There's a chicken killer loose in North Pole. He doesn't use a knife.
There used to be 29 white chickens living in a backyard coop in a pretty neighborhood shaded by spruce trees 20 minutes south of Fairbanks. Today, there are three chickens left, understandably traumatized by the carnage they witnessed.
At some point before Monday morning, someone entered that chicken coop, a fenced-in area the size of a large bedroom, and selected 26 of those chickens for death. They ripped each of those chicken's heads off. Then they carefully arranged the dead chickens in the shape of a lollipop, with 19 headless chickens in a line and seven headless chickens in the circle at the end. They took the heads with them when they left.
"They were laid out in a roughly linear pattern, north to south, more or less, with no heads," said state trooper Ken Vanspronsen, who responded to the scene. "It's a little disturbing."
Vanspronsen said the heads were removed "forcefully." He ruled out the possibility that the chickens were killed by dogs or other animals.
These were meat chickens, bought in early spring and headed for the oven. Their meat is no good now, wasted, with flies buzzing the corpses and laying eggs by the time Vanspronsen got there. The husband and wife that were raising the chickens didn't have any idea about who might have killed their chickens. Troopers don't have any suspects, either.
Vanspronsen could give no clues as to why those lucky three chickens were spared.
"I have no idea. They were exactly the same as the ones that were slaughtered," he said.
Contact Joshua Saul at jsaul(at)alaskadispatch.com.