Heavy rains fell Thursday, and by that evening, the cat hadn’t come home. “I went out and called for her and she didn’t come around,” she says. Friday afternoon, the owner went searching for the cat and found it lying in the back yard.

“She had a slash mark — it was probably four inches long — that went on her thigh, along her back leg,” the owner reports. Another shallow cut slashed fur and skin, while a third, 6 inches long, sliced through the cat’s abdomen.

At first, the owner thought a dog or raccoon might have attacked her pet. But the cuts were clean, she says. “It wasn’t shredded, it wasn’t torn. It was like someone had something really sharp and had sliced her.”

She buried the cat soon after, thinking she might never know who had killed it. But on Sunday, she discovered suspicious graffiti on the city-issued garbage can behind her house. “GORE,” it said in red. A neighbor who’s a veterinarian looked at the letters, she says, and confirmed they’d been written in blood.

“What had really disturbed us,” the cat’s owner says, was the police department’s apparent lack of interest in the slaughtering. It’s something worth paying attention to, she says, especially since she’s seen a few graffiti tags in the Fan identical to the one on her trash can. It could be a copycat, she says, or perhaps “they’re just refining their work of art.”

The police “didn’t even come out and take a report or anything,” she says. The officer she called referred the case to Animal Control. A spokesman for that department says he wasn’t aware of the incident and had never heard of anything like it before.

The cat’s owner wonders if it was “a ritual thing, or someone full of hate.” She has warned her neighbors to keep their pets in at night. After all, she says, “This is the way Jeffrey Dahmer started out.”

— Melissa Scott