The suburbs, where madness meets cat murder

There is a serial killer stalking the suburbs here, leaving small heads in quiet gardens. Often, he keeps the tails.

When I told a friend I was writing about the Croydon cat killer, as he (or a copycat) appears to be holidaying in Washington State, her lips collapsed into a little moue, and then she looked away. “What?” I pressed, and she paused before replying, earnestly, “But what if he comes for you?” It was a risk I’d considered, having just celebrated our kitten’s first birthday, but one I am willing to take, because this story — some believe the same man has killed more than 500 cats over the last four years — is compelling and terrifying. And it encourages obsession: It pricks at ancient anxieties.

In midcentury America, the suburbs were seen by some as a dangerous social experiment — this style of living brought sickness. Suburban men fell ill from the stress of commuting; suburban women, trapped at home, had it even worse. In a best-selling 1961 study the authors renamed these regions “Disturbia.”

The place of suburbs in our collective psyche has been on my mind recently, as last year, with great internal drama, I moved out of the city, got a cat for my daughter — pets, of course, traditionally being tools for children to practice grief upon — and settled all the way down. In Britain the idea of suburbia has none of the David Lynchian perversion or drama of the United States. But it’s still thought of as an in-between place, a punchline, where small neat gardens reflect the dimensions of their owners’ minds. Suffocating, but safe. Until a predator shatters the illusion.

The first deaths happened in a place called Croydon. A South London suburb that, for David Bowie, “represented everything I didn’t want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from.” It was a “complete concrete hell,” he said cheerfully in 1999. “I suppose it looks beautiful now.” (It doesn’t.)

Accounts vary on when pets began to turn up on their owners’ doorsteps, cut in half, decapitated and disemboweled. But by late 2015, patterns had begun emerging — the killer appeared to be moving in concentric circles around the capital. One Facebook group nicknamed him “Jack the Rippurr.” A local couple formed an improbable team of crime fighters under the name South Norwood Animal Rescue and Liberty, or Snarl. “She’s a cat person,” Tony Jenkins explained of his partner, Boudicca Rising (between them the middle-aged couple house 31). As the victims added up — Ukiyo, belly sliced open; Oscar, decapitated; Charlton, head and tail missing — Jenkins and Rising recorded the deaths, collected remains, performed post-mortems, and approached the police, but it was their petition of more than 40,000 signatures that led to an official investigation.

And for a period, the police took them seriously. Last November, a detective sergeant, Andy Collin, expressed his concerns that the killer might, eventually, “cease getting that gratification and escalate the attacks to humans, specifically vulnerable women and girls.” But today, as deaths continue to rise, more figures of authority are backing away from humans as the cause. Writing in The New Scientist this summer, Stephen Harris, a retired professor of environmental sciences at the University of Bristol, declared that the deaths that have captivated the capital for years are in fact the work of foxes. “We have known for decades that foxes chew the head or tail off carcasses, including dead cats,” he wrote, claiming no killer has been caught “because there is no ‘killer.’” (Jenkins and Rising loudly dispute this interpretation.)

And yet, somehow that does little to dispel London’s feeling of existential threat. Headlines like “Slaughter in Suburbia” have given way to stories about an increase in murdered rabbits, while the cats continue to turn up, bloodless and cleanly disemboweled. One head was left on the penalty spot of a garden football pitch. “Does he exist?” we ask ourselves, and then, “Does it matter?” We have invoked him anyway, and he lurks in shadows inside us, and in half-remembered folklore — perhaps our gardens are just his most recent hiding place.

In Michelle McNamara’s true crime best-seller “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” about her search for a murderer who stalked the California suburbs, it was the lamp-lit detail, more than even the crimes themselves, that stayed with me — the way the killer prowled his victims’ cul-de-sacs over decades, peering through their windows at night. The most chilling thing was the suggestion that a side effect of suburban architecture is that the houses become stages for roadside audiences after dark, who watch their inhabitants dance from kitchen to sofa, to bathroom to bed. For all the apparent safety of these homes in the sticks, it seems they have the danger built in.

A year ago, after our baby was born, my partner and I moved to the area where I grew up, to a quiet street at the end of the Northern Line where the capital opens out into golf courses and garden centers, and I immediately began boring him with much existential whining about the shame of having returned to the safety of a life I’d thought left behind. Then, a month after we moved, our house was broken into. The bed was stained with muddy footprints — the burglar had turned over our furniture and opened my face cream, seemingly confused by the lack of jewelry. That night, tidying up, my partner said quietly, “I wonder what he thought of us.” The city had broadcast its dangers, using sirens and loud lights, but we learned quickly the suburbs hide theirs; here, on school fences, cartoon drawings warn of the threat of accidents and strangers’ cars in cute, childish scribbles. Now we always keep a light on.

We bought our kitten shortly after the burglary, presenting it to our child with a jangly collar and promise of distant grief. “Here you go, love!” I said to my daughter. “Death! Vaccinated, purring death with green eyes, death that thinks shoelaces are mice.” The suburbs had given us the space to teach our daughter about grief — there’s only so much loss you can fit in a one-bedroom flat. And the kitten was easy to love. She crept under our duvet at night and slept on my feet. We talked to her in song, and applauded her skill in climbing curtains. It was a couple of months later that I saw the post on a neighborhood website, alongside plant pots for sale, warning that the cat killer had arrived.

In August, after a Guardian writer pointed out that the cat killer story had “parallels with moral panics,” The Croydon Advertiser reported that the writer had subsequently “been subjected to foul abuse.” That same week, Jenkins suggested that, as the killer is someone he believes moves around for work, “There is certainly a possibility that a journalist” might be committing the crimes. There’s a high-pitched madness here, and I don’t like it, and neighbors are curfewing their cats, and there is a confluence of tensions as people look at their cats and see their own vulnerability. Our pets are where we keep the stuff we can’t put anywhere else — our fawning adoration, our aspirations for security and unconditional love, our grief. In the suburbs, more than just curtains are twitching.

(Eva Wiseman is a columnist and editor at The Observer.)