The Lost Dogs (9 page)

Among the vehicles and equipment gathered were shovels, nose plugs, and body bags. The VSP forensics unit would do most of the heavy lifting on the exhumations, but what they would do once they unearthed the dogs remained an open question. Ideally the bodies would go into some sort of cold storage to preserve them as evidence, but Knorr had called around to a few such places and none were thrilled by the idea of stockpiling dead dogs for an indeterminate amount of time.

Normally, Knorr wouldn’t have forged on with such an important question unanswered, but he was particularly eager to get back on the property and dig. Sometime between May 7 and May 18 the house had been broken into and burglarized. On the one hand this seemed neither outrageous nor alarming. The house was now both notorious and unoccupied, so there was a chance criminals and souvenir seekers had come to clean out whatever they could find. The missing items included three plasma TVs—sixty-two, forty-two, and thirty-two inches—two floor buffers, a vacuum, a leather sofa, and an upright washer and dryer, all valued at a total of $17,550.

On the other hand, Knorr knew there was a possibility the Bad Newz crew had taken the stuff themselves to keep it from being confiscated and had reported it stolen to cover their tracks. Even more frightening, Knorr wondered if they were removing evidence from the house, and using burglary claims to give them an out in case investigators noticed anything missing.

He suspected the worst, which was all the more reason why he was happy Brinkman had secured a warrant, a team had been assembled, and they were less than an hour away from executing the search. As the group huddled for one last run-through of the plan, Brinkman’s phone rang. He walked off as he spoke, then closed the phone and turned around.

“We’re done,” he said. “We’re shut down.”

“What?” Knorr said.

“That was Brown. He and Poindexter said we can’t go forward with the warrant, said there was something wrong with it. Also said Vick has sold the house.”

Knorr exhaled through tight lips. “Is that normal?”

“In ten years,” Brinkman said, “he hasn’t questioned one of my warrants.”

Knorr pulled out his own phone. “Mike Gill, please,” he said, then waited in silence. “Mike,” he said at last, “it’s Jim Knorr. We have a situation.”

The next night Knorr was driving to Baltimore’s Camden Yards. The Orioles were hosting the Toronto Blue Jays and Knorr was going to the game with his son and his son’s friend. Knorr’s phone rang. It was Mike Gill, and he wanted to talk about obtaining a federal warrant in the next few days to go after the missing evidence.

Knorr was on board. After the search was canceled, Brinkman assumed Poindexter would make his objections known. Once those were addressed, Brinkman would be able to obtain a new warrant and move forward. That sounded good on paper, but Knorr was too amped up and pissed off to sit around and wait, so he drove to Virginia Beach to see Brownie. For all of the time he and Brinkman had spent talking to Brownie, neither had ever put anything down on paper. Knorr spent the day typing out Brownie’s entire story and grilling him for specific details about where the dogs were buried. If Mike Gill wanted to get a federal warrant and go after the dead dogs, Knorr was more ready than ever.

His only concerns were organizational. He needed to assemble a new team that would include USDA agents, Virginia State Police, and SWAT. He wasn’t certain of everyone’s availability and how fast he could pull everything together. Not only that, but two more federal inmates had come forward to offer potential evidence against Vick, and he and Brinkman were scheduled to interview those men the following week.

By the time the call was over, Gill had decided they should wait a week. The jailhouse interviews, if they proved productive, would only bolster the warrant request, and it would give Knorr time to muster the troops. When Knorr finally hung up, his car was approaching Camden Yards. He looked at his son and the friend, who had listened to only half of the wide-ranging discussion about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of a confidential case. They stared back, awaiting explanation. “You didn’t hear a thing,” Knorr said. “Got it?”

 

On Tuesday, May 29, Jim Knorr was preparing for his meeting with the first of the three prisoners that was to take place the next day, when another storm hit the news. The Surry County Sheriff’s office issued a press release. It read:

The text of the message gave no reason why the search had been halted and Sheriff Brown remained silent, but Poindexter later told reporters that he and Brown “didn’t like the wording.”

Although he had said at the outset that he wasn’t going to try the case in the media, the commonwealth attorney had been frequently quoted in the press and the accumulated impact of his statements was confounding.

“Much of the confusion over the Vick case and many of the questions center on Poindexter’s comments about the evidence he has found in the month since the raid on Vick’s property,” George Dohrmann wrote on
SI.com
. “At various times, Poindexter has said there is no evidence Vick was involved, that he saw clear evidence of dogfighting, that there were no witnesses to dogfighting on the property, that there were witnesses who claimed Vick fought dogs. And then, on Thursday, when a reporter from WAVY-TV in Virginia asked if Poindexter had evidence that put Vick at dogfights, Poindexter replied: ‘Yes. We have informants. We have people who are volunteering to make those allegations.’ ”

Part of the problem seems to have been a simple lack of clarity. At times the prosecutor appeared to be saying what he believed based on what he’d seen and been told. At other moments he apparently addressed what he could prove based on the evidence he had in hand. At one point he told the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, “I don’t to date have one investigative report. I have nothing on my desk. But I’m in touch with people who assure me they can provide me the stuff.” In other words, what he knew and what he could use in court were two different things.

Taken individually and carefully parsed in this way, most of Poindexter’s statements did make sense within a particular frame of reference, but in their totality, they appeared conflicting to some. As the investigation moved into its second month without any charges filed and no sign that any would be coming soon, reporters, animal rights groups, and even some other people in law enforcement were beginning to question Poindexter.

“He [Poindexter] was at the home and saw the equipment that we seized,” Kathy Strouse, an animal control officer who had been on-site for the initial search told Yahoo! on May 15. “When we were there, he said he had enough right there to issue an indictment. He didn’t say who he would indict, but he said he had enough. Now, with what he has said, it makes you think, ‘What in the world is going on in Surry County?’ This certainly doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy about the Surry County attorney.”

Mark Kumpf, a former animal control officer in Norfolk and Newport News who had moved on to become a dogfighting specialist, told
The Virginian-Pilot,
“There is more evidence [in the Vick case] than has been used to convict several other people in Virginia.”

“The overwhelming majority of dogfighting cases are based on circumstantial evidence. Most often, they could probably get a conviction off much less than [Poindexter’s] already got,” Ethan Eddy, an attorney at the Humane Society told the New York
Daily News
. “It is fair to say that this process has taken longer than usual.” Poindexter did nothing to ease the anxiety when he peppered his interviews with statements like “If people on that property committed a crime, and I believe they did, it will be a crime tomorrow, it will be a crime in six months, it was a crime yesterday,” and “I have several cases with greater priority.”

In defending his reasons for not executing the warrant, Poindexter said he’d been told there was already a wealth of forensic evidence, so he felt no reason to rush back for more. He also contended that if there was something wrong with the new warrant—if the wording wasn’t right as he had said—that there could have been something wrong with the previous ones as well. This seemed especially odd to Knorr since as far as he was concerned those questions had been raised and answered during the May 21 meeting.

Throughout it all, Poindexter invoked the failed Benny Butts prosecution as a reason for his caution. He didn’t want to rush into something that would jeopardize the case down the road and consistently pointed out that the goal was success, not speed. “We would like to bring the strongest case possible, rather than react to knee-jerk pressures,” he told
USA Today
. And “You’ve got to nail things down before you accuse people of felonies.”

Behind the scenes, Knorr bristled. Personally, he found Poindexter profane and vulgar, often punctuating his speech with curses. None of that bothered him much—he’d dealt with tougher characters. But he was troubled by all the talk because he felt public statements hurt investigations: Comments about who was or was not a suspect, what sort of evidence had been collected or was sought, and in which direction the investigation was moving, gave suspects an advantage.

Now, the media had gotten its hands on the unexecuted warrant and the investigation was dealing with a new reality: The entire world was suddenly aware that one of the objects of a proposed search at 1915 Moonlight Road was to exhume as many as thirty dog carcasses. Like Knorr, Mike Gill worried that the suspects would use this latest intelligence to go back and remove evidence. Digging up the dogs and burning down the sheds were serious measures, but they were easy to execute, especially since Brownie had said the graves were fairly shallow. Even more, the main suspect had plenty of motivation—there were literally hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings at stake.

The U.S. attorney’s office of the Eastern District of Virginia may well have been motivated by current events, too. The Duke lacrosse scandal was rattling to a close in the headlines and taking a little of the honor and integrity of government prosecutors with it. That case exploded into the national consciousness in March 2006, when a dancer hired to perform at a party hosted by the Duke team later claimed that she was raped by three of the team members. The Durham, North Carolina, district attorney, Michael Nifong, bungled the case by violating numerous procedural rules, presuming the guilt of the accused by saying in public that Durham would not become known for “a bunch of lacrosse players from Duke raping a black girl,” and calling the team “a bunch of hooligans.” Just over a year later, in April 2007, the North Carolina attorney general dismissed all the charges, and Nifong was disbarred for “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation” and convicted on contempt of court charges.

The case was a black eye for government lawyers, and Durham was only 166 miles from Surry County. The lawyers of the Eastern District of Virginia surely didn’t want to see history repeat itself. They wanted to prove that the job could be done right—fairly, quickly, efficiently and without a media circus trailing behind.

Poindexter may very well have filed charges the following week and successfully prosecuted the Bad Newz crew, but those possibilities would forever remain unexplored because when the information about the search for the dead dogs hit the news, Mike Gill made a decision. The U.S. attorney’s office of the Eastern District of Virginia was officially taking on the case.

This good news came at a price for Brinkman, Knorr, and Gill. The failure or success of the operation would now fall squarely on them. They were aware of the outcry and how closely the case was being watched by both the public at large and the animal rescue community. The pressure was real and the longer the case went without any visible progress, the more it grew. They needed these jailhouse interviews to go well, and they needed to get back on that property. Soon.

THE SURRY COUNTY ANIMAL SHELTER
sits just outside the center of town at the end of a gravel access road that leads to something of a vehicle depot—a lot filled with old semi containers, a car trailer painted in camouflage, and a stable of garbage trucks. The back of the lot is taken up by an appliance dump, stacked with old stoves, leaking refrigerators, rusted-out water heaters, and broken-down washers and dryers. Off to the side lies a low, drab building—the shelter.

Inside, there are fourteen four-foot-by-six-foot chain-link pens broken into two rows of seven, and at the end of April 2007 all but one of those pens were occupied by dogs from 1915 Moonlight Road. Within a few days of arriving the dogs felt as if they knew every inch of the place—the dull beige walls, the ceiling with its exposed beams, and the fans turning slowly. Eight small windows spread around the room let the daylight in, reminding them of where they were not.