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Maggie Cothern and her husband Jimmy lived in Durango Colorado. Durango is a small community of ranchers, whitewater rafting and some of the best snow skiing and mountain biking in the United States. It is also a place where substance abuse and domestic violence are prolific. While experts argue why family violence has escalated in small town America, one investigator knows that there is another side to this equation, even a precursor if you will. Kimball Lewis, a nationally recognized animal abuse expert knows that violence against animals is often a barometer of future abhorrent behavior against people. Often, the people who are the focus of this violence are within the family unit.

In 1993, Lewis was a commissioned officer through the Colorado Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Animal Protection. In a separate but parallel role, he was also the director of animal enforcement and protection in La Plata County Colorado. His officers handled animal control and well as neglect and abuse investigations in an area considered paradise to many. But as Lewis is quick to point out in his upcoming book, paradise always has an unseen element. Durango was no exception. It was here that Lewis began to see an increasingly obvious pattern as animal violence and crimes against people became more and more intertwined.

It was a snowy March in Durango and the winter tourist season was in full swing. I was head of the regions animal enforcement and protection program and was seated in my office filling out paperwork when the intercom buzzed. There was a woman in the lobby who was visibly distraught and requesting to see me. Although I had a pile of paperwork in front of me I could hear the urgency in the receptionist’s voice and so I asked for her to escort the visitor in. There, seated across from me was a small woman, no more than 21, a frail, scared, unsure figure stood there shuddering in front of me. Her name was Maggie Cothern and as I asked her to sit down, she burst into tears. Maggie related that she had been married to Jimmy Cothern for a short while when the abuse first started. It was verbal in the beginning as he launched into the typical pattern of demeaning Magie and then slowly isolating her from friends and family.

It took an act so cowardly as to sicken even the most seasoned investigator for Maggie to finally break ranks with her husband and seek help. Ironically, he had not yet physically abused Maggie. In her eyes that would have been bearable. No, what her husband did was to take her tiny American Eskimo dog and bash its helpless body against the cement crushing the little dog’s hips. Jimmy had struck out at Maggie through an area more vulnerable to many women than themselves. He had attacked her pet. Since Maggie and Jimmy had no children yet, Jimmy did what more and more perpetrators of domestic violence do every day, he brutalized her tiny dog as a leverage mechanism to gain silence and compliance in an ongoing cycle of violence.

Maggie did something that Jimmy hadn’t counted on, something that most abusers don’t count on, she got mad and fought back. Maggie sat there across from my desk, her nearly lifeless dog in her arms, asking what could she do. The rage I felt come over me as her story was related and as she took the blanket away to reveal the shaking body of her little dog was overwhelming. I gained my composure and with a few telephone calls, made arrangements for the doctors at the Durango Animal Hospital to take the dog in for emergency surgery. Like so many women seeking refuge from violence, Maggie had left with only the clothes on her back. A costly vet bill was out of the question. Fortunately, the doctors at Durango Animal Hospital are part of a very compassionate community and they donated the surgery. While Maggie’s little dog had pins drilled into her hip, I directed Maggie toward the police for a protective order.

Several days later, I was in my office late. The snow was piling up and living on a ranch at nearly 2000 feet higher in elevation than the town of Durango, I knew I needed to get going or I'd wind up spending the night at my office as had already been the case several times that year. With more than 300 inches of total snowfall that year at home, the weather was a formidable adversary and throw in 110 horses to feed and you get my point. Just as I was preparing to leave, a vehicle with two figures in it pulled up the long road to the office with their headlights off. Norma, my office manager was still out front shutting down the computer. "Kimball," Norma called, "there is a man here who wants to see you". I told Norma to send him in and as I looked across from my desk I was a little more than shocked to see Jimmy Cothern standing there. A second man was standing guard at the front door and I realized they meant trouble.

What Jimmy Cothern said next totally floored me. "Where’s my dog!" He cursed and sputtered at me and I realized that this was an abuser who was willing to go one step further than most. As professional as I have tried to remain over the years, something in me triggered an angry response. Here I sat, being threatened in my own office by the very man who had brutally attacked his wife’s dog. I leapt from my chair and catapulted myself over the desk in one effortless motion landing directly in front of Jimmy. "You don’t own any dogs" was my reply and I directed him toward the door. The man at the door stepped forward to block my way causing me to find physical strength I didn’t know existed as I swiftly ejected them both in a heap into the night and the falling snow.

I never saw Jimmy again. He moved over the Mountain to Mesa County where he was later shot six times by a Mesa County Sheriff’s Deputy when he exited a stolen car with a gun in his hand. Maggie and her dog now live out their life in relative piece. That very same year I saw another case in Durango one evening when a man named Mike Willimans went into the Sundowner Saloon on North Main to find his estranged partner, Rene Preston dancing with another man. Mike Williams promptly left the tavern and drove to the La Plata County Fairgrounds some six blocks south of the tavern on Main Street. There, Williams methodically went from one stall to the next, stabbing to death all four of Prestons horses. When Patrol Sargent Mike Weaver arrived on the scene, Williams assaulted the officer by punching him in the face. He was later taken into custody.

But the Cothern and Williams story are only the tiny tip of a very large iceberg. Court records are overflowing with examples such as these. In 1996, 97 and 98 I handled four of the worst cases of animal torture, abuse and violence I had seen in nearly seventeen years and each case was an internal portion of some ongoing domestic violence case.

Eugene Oregon, 1997. Leslie Lunsford Traeweek, a 35-year-old white male is dating and living with a local grade school teacher. Traeweek becomes abusive toward his domestic partner and when she ejects him from the home, his very first response is to target her dog, which she had adopted from the local humane society. The teacher was a decent, hard working woman and she was genuinely frightened by Traeweeks threats and actions. We encouraged her to place her dog in a "safe house" and to be wary of Traeweek. One week later, she came home to find Traeweek standing in her living room. Having already trashed her house, Traeweek then walked over to an aquarium where the woman kept a tiny Gecko Lizard. Traeweek looked at the woman and stated "do you like your Gecko?" She replied that she did, and then watched in horror as Traeweek dismember the animal in front of her. Traeweek fled when police arrived but in a turn of poetic justice, a Eugene Police K-9 apprehended him. Traeweek was found guilty of a variety of charges including felony aggravated animal abuse.

That same year, Tamara Barnes, a local Eugene woman who worked at Sacred Heart Medical Center showed up unannounced one day at my office. Barnes had married a man who seemed on the surface like the perfect husband. Shortly after their marriage, the isolation began. When that didn’t work, he began the verbal abuse. Barnes was preparing to leave when her husband announced to her, go ahead and leave me; I’ll kill your pets. Barnes was terrified and knew he would make good on his promise to kill her cats. As Barnes related to me, the final straw came not when he hit her over the head with the telephone, but later when she came home from work and found one of her cats rolled up in a ball of duct tape. Her husband had been kicking the cat around the room like a football while he had the cat rolled up in tape! When Tamara sought refuge at a local women’s shelter, she was told they would take her in but had no place for her pets. Now, as Tamara Barnes sat across from me telling her story, I knew we had to develop a program that would effect some meaningful change.

That night in my office, sometime between when Barnes left at 6:00 PM and before the sun rose the next morning, The first Domestic Violence Assistance Program now know nationwide as DVAP, was created. DVAP would provide immediate emergency shelter for any animal belonging to any woman or family in crisis as a result of family violence. This program would allow the victim of domestic violence added mobility to flee from harm while providing her with the reassurance that her animals were being well cared for, and at no cost. Any animal means any animals and as soon as we launched the program, a woman drove to Oregon all the way from Sacramento California with her two daughters and three horses to seek refuge from violence. We accepted the horses and today, the woman and her daughters live and work on a ranch with their horses at their side. She later told me that had she stayed another day, her husband was to have killed their horses, using the animals as a leverage mechanism in an ongoing cycle of violence and intimidation.

Because Tamara Barnes was no longer willing to be a victim, the DVAP Program was created and is now used in cities across America.

In the meantime, violence and animal abuse continue to overlap one another everyday. More and more law enforcement agencies are being trained to look for other forms of violence at the scene of animal abuse cases and in reverse, look for animal abuse at the scene of family violence. In 1997, FBI Special Agent Jim Fitzgerald of the Behavioral Sciences Unit in Quantico and I were invited to address the Association of the Bar in New York City. The topic: Animal Abuse as a Gateway Offense. A conference room packed full of prominent judges, prosecutors and attorneys listened intently as we discussed the rising number of violent incidents against women and society in general where the perpetrator had a know history of violence against animals. Indeed, the connection is now being made at all levels of public protection and in the criminal justice system.

Animal abuse is not simply a precursor to family violence. Literally every serial killer apprehended during the twentieth century had some experience with animal abuse as a child.

In 1997 again in Eugene, Oregon, two young men ages 19 and 20, drove to Eugene from Portland Oregon. Andrew Taylor Gibbs and Jonathan Braithwate were in town driving around at 1:00 AM with something on their mind. As the two men approached the Friendly Street Neighborhood near the Flicks and Picks Video Rental shop, Andrew suddenly spotted an orange tabby cat standing in the driveway of a quiet neighborhood home. The pair pulled their car over to the curb and turned off the motor. Waiting silently for the cat to approach, Jonathan opened his door and began beckoning the cat toward them. The cat as it turned out belonged to a retired couple in whose driveway she was standing. Having been treated with love and kindness all of her life, she had no reason to distrust the voice or touch of a human.

She instantly and eagerly came to the car when called. Jonathan scooped the cat up and the pair drove toward Alton baker Park in Eugene. At 4:00 AM, Dennis Williams, a Eugene Homicide Detective for many years was on patrol duty and spotted a pair of young men crouched suspiciously near their truck in Alton Baker Park acting suspiciously. As Detective Williams would relate, he knew instantly something was wrong and he approached the men who immediately moved to the opposite side of their car. Williams was horrified to find that the pair of young men had bound a cats legs together with speaker wire and tied her to the fence where they tortured her to death. Because of Williams’s observations and additional work by Eugene Police Detectives, the owners of the cat were located and the pair were charged and convicted for felony aggravated animal abuse.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this case comes with deeper analysis. When you consider the nature of this crime and what these men did to this cat, suppose for just a moment that the cat had not come to their car so willingly and had in fact escaped their grasp. Suppose as Braithwaite and Gibbs peel away from the curb without the cat and as they rounded the next quiet residential street, your daughter is on her way home from a friend’s house, or perhaps your wife is walking home from shift work at the hospital. Where do these two men draw the line between abducting the cat or your child? I submit to you from years of experience investigating these horrific cases, that the line is almost if not totally invisible and that only fate and circumstance prevented these two men from taking a human life that night. Sadly, they did take a life and in the most barbaric manner.

Now is the time for society to look very closely at animal abuse as a gateway offense. Now is the time for us as citizens and lawmakers to recognize the all too common denominator between violence against people and animals. It was no surprise to me that in 1994 when I apprehended a 23 year old man in Durango for lighting a litter of puppies on fire, that he had already been charged twice with domestic battery.

I am not suggesting that we treat crimes against animals more seriously or with greater priority than crimes against people. I am merely suggesting that we need to look at the broader picture when criminal acts by one person cross over from one species to the next. Our criminal justice system as well as the rehabilitative mechanisms already in place must act now to adopt as part of their overall examination of violent acts, the component of violence against animals as a barometer of future crimes against society and as a historic overview of an individuals actions when determining sentencing and physiological intervention.

Just a few months ago, I spent Thanksgiving weekend of 1999, investigating a case where a family’s 14-year-old dog had been abducted from her yard, drug behind a car, stabbed in the neck and then hung from a bridge. This was not some inner-city crime. This barbaric act took place in the exclusive resort community of Sunriver Oregon and was committed by two local youths, age 15 and 16. A pre-sentencing physiological examination ordered by the court revealed that both teens were at strong risk for repeat offenses and violent acts against the community. Both were denied bail and recently sentenced to 8 and 10 years respectively. Will this sentence address the real problem or will it be a boot camp where they become better criminals? Hopefully, early intervention and education programs will recognize these acts as a cry for help and our criminal justice and corrections systems will retool themselves accordingly to prevent repeat offence of a much greater nature.

The author is the founder of the Domestic Violence Assistance Program and one of the nations leading authorities on animal abuse as a gateway offense to violence against people.

Copyright © 2000 Kimball Lewis. All rights reserved.

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