of exsanguination, or excessive blood loss, with a contributing cause of blunt force trauma to the head and abdomen.

BCSO investigators later found a mallet similar to the one Petit described in the top shelf of a tool box in Fowler's garage.

However, there was no blood on the mallet, Hess said, and no blood on Fowler's clothes like there should have been if she had just slaughtered an animal. He added that Shipley called prosecutors after being told the trial was near and informed them that Petit was in the Midwest. It did not make sense to pay for a witness to come back to Florida for a misdemeanor trial, Hess said.

Shipley said he was "extremely upset" and called the decision to drop the charges "suspicious." He and Petit ended their relationship shortly after the incident but have remained amicable and are in contact.

"She made it very plain and clear she would gladly come back to testify if she was in another state, another country, another planet," Shipley said.

Hess said the situation remained suspicious and that a necropsy showed that someone had been abusing the cat by shooting it with a pellet gun. However, the evidence was not present in the case and there seemed to be no reason for a veterinarian to act completely out of character and kill a cat, Hess said.

"Those are the hard decisions that prosecutors have to make," he added.
Source: newsherald.com - Dec 2, 2010
Update posted on Dec 2, 2010 - 9:21PM 

References

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