ILLINOIS -- Forty years before law enforcement raided her home wearing HazMat gear, before the electricity was shut off, before the eviction notice was served, before the smell of ammonia overtook her house and feces covered the floor, a love of animals was born inside the heart of a tiny 8-year-old girl from Christopher that was so strong she spent countless hours practicing surgical operations on her Winnie-the-Pooh doll.
Elisa Kirkpatrick studied hard, driven with purpose. She graduate from Christopher High School, then Rend Lake College and SIU and finally realized her dream of practicing veterinary medicine when she walked across the stage at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine.
On June 3, 1993, she became licensed veterinarian No. 090-006939.
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| Photo: Richard Sitler, The Southern |
In the years since, she said, she never met an animal she didn’t love. In fact, she said, the more misfit the animal the more she loved it.
She preferred them to humans. Kirkpatrick, 51, said she never married because no man ever stayed around long after meeting her roommates, which lately included
more than 40 dogs, 15 cats, 2 pigs, a donkey, a cockatoo, a bobcat and an African serval named Aoiqe – an Irish feminine name that means “beauty” or “radiance.” The cat – bigger than a large dog, colored like a cheetah – shared her bed for some time, she said, until the animal's natural instincts kicked in to prey on the smaller animals also cuddled up.
On Friday, Williamson County law enforcement, firefighters and animal control officials raided her home, north of Creal Springs. Wearing biohazard suits, they removed the live animals, some caged, some running loose, as well as
several bags and three deep-freezers full of dead animals.
Noting conditions so horrendous – the smell of feces and urine so offensive to the nose – Williamson County Sheriff Bennie Vick said he couldn’t imagine any living thing staying there.
They left Kirkpatrick behind.
'Put me in jail'
Kirkpatrick said she spent the night in the home all weekend, as she has on and off for months, hanging onto her 23-acre, $160,000 farm home, even after the central heating and air busted and she couldn’t afford to fix it several years ago, even when the electricity was shut off 2-1/2 weeks ago. In the winter, she said, they huddled around two space heaters. She used window units in the summer.
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| Photo: Richard Sitler, The Southern |
Several officers, she said, called her a “liar.” She overheard one person on scene call her “evil.”
Another officer, she said, asked if she had starved the dead animals to death, or simply killed them.
Though Kirkpatrick expects they will soon, deputies didn’t arrest her during the weekend.
“I said, ‘Put me in jail. I’ll get a break. I won’t have to worry about lights or food. It’ll be a vacation from what I’ve been going through,” she said, looking at her feet, her voice growing quiet, as she added: “It’s humiliating.”
Vick said officers responded to the woman’s home after a representative of Regions Bank, attempting to serve an eviction notice in the process to foreclosure, was alarmed by what he smelled.
“He noticed the odor and he thought there was probably a body in there that had decomposed,” Vick said.
An investigation was opened, and Kirkpatrick agreed to an interview at the sheriff’s office.
According to police, she told them that she
had lost her veterinarian license in 2014, but was still doing surgeries in her home. She informed investigators that her clients did not know she had lost her license – and no one came to the house. Kirkpatrick would go to her clients’ homes and pick up the animals, and then return them.
She told investigators she recently performed surgeries on dogs and cats. She did those surgeries on her kitchen island, the sheriff’s office said.
Suspended license
Records provided by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation show Kirkpatrick’s license was suspended in December 2014 for not less than one year for practicing veterinary medicine on an expired license and for failing to provide care within acceptable practice standards.
That suspension stemmed from a 2011 case in which an owner claimed the cat that had been left at Kirkpatrick’s Kitty Klinic, off Giant City Road, showed signs of injury and neglect and smelled of urine. Kirkpatrick’s license was previously suspended between Jan. 31 and Dec. 27, 2011, records show.
According to the file, Kirkpatrick never responded to several requests to address the complaint, and missed two hearings on the matter in June and August.
Police said the interview on Friday prompted a call to Williamson County Animal Control, who agreed that the animals were in a life threatening situation. A search warrant was issued.
Charges are likely
Without power, the freezers had thawed, causing the kind of smell that delivers a punch to the face and gut.
“I don’t think she was living there,” Sheriff Vick said, asked why the woman was left behind by police after the raid without an evaluation or welfare check by a social worker. “I just can’t imagine anyone living in that filth. None of the guys said anything about being concerned about her health or mental health status or anything.”
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| Photo: Richard Sitler, The Southern |
Vick said the case is being prepared for State’s Attorney Brandon Zanotti, and charges are likely. Zanotti said on Tuesday he did not expect them that day, and did not indicate when they might come.
'I'm not crazy'
When The Southern approached her home on Tuesday afternoon about a quarter mile off Route 166, Kirkpatrick was not there. An older gentleman, Louis Ottolini, was working in her yard. He described himself as a friend and customer for 15-plus years.
“If you’ve never seen an animal lover, you’re going to see one right now,” he said.
Ottolini said people will judge what has happened here, but they will misunderstand. He noted that Kirkpatrick had spent tens of thousands of dollars on her animals. Recently, he said, she paid $15,000 for a kidney transplant for a cat, Angel Boy. She recently paid $2,000 for her runt house donkey, Theo, to have a prolapsed rectum treated.
Ottolini said Kirkpatrick was working in the basement, and honked the truck horn several times to alert her that guests had arrived. A rooster crowed, but she did not appear.
A few minutes later, Kirkpatrick rode up her winding gravel driveway on a rustic green John Deere lawnmower.
Clothes hung loose on her thin body. Hot-pink, fuzzy winter socks were tucked into her slip-on white sneakers. Kirkpatrick declined an interview at first, saying she was advised not to talk. Eventually, she opened up, speaking for more than an hour, growing angry at times, crying at others. Several times, she said, “I’m not crazy.”
Kirkpatrick said she worries people will hear about her situation and think she believes the way she was living was OK. She said she knows it was not. “It’s so bizarre,” she said. “The whole spiral of events.”
She practiced on Giant City Road for 13 years, and then moved her practice to Carterville. People would drop off cats for a procedure and never come back for them, she said, claiming it happened five times in 2014. She took them in. Those and others, she took them all in. The house became fuller, her wallet thinner.
Right after her Carbondale clinic closed, she said, her mom tripped over a dog and broke both wrists and an arm. A month later, she broke her hip, Kirkpatrick said. Moving things from bad to worse, she said, in October, her dad was diagnosed with cancer. She knew the house was getting out of control but said she thought, “I’m losing my dad. I’m sad. I just shut the room door. I’ll just deal with the poop later.”
Her dad died in January.
She described her parents and animals as her best friends. A neighbor described her as a recluse who appeared not to have many people friends.
Kirkpatrick said she kept practicing after the state suspended her license because she needed money to keep the animals fed. She said she spends upward of $1,000 a month on pet supplies and food. For months, she said, she’s been feeding herself $2.31 per day of drive-thru Taco Bell.
The majority of her dogs, she said, came from a raid of a Colp home, where 47 dogs were taken in March 2008. She recalled telling a friend she just wanted to go look at the dogs. Her friend warned her: “Don’t!” Kirkpatrick said she ended up with many of the dogs, nursing them to health, spaying or neutering them and then placing them in supposed forever homes. All came back but one, she said.
“They’re feral. They’re wild,” she said. “They’re big, mangy, mated, un-socialized dogs, but I loved them.”
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| Photos: Richard Sitler, The Southern |
Kirkpatrick said she was storing the dead animals in her house because she planned to have them cremated, but couldn’t come up with the roughly $100 per animal that it cost. If she buried them in the yard, the wild animals would get them, she said. When the power was cut off, she said, she panicked and kept hoping she could dig herself out of the ever-widening hole.
Of her animals, she vowed to fight in court to get them back. Her only regret, she said, was keeping the bobcat as long as she did. “I knew that was wrong.”
But she said someone had trapped him and brought him to her covered with 1,000 ticks and so weak he could hardly stand.
She intended to nurse him back to health and set him free. Like all the animals, the bobcat also had a name, but she declined to give it, saying she didn’t want people to get the wrong idea that she thought it was a pet.
(
The Southern - May 26, 2015)
