GUEST BLOGGER NEIL ARNOLD: The Rochester Rabbit Ripper

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Neil Arnold to the CFZ bloggo with this first guest blog. I have known Neil for fifteen years now since he was a schoolboy with ambitions for adventure and I was an earnest young hippie who merely wanted to start a club for people interested in unknown animals. Nothing much has changed over the years. We are just both a tad older...

Who, or what, is the Rochester rabbit ripper ? That’s the question I was asking myself after an investigation on the outskirts of historic Rochester. Now, Rochester, with it’s Dickensian association, is a beautiful place, but under the cloak of darkness weird stuff happens.

Over the course of a few years there’s been sightings of large cats, unidentified swimming objects in the river, black magic coven’s accused of sacrificing goats, piles of large pet dogs found crushed and scratched in the local woods, and now this.

The so-called Rochester Rabbit Ripper was behind the discovery of a severely mutilated domestic cat in a neighbouring village. An elderly couple awoke one morning (4th March 2009) to find the grisly remains in their garden. The remaining body parts were put in a wheelie bin. The following morning the half-eaten remains of a rabbit were found and sniffed out by their dog. Now, this poor dog certainly wasn’t responsible. For one, it’s blind. Two, it is on its last legs and can hardly walk. Fur was strewn about the garden, but one of the neighbours mentioned he’d never seen a rabbit in his garden all the time he’d lived there, however, rabbits would certainly have been in abundance in the flanking overgrown alleyway and pathway which runs along the river Medway. Some ‘thing’ had eaten the rabbit, leaving its back legs, and the couple phoned me. I arrived at the scene expecting to clear the mystery up in no time, but experience usually tells me that something weird is going to happen.

So, I checked out the remains which the elderly gent’ had thrown in the bin with dog excrement, and prodded my way through. A neighbour was quick to arrive and mentioned a few nights previous he’d been in his kitchen at around 11:00 pm, looked out his back garden and saw the rear end of a massive black cat which slinked away. So, maybe the so-called ‘beast’ of Blue Bell Hill had struck again, this animal being a black leopard said to prowl the neighbouring villages. I went into the neighbour’s house whilst the elderly couple went for a drive. After half an hour I decided to make for the woodland pathway, but as I left the house, I glanced towards the elderly couple’s gate and saw their crippled and blind Alsatian munching something. It was half a rabbit!

Now, it wasn’t the same rabbit because I had this slain bunny in a bag, but somehow, a new rabbit had appeared from nowhere. Within the last thirty or so minutes. The dog was crunching bones and lapping at the meal with difficulty, but the poor, hungry mutt wasn’t allowed to eat such a meal as it was on a special diet, and certainly couldn’t have gotten round the garden to catch a rabbit. Even though no-one had seen rabbits in their garden, probably because rabbits couldn’t gain access, it was a mystifying triangle. Had, whilst I was in the neighbour’s house, a black leopard dumped another rabbit in the garden, eaten half of it, but somehow, the crippled dog picked up the scent, even though the dog couldn’t get down the steps of the garden. Or, had there never been a black leopard, but instead a dog gorging itself on local rabbits and domestic cats ? Unlikely. When I got home I received a call from the elderly couple who were mystified as to how their dog had gotten another rabbit, but did mention that sometimes ‘things’ were thrown over the fence for the dog to eat ? However, who on earth had been hunting rabbits, and chucking their rear end over a fence ? It was all confusing, and so the saga continues…until the next mysterious kill.