In a twisted mystery that has spooked a quiet Pemberton Township neighborhood, two black cats were decapitated, their intestines yanked out and wrapped around the animals' hind legs. Then they were carefully placed in the driveway of a North Lakeshore Drive home.

The woman who found them in her driveway is uneasy. She and her husband have lived in the house for 10 years without problems.

"This is a good neighborhood. We have good kids live here. I don't understand why anyone would do this to us. Really, I don't," said the woman, who asked that her name not be published.

"It was on Friday morning," she said. "I was going out to hang my Halloween flag, and I saw these black things in the driveway. I thought they might be raccoons. But I got closer, and I could see they were cat bodies, and they had no heads."

She called the police, who turned the case over to Burlington County SPCA Chief Richard Forberg. On Tuesday, Forberg led a team of armed investigators through the woodsy neighborhood along Mirror Lake, searching for the missing cat heads, and "possibly other remains of other animals."

Decapited Cats
© J.D. Mullane/PhillyBurbsLaw enforcement agents search for missing cat heads and other animal remains on Gladiolus Street in Pemberton Township, NJ on Tuesday Oct. 1, 2013. Two decapitated black cats were left on a driveway last Friday on North Lakeshore Road.
"We have no suspects," Forberg said, taking a break from the search near Gladiolus Street. "But we believe the cats were killed somewhere else and then deliberately placed in that driveway. We have no idea why."

The animals were sliced open, breastbone to hips, in the same manner that a hunter guts a deer, he said.

"First, we thought it was a religious offering of some sort," Forberg said. "We talked with an expert in Santeria and Voodoo, and he said no. If it was Santeria, there would be other items present to show it was some sort of offering, or sacrifice, or an attempt to cast a spell, whatever you want to call it.

"We inquired about whether this was witchcraft, and the expert's opinion is that it's probably not. Because the cats were black, and black cats hold special meaning to (practitioners of black magic), and are not typically sacrificed.

"We think this is a very, very disturbed individual who did this. And they may have done it as a warning, and we are taking it very seriously," he said.

Keri Sumner saw the investigators sweep past her house Tuesday morning. She said she alerted her neighbors to the cat story by posting an item about it on Facebook.

"It's just so creepy," she said. "It sounds ritualistic. But it's been like that around here. Last January, they found a guy floating in the lake. On Monday, we had a murder. Now we have decapitated cats."

Decapited Cats_1
© J.D. Mullane/PhillyBurbsRichard Forberg, chief of the Burlington County SPCA "humane police," searches in Browns Mills on Tuesday Oct. 1, 2013 for evidence on the bizarre case of two decapiteated, gutted cats left in a driveway on North Lakeshore Road. The cats' intestines were used to bind the animals' rear legs.
Forberg said animal cruelty is not uncommon in Burlington County.

"We had an ax killing of cows a few years back in Westampton," he said. "In Medford, we had a case of two dogs tied up in trees. One died; the other survived. Things like this happen all over the state. But this one, with the beheadings, this is really out there."

The decapitations were clean and done with expertise.

"It appears that a knife was used - a very sharp, clean-edged knife," he said.

The animals' internal organs were intact, too.

"Nothing was missing," he said.

Forberg said he is concerned because there is a grisly pattern well-known to law enforcement: People who get kicks from killing animals usually work their way up to killing people. Serial killers share that common trait.

"That's how they start, by killing animals," he said. "That's why we go through police academy training. Generally, we are the first ones to make contact with serial killers, or people with that potential, like a Jeffrey Dahmer."

But who did it, and why?

Forberg believes it is someone in the neighborhood. Sumner wonders if it is the stranger on a bike who stopped at her house last summer, oddly requesting to snap a picture of their family dog, and then became huffy when she asked him why.

The woman who was the target of the bizarre episode said she does not believe it is anyone in her neighborhood.

"We have to watch for strangers," she said.

Especially if strangers are watching them.