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Family Rattled By Visit From The Macabre

By DANIEL RUTH

Published: Nov 13, 2007

This is more than a story about a dead animal. It's a story about a dark, lifeless, cruel soul.

Until about a week ago, Martha Kaye Koehler, the in-house legal counsel for Hillsborough Community College, and her family lived a comfortable middle-class life in South Tampa.

Since March the Koehlers had been raising Joy and Hearts, two Pekin ducks (think AFLAC insurance commercials) in the backyard of their Sunset Park home.

Pekin ducks, which don't fly, are known to be easily domesticated, harmless critters.

So imagine the consternation when Koehler awoke Monday, Nov. 5, to discover Joy missing from her backyard.

"I just thought the duck had been stolen," Koehler said, noting how hard it was to explain to her 9-year-old daughter Ryann that sometimes there are just bad people in the world.

Martha Kaye Koehler was about to find out she had had no idea how bad.

Creepy Turn

It was already disturbing enough to realize some sick, twisted lowlife had violated her family's privacy by invading her backyard in the dead of night to steal a helpless animal. Now things were to take an even creepier turn.

The next day, Koehler arrived home from work. "Something looked odd," Koehler recalled. "I had a funny feeling something was not right." And it wasn't.

Joy was dead. Whoever took the duck had broken her neck and to add insult to depravity had returned to the Koehler's backyard to carefully bury the bird in an almost ceremonial fashion.

"It was almost as if someone was leaving me a message," said a shaken Koehler, who has lived peacefully on her street for many years without any problems with her neighbors.

The ducks had been pets, following Ryann around like puppies. Now the Koehler backyard had become a killing field playground for a depraved dolt.

Yet, the Koehlers' ordeal was far from over.

Hearts was relocated to a safer home. Joy was buried in a deep hole in the backyard. Martha Kaye Koehler thought her family's horrific experience was at an end.

Always Looking

She was wrong.

On Thursday night, "they came back on the property," Koehler said of her tormentor. Joy had been dug up and the duck's head now stuck out of the dirt.

Police reports have been filed. Koehler has posted fliers around her neighborhood. But in the course of two weeks, a family's life, a little girl's life, has been forever damaged.

"This has changed our lives," Martha Kaye Koehler said. "I know I will always be looking for someone who may be watching us."

Koehler and her husband C.J. are in the process of installing motion-sensitive lights in their backyard. That's cold comfort, though.

The couple knows that somewhere in their neighborhood a highly disturbed person walks the streets, maybe waves to them from their car, passes them in the supermarket, and - watches them.

It wasn't just an animal that met an untimely end at the hands of a half-wit.

It was too calculated.

It was too cold.

It was evil paying a house call.

And it lives among us.

Keyword: Book Of Ruth, to read and comment on Daniel Ruth's blog.