The saga of a missing leopard, dead vulture and stolen monkeys would become a national obsession and lead to a single arrest.
The culprit came and left in the dead of night, leaving no trace by footprint or film. The only evidence of an unwelcome visitor took shape in cut, mangled mesh, and the discovery of a single tenant in a home where two had lived.
There are two alarms you can sound in a moment like this: Code Blue or Code Red, the latter reserved for the most dangerous animals. Nova fell into the former.At roughly 29 pounds and 3 feet long, Nova isn’t a leopard at all, but an entirely separate genus of wild cat named for the cloudlike spots that coat her body. When compared to the playful personality of her sister, Luna, Nova is known to be shy, even standoffish.
The theory was Nova, who has been bonded to her sister since birth, wouldn’t wander far. A nocturnal cat, the hope was she was camouflaged in a nearby canopy, waiting for either dinner or dusk to explore. About 30 minutes later, the incessant screech of a squirrel gave Van Slett pause. Pay attention to nature.
Pin, an endangered, lappet-faced vulture was found lifeless on Jan. 21, just over a week after Nova went missing, during another morning head count gone awry. He was believed to be about 35 years old, and spent 33 of those years at the Dallas Zoo. The zoo couldn’t fathom how or why, but it was clear their best efforts were failing them. So they tried something new: A reward — $10,000.On Jan. 29, a zoo visitor was asking questions about animals. Not just any questions, obscure questions:This man took notes on tissue paper.Bella and Finn, two emperor tamarin monkeys, were missing.
Jef Tingley, a senior zoologist, worked with both of them in their first weeks in Dallas. “It’s not just some animal somewhere,” Tingley said. “They’re very special to us — priceless.” If there was any chance the pair had merely escaped and were on their way home, keepers placed not only cameras near the back door to their habitat, but water, food and heaters.In North Texas, a winter storm was coating the region in ice.In a residential neighborhood in Lancaster, a city about 15 miles south of the zoo, sat a multicolored-brick church topped with a gable roof.
Zookeepers had compared notes and pinpointed a common thread on surveillance video: A man wearing a knit hat, hoodie and sweatpants. The map on his phone lit up in streaks of red. It was nearing rush hour, and Edell figured it must be traffic. Then he remembered: the storm. Rain and sleet had clogged and caked the freeways. But staying home wasn’t an option. He hoped his 4Runner would hold up.
Once inside the zoo’s hospital, just beyond the elephant habitat in the Giants of the Savanna, Bella and Finn were sedated for thorough physical exams, and worst fears were confirmed when they were placed on the scale. Finn had lost more than 10% of his body weight, while Bella lost half that, figures a zoo animal health and welfare official called “quite dangerous.”He wanted to make a triumphant announcement:But he also didn’t want to make promises he couldn’t keep.
Like in 2016, when outrage erupted over the death of Harambe, a gorilla shot dead at the Cincinnati Zoo after a boy fell into his enclosure. Or in 2007, when a group of young menat the San Francisco Zoo until she leapt from her enclosure and mauled them. She, too, was killed.
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