Washington County Cattle Mutilation Experiment
By Rick O'Kelley
In the summer of 1977 I was a criminal investigator working for the Washington Co Sheriff's Department. Herb Marshall was the sheriff and Lt J D Snow was chief of investigations. Lt Snow was a seasoned livestock investigator and when we began to investigate complaints about possible mutilated livestock he was quick to point out that he believed the animals were dying from diease and natural processes were at work on the carcasses. Benton County to our north had a lot more of these coming in and some involved expensive horses. Sgt Doug Fogley of the Arkansas State Police CID was called in by Benton County to assist and it seemed the more these were talked about the more began to occur. Over the next two years more and more of these cases came in, so many that Dr. Nancy Owen of the University of Arkansas conducted her own investigation of 20 of the Benton County cases debunking some of the myths.
By 1979 Lt Snow had left the department and I was in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division. The press was reporting on the mutilations and panic seemed to be spreading fears. It was like Orson Wells was on the radio with his "War of the World" and no one was listening to his reminder that it was just a show but that was about to change. It was September when Sheriff Marshall come into the CID office and annouced that we were going to conduct a cattle mutilation experiment and he instructed me to put together three teams, one investigator and one patrol officer on each team. Video was new an expensive at that time but Springdale Police Department had a new camera and they agreed to loan it for the experiment. I had both a new personal camera and the department camera to record the experiment on film. In late September or early October we traveled to Jack Perry's ranch located east of Springdale and just north off of then US 68 Highway now US 412. Mr Perry had a vet put down a sick calf and we began our round the clock surveilance of the carcass. After 36 hours and three twelve hour shifts we concluded. What we found and what was recorded was a classic cattle mutilation. While this was in early fall, it was hot and just a few hours in the sun and the carcase bloted and pushed the insides out the anus of the calf. The blow flies were quick to remove the eye that was up, the tongue that was hanging out, and the insides that were pushed out. At night the carcass would cool and all evidence would be pulled into the body of the carcass. We were surprised that no preditors appear during the stakeout. All the "surgical" removals were done by the blow flies.
We took our evidence to the Cattlemans Association meeting and invited the press. After viewing our evidence all but one rancher agreed and that rancher was one of the ranchers who had reported a mutilation and he was angry probably more because he had told his fellow ranchers that he believed devil worshipers had killed his cow. The press reported our experiment and almost immediately the reporting of the mutilations stopped. Farmers, ranchers, and vets begin to focus on what was causing the live stock to die and less on what happened after they died. I remained at the department until 1991 when I retired and we had no additional reports during my time.
Our experiment was reported in the local and state newspapers and on local TV. In the fall of 1980 one of the investigators brought in the September 1980 issue of Penthouse Magazine and there on page 120 was a story about the who nation wide cattle mutilation event. On page 142 at the bottom of the left column it said "And so it was, in search of the surgeon, that Herb Marshall, the enterprising sheriff of Washington Co Ark., setup an experiment in which two of his men parked themselves in some bushes for 30 hours traight and observed a calf...". To be certainly Sheriff Marshall deserves far more credit than most give. My role in this was I was simply following his orders. He and Rancher Jack Perry organized it and we merely executed the orders we were given. To Sheriff Marshall's deputies this was just another case that our Sheriff had assigned, no more and no different than any other but to my amazement if you google for "Sheriff Herb Marshall" you will not find this story outside this posts but if you google "Sgt Rick O'Kelley" you will find this story which originiates with a newspaper interview that I was authorized to give in Sheriff Marshall's absence. He and Jack Perry should receive full credit for this experiment and this post is to set the record straight.
I have gone on to establish an Internet business and image my surprise when in the summer of 2005 I received an email from a person at National Geographic asking if I was the Rick O'Kelley who was part of the 1979 experiment. They were working on an episode of "Is IT Real" titled Chupacabras. They flew to Northwest Arkansas with a film crew and interviewed myself and at my assistance former Sheriff Herb Marshall. The file had long been distroyed or mislaid and none of the images that I took for the department seem to exist but I had a dozen of images that I had taken with my personal camera of the experiment and some of my images were used in their show.
I am surprised that thirty years after this experiment that cattle mutilations continue to be of interest to so many. I am more surprised that no other agency has duplicated our experiment as they often continue to expend resources investigating seeking other causes. I found as late as 2008 in some blogs that our 1979 experiment is still being talked about.