6 Wild True Crime Cases Where An Animal Got The Blame
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In an Australian outback campground in August 1980, a desperate Australian mother wailed, “A dingo’s got my baby!” Her cry, misheard as “a dingo ate my baby,” became an inexplicable punchline and pop culture fixation in the years that followed the disappearance of 9-week-old Azaria Chamberlain.
The baby’s body was never found, and her mother, Lindy Chamberlain, was adamant that she’d seen the wolf-like carnivore leave the family’s tent. Though Chamberlain had the support of fellow campers and rangers, authorities charged her with murder in 1982, and she was sentenced to life in prison. After Azaria’s jacket was found near a dingo lair in 1986, Chamberlain was released, new investigations knocked down key evidence, and she was ultimately exonerated — though it wasn’t until 2012 that a coroner officially ruled the baby’s death the result of a dingo attack.
The twists and turns of Chamberlain’s ordeal have been adapted for movies, TV and even an opera. But it’s not the only true crime case where a wild animal has been implicated. In some, a suspect used a story of an animal attack to conceal their crimes. In others, evidence that could be claw or teeth marks continues to be the subject of fierce debate.
Michael and Lindy Chamberlain arrive in court on Feb. 2, 1982.
Owl
On Dec. 9, 2001, Michael Peterson told police he found the body of his second wife, Kathleen, at the bottom of a staircase. She lay in a pool of blood that drenched the bottom steps and the walls of the narrow stairwell. Peterson claimed his wife must have fallen while he was by the pool where the couple had shared drinks, but he was charged with her murder. Authorities dismissed the idea that she could have fallen, determining she had been bludgeoned to death and suffered deep lacerations on her scalp.
As documented in the 13 episodes of “The Staircase” documentary — revered in the true crime genre — and HBO Max’s 2022 docudrama of the same name, Peterson was tried in 2003, convicted by a jury (who heard evidence that the body of his close friend and neighbor was found at the bottom of a staircase in Germany in 1985) and sentenced to life in prison. A decade later, he was granted a new trial based on perjured testimony from a blood-spatter expert. The second trial never happened — in 2017, he entered an Alford plea on a reduced manslaughter charge and was sentenced to time served.
The plea didn’t require him to admit guilt but rather to acknowledge that the prosecution had enough evidence to convict him.
Still, he might have been exonerated if jurors had heard the infamous Owl Theory, first presented by his neighbor, Larry Pollard, in 2008. Based on the fact that three microscopic owl feathers were found in strands of Kathleen’s hair that investigators found in her hands and the pattern of the lacerations on her scalp (caused by a fireplace tool, prosecutors said), Pollard suggested that she had been attacked by a barred owl. According to his theory, which was later bolstered by a raptor expert, the bird had attacked her as she walked to the house. Injured and disoriented, the theory goes, Kathleen fell down the stairs, sustaining fatal injuries.
Michael Peterson was initially sentenced to life in prison for the death of his wife, Kathleen Peterson, pictured here.
Mountain Lion
Twenty-eight-year-old Christopher Whiteley was last seen the morning of Dec. 2, 2020, heading out from his girlfriend’s home in Texas’ rural Hood County, about 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth, to hitchhike to a house-painting job.
Whiteley reportedly took a shortcut to the main road through a wooded area, which was where searchers found his body the following evening after a friend reported him missing.
Whiteley’s body lay in the thick brush 15 feet away from his backpack. There was a deep, jagged wound on the right side of his neck, which had severed his jugular artery. “Small, thin scratches marked his torso, forehead, and one side of his face. He was shirtless, even though the weather had been cold,” Texas Monthly reported.
The next day, the Hood County Sheriff’s Office issued a press release stating definitively that a mountain lion had killed a man — the first-ever fatal mountain lion attack in Texas — and authorities were searching for the animal. The announcement galled the state’s wildlife agencies — including Texas Parks and Wildlife Department biologists, Texas Game Wardens, and a USDA Wildlife Services trapper — whose inspection at the scene and review of evidence contradicted those findings. A mountain lion had been spotted recently, they said, but it was 100 miles away. They also noted that there had only been about 30 fatal mountain lion attacks in the U.S. in the past 100 years.
In fact, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department disputed whether Whiteley had been attacked by a wild animal at all. “None of the evidence reviewed by [the agency] indicates a predatory attack by a mountain lion or other wild animal,” TPWD spokeswoman Megan Radke said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press on Dec. 6, 2020.
After a contentious meeting on Dec. 7 at the medical examiner’s office, Jonah Evans, the department’s state mammalogist, was concerned that law enforcement authorities had so quickly ruled out homicide as the manner of death. “I’m really concerned about the possibility that a murder[er is] out right now and has gotten away with this crime,” he wrote, according to The Dallas Morning News.
But the Hood County Sheriff’s Office announced in January 2021 that it was closing the case after a final autopsy by the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office, which ruled the death an accident due to an animal attack. It noted, however, “There is still a disagreement with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department whether Whiteley was killed by a mountain lion or not.”
Members of a faith-healing sect surround a woman as a man holds a snake above her head in Evarts, Kentucky, on Aug. 22, 1944.
Snake(s)
On Oct. 4, 1991, Darlene Summerford said her husband, a Pentecostal snake handler, used the tools of his trade to try to kill her. As depicted in the 2020 HBO Max documentary “Alabama Snake,” Glenn Summerford, 47, forced his 23-year-old wife to stick her hand in a cage of rattlesnakes in the hopes that she would die from a poisonous snake bite.
She was bitten — twice — but fortunately received anti-venom treatment and recovered.
“He took a pipe and hit the cages real hard so the snakes got real mad and then grabbed me by the hair and said he would push my face in there if I didn’t stick my hand in there,” she told jurors during his trial for attempted murder, according to The Associated Press. “He said I had to die because he wanted to marry another woman.”
Summerford was the pastor of the Church of Jesus With Signs Following in Scottsboro, Alabama. The religious practice of snake handling, a ritual usually accompanied by speaking in tongues and laying on hands, centered around a literal interpretation of a biblical command to “take up serpents” without being harmed.
Summerford was convicted and sentenced to 99 years in jail.
Mike Williams' family and friends cry over the guilty verdict in the trial against Denise Williams, Mike's former wife, on Dec. 14, 2018.
Alligator
When Mike Williams went missing after hunting ducks on Florida’s Lake Seminole in December 2000, authorities suspected he’d been eaten by alligators. His boat was found on the shore, his car was abandoned nearby, and searchers later found his hunting license, jacket and waders at the bottom of the lake.
The 31-year-old real estate appraiser had been married to his wife, Denise, for six years, and they had an 18-month-old daughter. Williams’ best friend, Brian Winchester, was an insurance agent, and convinced Williams to take out three life insurance policies totaling about $1.75 million, NBC News reported.
Denise Williams successfully petitioned to have her husband declared dead, received the insurance payout — and married Winchester in 2005. The couple eventually divorced, but in 2016, she told police that Winchester had kidnapped her at gunpoint. Investigation into the kidnapping brought new attention to Mike Williams’ disappearance, and 14 months later, Winchester agreed to a plea deal with prosecutors. In exchange for telling authorities about the killing, he admitted he had buried his friend’s body far from Lake Seminole and its alligators; even 17 years later, the remains and clothes were still intact. To avoid prosecution for murder, Winchester admitted to shooting and killing Williams and implicated Denise, with whom he’d been having a three-year affair before they decided to kill her husband and collect the life insurance money.
Denise Williams was sentenced to life in prison in 2019. It was reversed on appeal, but she remained in prison on a 30-year sentence for conspiracy to commit murder. Winchester, who received immunity for the murder, is serving a 20-year sentence for armed kidnapping.
Bear
Lucas Gingras was staying in a Vermont cabin in 2014 with his girlfriend, Ladonna Merriman, when he told her they needed to jump off a 70-foot cliff to flee from a bear. But there was no bear, which Gingras later explained he’d hallucinated because they had been taking drugs.
Merriman, however, told authorities that she believed Gingras wanted to kill her because she was planning to break up with him. After she survived the fall down the cliff, he allegedly dragged her to their car, returned with a rifle and fired a shot inside.
Gingras was charged with attempted first-degree murder and arson (he also set fire to the cabin), among other crimes, but the charges against him were reduced after Merriman died from unrelated causes and could not testify at trial. He was sentenced to 4 to 10 years for arson and reckless endangerment and was released on furlough in 2019.
Suzanne Morphew in an undated photo.
Elk, Deer, Chipmunks And More
Colorado man Barry Morphew blamed a menagerie of wild animals — including 85 chipmunks, a bull elk, deer with horns and a runaway turkey — on his unusual behavior when police questioned him after his wife, Suzanne Morphew, disappeared in May 2020, and suggested that she’d been attacked by a mountain lion. He was charged with her murder, but in April 2021, days before Morphew’s trial was scheduled to start, the district attorney asked that all charges against him be dropped. Morphew later filed a $15 million lawsuit accusing prosecutors and local, state and federal investigators of violating his civil rights.
From there, the investigation seemed to stall. But in September, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation announced that Suzanne Morphew’s body had been found. Authorities, who have not named Barry Morphew as a suspect, believe she was murdered and buried in a shallow grave before her remains were scattered — likely by animals.