Page 5 - Blood and thunder

An unusual case

How far would you go to keep a secret? As a detective I had come across many
weird cases but today I`m going to tell you about the most difficult and peculiar case
that I had to lead: “The man who stole a leopard”.
A few years ago the police arrested a man who illegally kept a wild animal. He
domesticated a leopard and had it caged inside his house. Apparently, he really loved
that creature. Was the man crazy or did he have reasons? Well, I was wondering the
same so I decided to take the case and look into it.
First of all, I thought, why a leopard? Where did he get it? In his house he had
many pictures, most of them of the leopard but I figured it out that he was a zoologist
so he used to go on expeditions to the jungles with his work team. They often stayed in
the places they went, camping for better work. He spent all of his time there so it seemed
to be easy, he liked animals, maybe he was obsessed with them and he took one, but
there had to be something more. One thing that left me thinking was that when he was
arrested he said so many times the phrase: “don’t spill my secret”. So what secret was
he talking about?
After months of reading his notes and discoveries, I realized that there was a
woman involved. On one of his trips he saw a leopard cub that was injured so he took it
to the camp because there was a new vet. She saved the leopard but they had to keep it
in the camp for some days because the animal wasn’t in conditions to live on its own.
The point is that he fell madly in love with that woman but she told him “no” several
times. Even though she avoided him, he started to get the idea in his mind that she, the
leopard and him could form a family.
He used to stare at her every time he met her, so with time she realized that he
was mad as a hatter. Consequently, she wanted to stop working with him. When he
noticed that, he decided to give her what he thought was a “small” dose of morphine
that they had to calm the animals, but instead of that, he gave her an overdose that killed
her. What’s more, a disturbing fact is that her body was found in the man’s attic.
But continuing with the story, the man no longer thought clearly. In a desperate
attempt to escape, he took the leopard with him. In part, because it was the only thing
he had to remember the woman he loved. And besides, because he believed that the
animal could reveal it all, since it had seen everything. That’s why he kept it in a cage,
in this way the leopard wouldn’t spill his secret.

Story based on Duran Duran’s song “The man who stole a leopard”