Jim Gorant - The Lost Dogs - Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption

Based on all of this, Knorr proposed a second search of the property. Combined with the physical evidence they’d already collected-the paperwork, treadmills, food, supplements, bloodstained carpets, and the dogs themselves-it could be enough to seal the case. Dogfighting convictions had been won in Virginia recently with far less backup. Just not in Surry County, where the biggest dogfighting case they’d ever brought-the Benny Butts case-ended in disaster because of an illegal search.

Poindexter considered the information, and there was general consensus that a second search should proceed, but the conversation moved on without a firm decision. Poindexter wondered aloud if a press release should be issued following the meeting, and one was drafted so that everyone could approve it. It had been two hours since the meeting started, and everyone began to gather their belongings and prepare to leave. Knorr wasn’t satisfied.

“Excuse me,” he said, “does everyone agree we should go forward with the second search?” Brinkman said yes. The Virginia State Police said yes. Everyone looked to Poindexter.

“What do you think, Sheriff?” Poindexter responded.

“I agree with the others,” Brown said.

“Okay,” said Poindexter, “you’re the investigators.”

JIM KNORR STOOD NEAR a boat launch at the Hog Island Wildlife Management Area. He strapped on his bulletproof vest and checked his weapon. It was a Wednesday afternoon, two days after the meeting in which he had convinced Poindexter that a second search was needed to dig up the bodies of the recently killed dogs.

Straight out Route 650 on the James River, this state park was the local police’s favorite staging area, and it was where Brinkman had assembled before the initial raid. The appeal of this spot was its seclusion, and as Knorr stood there he could see only blacktop, reeds, and water. That, and twenty or thirty other law enforcement officials gathered to prep for the second raid on 1915 Moonlight Road. The group included Bill Brinkman and Virginia State Police officers, including a SWAT team and a forensics team. The plan was the same as last time: SWAT would go in first to secure the property, then everyone else would move in to finish the business at hand.

Among the vehicles and equipment gathered were shovels, nose plugs, and body bags. The VSP forensics unit would do most of the heavy lifting on the exhumations, but what they would do once they unearthed the dogs remained an open question. Ideally the bodies would go into some sort of cold storage to preserve them as evidence, but Knorr had called around to a few such places and none were thrilled by the idea of stockpiling dead dogs for an indeterminate amount of time.

Normally, Knorr wouldn’t have forged on with such an important question unanswered, but he was particularly eager to get back on the property and dig. Sometime between May 7 and May 18 the house had been broken into and burglarized. On the one hand this seemed neither outrageous nor alarming. The house was now both notorious and unoccupied, so there was a chance criminals and souvenir seekers had come to clean out whatever they could find. The missing items included three plasma TVs-sixty-two, forty-two, and thirty-two inches-two floor buffers, a vacuum, a leather sofa, and an upright washer and dryer, all valued at a total of $17,550.

On the other hand, Knorr knew there was a possibility the Bad Newz crew had taken the stuff themselves to keep it from being confiscated and had reported it stolen to cover their tracks. Even more frightening, Knorr wondered if they were removing evidence from the house, and using burglary claims to give them an out in case investigators noticed anything missing.

He suspected the worst, which was all the more reason why he was happy Brinkman had secured a warrant, a team had been assembled, and they were less than an hour away from executing the search. As the group huddled for one last run-through of the plan, Brinkman’s phone rang. He walked off as he spoke, then closed the phone and turned around.

“We’re done,” he said. “We’re shut down.”

“What?” Knorr said.

“That was Brown. He and Poindexter said we can’t go forward with the warrant, said there was something wrong with it. Also said Vick has sold the house.”

Knorr exhaled through tight lips. “Is that normal?”

“In ten years,” Brinkman said, “he hasn’t questioned one of my warrants.”

Knorr pulled out his own phone. “Mike Gill, please,” he said, then waited in silence. “Mike,” he said at last, “it’s Jim Knorr. We have a situation.”

The next night Knorr was driving to Baltimore ’s Camden Yards. The Orioles were hosting the Toronto Blue Jays and Knorr was going to the game with his son and his son’s friend. Knorr’s phone rang. It was Mike Gill, and he wanted to talk about obtaining a federal warrant in the next few days to go after the missing evidence.

Knorr was on board. After the search was canceled, Brinkman assumed Poindexter would make his objections known. Once those were addressed, Brinkman would be able to obtain a new warrant and move forward. That sounded good on paper, but Knorr was too amped up and pissed off to sit around and wait, so he drove to Virginia Beach to see Brownie. For all of the time he and Brinkman had spent talking to Brownie, neither had ever put anything down on paper. Knorr spent the day typing out Brownie’s entire story and grilling him for specific details about where the dogs were buried. If Mike Gill wanted to get a federal warrant and go after the dead dogs, Knorr was more ready than ever.

His only concerns were organizational. He needed to assemble a new team that would include USDA agents, Virginia State Police, and SWAT. He wasn’t certain of everyone’s availability and how fast he could pull everything together. Not only that, but two more federal inmates had come forward to offer potential evidence against Vick, and he and Brinkman were scheduled to interview those men the following week.

By the time the call was over, Gill had decided they should wait a week. The jailhouse interviews, if they proved productive, would only bolster the warrant request, and it would give Knorr time to muster the troops. When Knorr finally hung up, his car was approaching Camden Yards. He looked at his son and the friend, who had listened to only half of the wide-ranging discussion about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of a confidential case. They stared back, awaiting explanation. “You didn’t hear a thing,” Knorr said. “Got it?”

On Tuesday, May 29, Jim Knorr was preparing for his meeting with the first of the three prisoners that was to take place the next day, when another storm hit the news. The Surry County Sheriff’s office issued a press release. It read:

A Search warrant issued on May 23, 2007 for 1915 Moonlight Road has not been executed at this time at the request of the Surry County Sheriff’s Office and the Commonwealth’s Attorney.

The investigation continues.

The text of the message gave no reason why the search had been halted and Sheriff Brown remained silent, but Poindexter later told reporters that he and Brown “didn’t like the wording.”

Although he had said at the outset that he wasn’t going to try the case in the media, the commonwealth attorney had been frequently quoted in the press and the accumulated impact of his statements was confounding.

“Much of the confusion over the Vick case and many of the questions center on Poindexter’s comments about the evidence he has found in the month since the raid on Vick’s property,” George Dohrmann wrote on SI.com. “At various times, Poindexter has said there is no evidence Vick was involved, that he saw clear evidence of dogfighting, that there were no witnesses to dogfighting on the property, that there were witnesses who claimed Vick fought dogs. And then, on Thursday, when a reporter from WAVY-TV in Virginia asked if Poindexter had evidence that put Vick at dogfights, Poindexter replied: ‘Yes. We have informants. We have people who are volunteering to make those allegations.’ ”