The Omegle Cat Killer: A true crime tale of stopping online animal abuse (Part 1)

by Patch O'Furr

CONTENT WARNING for animal abuse – Part (1) A Killer – (2) A Trend – (3) A Watchdog

Someone was killing cats and posting the videos online. He had to be stopped, but how? Internet sleuths were hunting the killer who reveled in taunting them. As hard as they tried, identifying the killer wasn’t enough to get official action. The hunters felt helpless until he escalated to killing a human victim and mailing the body parts to terror targets.

Finally the authorities noticed, and Canadian man Luka Magnotta was caught and convicted. In December 2019, the story came out on Netflix as Don’t F*ck With Cats, one of the year’s most-watched documentaries. The story suggests that taking animal cruelty seriously could have saved a person, and it showed a trend: “Murderers have become online broadcasters. And their audience is us.”

Months after the show, the same trend emerged from inside furry fandom to terrorize the public. It made a new case for the FBI, and you’ll have a lot to think about when you see the updates at the end.

More than a copycat

In May 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic was turning the world upside down. Stuck in quarantine, furry fans lifted their spirits by mingling online. They joined a regular event on the Omegle video chat service, using hashtags to meet fellow fans by random connection.

They weren’t expecting to meet a woman in an animal-skin mask, gripping a bloody skull a little bigger than an egg. It almost looked fake, until she used a finger to pop out an eyeball like a grape. Something terrible was being done to real animals.

Whoever was doing it wasn’t just shocking random targets. She knew about their event, and targeted them with hashtags like #furries, #fursuit and #furryfandom. It made a trail with sightings of gory animal parts and links to Instagram and Tiktok. It was hard to document the live incidents as they spun past, but alarm spread and reached millions of viewers on Youtube. The creepy intruder got the attention she wanted, but where did she come from?

The shocking hype never told the full story. The Omegle Cat Killer was only a blip before Youtubers and blogs quickly forgot to track if justice was done. Dogpatch Press has the full extent of what happened and the legal outcome — but let’s also look at how she didn’t just emerge without warning in 2020. A path was laid much earlier.

Cautious attention after SomeOrdinaryGamers showed 2 million subscribers.

The path of escalation

As early as March 2019, furries were first to spread bewares about trouble with a woman accused of doing art scams and harassment in their community. The bewares didn’t stop a trajectory to worse. A comment in November 2019 shows rising awareness of animal abuse.

Murder is hard to get away with, especially for thrills; but people who do it often start with animals, and online animal abusers feel safely out of reach. The victims don’t talk. If they’re identified, it can take high effort to prove there was a crime at all. Police don’t take it seriously while putting human victims first. Local dog-catchers don’t do stings and forensics. There might be rare lone convictions on single people, but there are also networks for it with many members who have long odds for getting caught. That makes opportunity to exploit.

Furries saw this with popular Youtuber Kero the Wolf. In 2018 he was caught abusing his dog in a ring for animal torture. It was past the time limit for charges and he got off on technicality. The community knows about Kero, but what can they do when investigation goes nowhere and many in the ring stay free?

Facing these odds, the hunters of the Omegle Cat Killer followed her dangerous rise by joining forces to save the victims.

From a Google Doc made in May 2020.

Masks and confusion

I was tipped early about the hunt for the Omegle cat killer. It gave me access to investigators who showed their work in progress. They narrowed sightings of the woman online down to one suspect with furry accounts. But even with a name, was there court-worthy proof of crime?

I watched her do a video tour of her house and deny responsibility. The skin mask and gory body parts got explained with a taxidermy hobby, using roadkill, gophers or natural deaths. It might involve interest in anatomy and science, or trolling for views with a financial motive. There might be plausible deniability of crime. It wasn’t all clear.

What about claims that pets were adopted from ads, and the ex owners were taunted with death photos later? Or headless dog carcasses were found in a cornfield near the suspect’s house? Or sockpuppet accounts were taunting investigators? Denial games could hide proof that only warrants could get.

Sources clammed up and couldn’t be verified. Police were involved, but then the story was called a prank or hoax. That wasn’t a satisfying resolution. Charges or not, it still traumatized many watchers, wasted resources and hurt the community. The Furry Omegle event was canceled. I wrote a story, but many sources were pulled down and a lawyer involved said I should hold my story to reduce hype. It seemed to fizzle out, but there HAD to be more to it.

After weeks of silence, the FBI announced federal charges for Krystal Cherika Scott, a 19 year old in Indiana.

These charges weren’t publicized much.

Sources: Scott’s local police dropped the ball

While Scott kept posting gory videos, her crime kept escalating despite the alarm it caused. Investigators were frustrated about lack of help while persisting to start cases with multiple police agencies. If anyone insisted that Scott’s local police should handle it, things could have gone nowhere.

This source stays off the radar as an investigator, so I won’t name them:

“Kokomo [Indiana] police department had absolutely nothing to do with it and were useless throughout the entire process. They dismissed it as a hoax entirely. The only reason anything happened was because the FBI in a different state got involved when the police there found it was out of theirs.”

Another source local to Scott confirmed that there was alarm on Facebook about animal abuse in the previous year, but it didn’t help. In May 2020 Scott got bold enough to start livestreaming the abuse. The Kokomo Police went to her house and found dead animals, but they wouldn’t do more without obvious kill videos.

(Left:) A local source and a Fox59 news story mentions inaction. (Right:) First anonymous source.

1500 miles away in Boise, Idaho, investigators were misled by Scott to believe the acts happened there. They opened a case with Boise police, who traced her Instagram account. That made a case for the FBI to go out of state and back to Indiana.

Fox59 News said Kokomo police found evidence on 5/3/20, and kept getting reports in June. Investigators say it was treated like a hoax while Kokomo police didn’t know about the Boise police or FBI action. Scott kept posting animal cruelty until July 8, when a federal warrant finally led to her arrest on 7/14/20.

“This case is an outstanding example of society’s intolerance to animal cruelty and the public’s willingness to do the right thing,” said Special Agent in Charge Paul Haertel of the FBI’s Salt Lake City Field Office. “Tips poured in from all over the world, assisting in an intense and technically complex investigation to find the alleged perpetrator and put a stop to the senseless and horrific abuse of innocent animals.” — FBI press release

“Intense and technically complex investigation” by 3 agencies shows how rare it is to solve such a case. Imagine working to do the right thing, but the abuse keeps going. Injustice is all too common. That’s why it’s so troubling to suffer the presence of abusers like Kero the Wolf in furry fandom.

In May 2021, Scott took a deal to plead guilty. She faced up to seven years in prison, a $250,000 fine and years of supervised release. In late 2021, the court sentenced her to 30 months in federal prison.

Indiana news about her conviction shared a witness report that police received in April 2020, an early warning that highlights the malice and lack of fast action:

A neighbor told News 8 he found a decapitated dog in the area months before the raid.

“It had been decapitated. The belly was slit up and down,” Brian Foster said. “After I drove down the road and I came back, the head was in the road and it wasn’t there when I first drove by.”

Scott’s motive is weird to think about; did something set her off? There were clues about her being a troubled teen who started as a victim. Attention on this was part of getting justice, but also part of the problem when she broadcasted animal abuse to enjoy the shock.

Final points.

  • Scott started in furry fandom and used it for targets — it’s a community issue.
  • Scott escalated to sadism after being a money and trust risk by scamming with art, taxidermy and bone sales, and ads for pets.
  • Community bewares were the first warning, but it couldn’t be solved without legal power while it escalated.
  • Solving it wasn’t just for outsiders, because local police didn’t stop it — it took cooperation between insiders and outsiders.
  • Social media attention fed Scott’s toxic psychology, and there were even copycats posing as Scott.
  • It’s a trend including Kero the Wolf, where crime ring members got away and deny it.

In 2024 Kero the Wolf tried to come back from community exile under a cover identity, like nothing happened. In Kero’s case the motive for secret abuse wasn’t to broadcast for attention, it was to enjoy the abuse itself. His stealth to hide it might make it worse than Scott’s open crimes, raising the stakes to stop it.

How does this behavior start, and how can a community organize and improve responses? It could use professional investigators in between the fandom and police, and new federal laws.

(Correction: Scott used Facebook ads.)

UPDATE: KRYSTAL SCOTT CAUGHT ABUSING AGAIN.

I was warned about this. After the hunt to identify Scott in 2020, an investigator had inside knowledge of her behavior in prison. Scott would take pride in torturing bugs she would catch inside. The investigator told me it was only a matter of time before she would get out and get back to it. That came true after her June 2023 release.

Scott was banned from all contact with animals through 2028, but caught violating the condition in June 2025. It started when the finder of a lost dog was disturbed about Scott’s response to online ads to claim the dog. After calling police and having to give her the dog, this source spent a day tracking her activity. Scott was accompanied by 2 friends and associated with a homeless camp where a dog was found dead, mutilated and buried in a trash bag near her area, although it couldn’t be proven as linked. Finally, she was spotted with both friends in a rented van holding 12 cruelly caged cats and dogs, and cited for abusing them. Her probation office is now aware.

  • PART 2: MORE ABOUT A TREND OF ANIMAL ABUSE ONLINE.
  • PART 3: A WATCHDOG SHARES WORK IN FIGHTING ANIMAL CRUELTY.
  • Find more on the “zoosadism” tag.

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