This is not about animals, and there were no crucifixions

Daphne Caruana Galizia Sunday, 9 February 2014, 11:09 Last update: about 11 years ago

From the day the first ‘crucified’ cat was found in Mosta two and a half years ago, it was obvious that this is not about animals, but about one very disturbed person. The animals were and remain a side issue and not the main deal. The man who is doing this is not to be described as disturbed on the basis that he is killing animals. There is far more to it than that, and this simplistic attitude is deeply foolish.

The killing of animals is just a fragmentary manifestation of a very profound problem: severe persecution mania and paranoid delusions. The deaths of dogs and cats are not the primary problem or the main thing with which we should be concerned. They are a side issue, the collateral damage if you wish, in the story of a dangerous man with an unbalanced mind.

I have been consistent from the outset in the view that the perpetrator should be caught not because he is a danger to animals, but because he is a danger to people and all the signs are there that he would think nothing of harming human beings or killing them. It did not occur to me at the start, though, that he might well have killed or harmed human beings already because I ignored the variable factors and instead bought the talk, based on the assumption that the perpetrator was youngish, that he would ‘graduate’ to violence against people.

But if the note found a few days ago with the dead cat on the Mosta church parvis is authentic, then it would seem that the real perpetrator is an octogenarian who has killed his own sibling in cold blood already, while suffering from paranoia and the belief that she had burnt his breakfast deliberately, and who was imprisoned for a decade for this. The same note claims that he paid young drug addicts to do the animals jobs for him, which would explain the eyewitness account of three young people looking suspicious in a car near Mosta church in the dead hours that night. One person doing that alone would be a mentally disturbed individual, but the involvement of three people indicates something else entirely that has nothing to do with mental illness: that they are doing it either as an elaborate prank (unlikely, as it has lasted two and a half years) or that they are doing it as a commissioned job for somebody else.

Unfortunately, too many people are missing the most crucial points in this awful matter and, even after the publication of the details in that note, have continued to speculate about the identity of the youngish man in the CCTV footage and to call for the police to catch him. But the information contained in that note means that the man caught on film is now almost irrelevant except as the means for acquiring the identity of the unbalanced individual who is behind all this. Who actually left the dead cat and dog on the church parvis is little more than a detail now that we know they were paid to do it. They are not the ones we need to be worried about. The real concern is the man who got them to do it in return for a bit of cash.

A lot of people seem to believe that the note was forged, a bit of fiction designed to ‘frame’ that man who shot his sister, on the door of whose house – which he had abandoned – the first dead animal was found. I haven’t seen the actual note. It wasn’t reproduced in the press but only reported in detail. Yet the level of that detail indicates that it cannot be a false creation, a bit of naughty fiction designed to get somebody else into trouble. To do that, the forger would have had to get into the mind of somebody in the grip of lifelong pathological paranoia/persecution mania, and more to the point, get into the mind of one particular individual suffering from that mental illness, with his specific paranoid concerns.

It is precisely because I write for a living that I understand how difficult that is, and how unlikely it is that there is somebody with that level of creative skill, imagination, perception and research abilities – a crucial mix of talents – living in Mosta and engaged in an elaborate game over two and a half years. Somebody that gifted would not be occupying himself in this manner. The level of detail – emotional detail as well as factual – means that the note is probably authentic. And in any case, it is always sensible to deploy Occam’s razor. Is it more likely to be authentic, or is it more likely to be the elaborate creation of somebody able to understand the paranoid mind, know various esoteric details (ripped jumpers, statues in Britannia Square, and so on) and also write in a manner that reflects the Mosta speech pattern? I’d say it’s the former.

As for the repeated use of the terms ‘animal crucifixions’ or ‘Mosta crucifixions’, it is nonsensical and hyperbolic. There have been no crucifixions. What we are talking about here is dogs and cats tied and sometimes nailed to two pieces of wood when they were already dead. Crucifixion is a very specific term: it means the nailing of an individual to a cross of wood so as to bring about his death.

If the individual is dead already, then it is not a crucifixion but the nailing or tying of a corpse to a cross. By heightening the drama, we are just giving this man what he wants and needs. The animals were dead, killed by other means. The cross is just post-mortem drama to get into the news – because if the cross were not there, yet another dead dog or cat in the street would go unreported.