by Linda Moulton Howe
Bill Hill was a police officer in the Peoria, Illinois for twenty-five years and then retired to the mountain wilderness of Salmon, Idaho. He purchased some horses for his ranch which stretches along a dead-end road. There is no traffic because there is no way to go beyond his property.
On January 12, 1995, he bought a healthy, young male buckskin. Then fourteen days later, he found the horse lying dead three hundred feet from his house on two inches of fresh snow.
"I could not understand what I was looking at," Mr. Hill told me. "There were no tracks around the horse, no signs of struggle, and no blood. Yet, a large section of hide had been cut from the belly taking the surface skin of the testicles and penis with it, but leaving the organs intact without the surface skin. On one side of the neck, there was a large hole that went in about two to three inches. The hole was filled with blood, but nothing was leaking onto the snow. And steam was rising from the wounds. So I must have come upon the horse soon after he was killed and cut up."
Mr. Hill called the sheriff's office and a veterinarian. At first it was assumed the neck hole had been caused by a bullet. However, the veterinarian confirmed there was no bullet and that "nothing was broken up inside the neck." Mr. Hill said that when he asked the veterinarian about the wounds, she answered, "I have never seen anything like this before and I don't have any answers for you."
Original file name: .CNI - Horse Mute.Idaho
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