by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

At 2 p.m. on Saturday, May 17, Katerina Vrahnos and her husband said goodbye to their dog Kerri, a nine-year-old Alsatian-Lab as they stepped out from the second floor apartment at St-Urbain and Van Horne. They planned to return soon, so they left the patio door slightly ajar. When hubby returned 10 minutes later to fetch something, he was puzzled when Kerri didn't hop on him with her customary enthusiastic greeting.

"My husband looked in the bathroom, under the bed, then he heard people talking in the back," says Vrahnos. The couple found a small group of people huddled in the neighbouring yard, where Kerri lay close to death. A neighbour reported hearing a thud that sounded like a garbage bag being dropped. Another neighbour on the scene, a veterinarian, says he found Kerri with a plastic bag covering her head. Vrahnos arrived just in time to see her dog die of asphyxiation.

Although Vrahnos says Kerri was a "good natured" beast, not all neighbours were quite so fond of the dog's vocal stylings. Apparently the dog had been known to bark when left alone.

"I don't think he barked excessively," she says. "Some neighbours said they never heard her, others had heard but said they didn't find it unbearable."

The neighbour downstairs wasn't crazy about Kerri and had refused to allow her in the backyard. Another - purportedly witnessed by a third party - had repeatedly glued menacing notes on Vrahnos's door since last spring: "We will get your dog and you will shut it up one way or another you stupid female" reads one. Vrahnos also says that eggs had been tossed at her door, cable wires cut and somebody had once tried to enter the window.

The police rapidly rushed to the murder site but Vrahnos says the manhunt for the dog killer never got started. "They didn't check anything," she says. "They didn't check for fingerprints on my door. They questioned everybody and gave me a card with a report number on it, but when I went to the station later, they told me that they wrote no report because they didn't have time."

Vrahnos has papered the area with photos of Kerri and a description of the tale, hoping for leads. The local SPCA has offered to help pressure authorities to find the dog killer.

But Patrick Piccinini, director of the Ste-Agathe SPCA, says the problem is that in spite of demonstrations, lobbying and massive petitions, lawmakers refuse to put teeth into the law criminalizing the murder of pets. Newly passed federal law C-15b "is just a few changes in the wording of the old law, which says that murdering a pet is considered vandalism," he says. Piccinini believes Quebec refuses to get serious with cruelty to animals because "they say it would be too expensive to police and enforce.

"Unless the guy signed his name and said, ‘I'm going to kill your dog,' the police think it's going to be a waste of time because the law against these things isn't strong enough," he says.