Crime-Fighting Cats

When we think of animals in police service, most of us think of dogs. Who hasn’t seen a drug-sniffing dog at an airport or a police dog demonstrating a take-down of an officer in padded clothes? Horses, in the service of the mounted police, are probably a close second.

But when it comes to crime-fighting cats, it’s fiction that comes to mind—Lilian Jackson Braun’s “The Cat Who…” series or our own shared series about Trouble, a black cat detective following in the footsteps of his father, Familiar. These fictional sleuths are practically icons in the world of cozy mysteries, but did you know they also have a distinguished record of service in real-life law enforcement?

It’s true. In fact, two Siamese cats once starred in what might have become an international incident.

Cats 1, Spies 0

It was 1964, and the staff of Holland’s embassy in Moscow, Russia, began to notice something unusual about the behavior of the two Siamese cats who lived there. The cats kept meowing and clawing at the walls of the building. Naturally, the staff suspected they’d been invaded by mice.

Expecting to find the invading rodents in the walls, the staff got out their tools and set about trying to expose their unwelcome visitors. Imagine their surprise when they found, not mice, but microphones!

Hidden in the walls by Russian spies, the microphones, when active, made a sound inaudible to humans, but perfectly audible to the cats’ more sensitive ears. This may have been the first and only time a Russian spy mission was foiled by a pair of felines.

Admittedly, these two spy-busting cats might more accurately be called diplomats than detectives, but they’re far from alone when it comes to fighting crime.

Cats with a Badge

For example, a police spokeswoman told the Guardian about a cat named Chief Mouser PC Tizer. Mouser, who lived up to his name, was assigned to patrol King’s Cross rail station and keep it free of mice and rats. And when a stray cat in Kyoto, Japan wandered into a police station, he was given a name (Lemon), made an honorary police officer, and given his own uniform.

Feline crime-fighters are a worldwide phenomenon. In the Texas coastal town of Port Lavaca, an orange tabby called the Captain outranks everyone except police chief Colin Rangnow. A social media star with more than 1,300 Instagram followers, the Captain keeps his officers in line with a balance of rewards and punishments (impromptu back massages and paw bops to the back of the head). Meanwhile, in a land Down Under, a “cop cat” named Ed patrols the stables at the New South Wales arm of the Australian Police Force. Ed single-handedly makes sure the horses of Sydney’s mounted police live in rodent-free accommodations.

Even Cat DNA Can Solve Crimes

In 2013, British authorities used the nation’s feline DNA database to convict a man of manslaughter. After eight cat hairs were found on the curtain wrapped around a dismembered male torso found on a Southsea beach, Detectives sent the hairs to the University of California’s Veterinary Medicine animal forensics lab for analysis. The cat hairs were a match for Tinker, a cat owned by suspect David Hilder, but authorities still needed to prove the strength of the match. That was the beginning of UK’s cat DNA database; with the cooperation of vets across the country, a Ph.D student collected 152 samples. When only three matched the crime scene samples, they knew the markers found in Tinker’s DNA were uncommon. While not conclusive on their own, when combined with the traces of the victim’s blood found in Hilder’s apartment, they gave detectives powerful evidence that Hilder was their man.

This was the first time cat DNA had been used to convict a killer in the UK, but not the first time worldwide. In 1994, Canadian detectives used hair from a white cat named Snowball to convict Douglas Beamish for the murder of his common-law wife, 32-year-old Shirley Duguey.

As you can see, cats and crime fighting go together like peas and carrots. Like meat and potatoes. Like peanut butter and chocolate. Next time you see your cat basking in a ray of sunlight, it might suddenly occur to you that maybe he’s not really napping. Maybe he’s actually solving a crime.

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Jaden Terrell is a Shamus Award finalist and the internationally published author of the Nashville-based Jared McKean mysteries. She is a contributor to the Killer Nashville Noir anthology, to International Thriller Writers’ The Big Thrill magazine, and to Now Write! Mysteries, a collection of writing exercises published by Tarcher/Penguin for writers of crime fiction. This former special education teacher is now a writing coach who offers private coaching, live workshops, and online courses for writers. In February 2019, KaliOka Press will publish her first Trouble novel, Trouble Most Faire, in which Trouble teams up with a mischievous potbellied pig to solve a murder at a Renaissance Faire. Connect with Jaden at www.jadenterrell.com.