He experimented with Ping-Pong balls, plastic garbage bags and even considered using rusty nails.
Finally, though, he settled on electrocution. It was so simple, so clean, and so hard to detect.
Zapping horses was the specialty of admitted horse slayer and scammer Tim Ray-nicknamed “Sandman” because, when he showed up, horses went to the Big Sleep.
It was Ray, known in show horse circles as Tommy Burns, who cooperated with federal investigators and helped illuminate what one prosecutor last week called “the dirty little secret” of some of America’s swankiest horse people: They paid men like Ray to kill their horses for the insurance money.
“The word is greed. Just money, money, money,” said Bill Graham, an ex-cop from Seneca, S.C., who investigates suspicious horse deaths for insurance companies.
“There’s some people in this country who would do anything for a dollar,” said Graham, whose pit-bull sleuthing once prompted him to shave a 1,000-pound horse to find a tiny puncture wound that proved the animal had died of distinctly unnatural causes.
Last week, Ray and 18 others were charged with crimes relating to killing 15 horses for insurance money. They were horses that were worth more dead than alive to the swells who bought them hoping to make a financial killing-and allegedly wound up paying to have the animals killed.
That scheme was uncovered after federal authorities five years ago opened another investigation into the 1977 disappearance of millionaire candy heiress Helen Vorhees Brach.
U.S. Atty. James Burns said in Chicago that last week’s indictments “should be viewed as a wakeup call for the equestrian industry to put its house in order.”
But many experts said that, in the tight little show horse world, the word was out years ago about the FBI and others being onto the scheme and that horse people were cleaning up their acts-for fear of getting caught-before the indictment.
Donna Ewing, president of the National Hooved Animal Humane Society in Barrington, said the unlikely weapons of horse killers include Ping-Pong balls, which are jammed up the animal’s nostrils.
It takes 12 minutes to suffocate a horse that way.
A garbage bag over the horse’s head is another way to kill, providing the assailant can keep the plastic in place as the horse thrashes and suffers and strains so violently to breathe that it literally scrambles its guts. Ray told investigators he had tried the balls, the bag and also knew a rusty nail could produce a fatal infection.
Agents specializing in insuring horses said that the deadly scheme was fostered by the go-go ’80s when yuppies and get-rich-quick stockbrokers bought into the flashy “hunter-jumper” show horse world, attracted by the cachet of the equestrian life and the attractive tax writeoffs of investing in horseflesh.
When the economy cooled off later in the ’80s, and once the tax laws were changed in 1986 to make horse ownership less profitable, there was less reason to hold onto the horses. Killing the animals made financial, if not moral, sense.
“The economy bottomed out, and wealthy people woke up and realized, `Hey, we’re broke.’ They had a $500,000 horse standing in their back yard. There was a good likelihood that that horse wouldn’t live very long. It was a good way to pay the American Express bill,” explained Butch Human, president of Horse Insurance Specialist, Inc. in Pilot Point, Texas, one of the nation’s largest horse-insurance agencies.
Human and other livestock insurance experts said that the insurance scheme was not as popular in racehorse circles, where one horse can be worth millions of dollars and even marginal horses can continue to make money for their owners.
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In the hunter-jumper world, where horses jump over obstacles of varying heights and Grand Prix events have purses in the $70,000 range, clumsier beasts can plummet in value from the tens of thousands of dollars they cost, down to 50 cents a pound as horsemeat.
That’s where Sandman Tim Ray came in. As recounted by Sports Illustrated in 1992, Ray killed his first horse in 1982.
Ray told an Illinois State Police investigator that he would take a 50-foot extension cord, cut off one end to expose the wires, slice it down the middle. He’d attach an alligator clip to the pieces, then attach one wire to the animal’s nose, the other to its rectum.
Plug in the cord, and “boom, the horse would hit the floor-dead,” said the state investigator. To detect that the horse had been purposely slain, a painstaking necropsy of the brain is required.
Equine insurance experts, including Human, insist that fewer than 1 percent of the horses they insure today die suspiciously.
Dr. Mark Bettcher, a veterinarian who practices in Huntley, in McHenry County, said the charges against Ray and the others amounted to ridding the horse world of “a few bad apples.”
“One of the problems with show horses is that it’s hard to set an accurate price on them,” Bettcher said.
Bettcher recalled the words of perhaps the area’s most infamous horseman, the late Silas Jayne.
“Sy was quoted as saying that a horse is worth 27 cents a pound and whatever the market would bear,” Bettcher said.
The notorious horseman’s name surfaced last week with the indictment of Richard J. Bailey, who was a partner with Frank Jayne Jr., Silas’ nephew. Bailey was charged last week with soliciting Helen Brach’s murder after she found he had swindled her in several horse deals.
Silas Jayne served seven years in prison in the 1970s for killing his brother and horse-breeding rival, George. Silas was in prison when Brach disappeared in 1977.
While the Illinois State Police never abandoned their investigation into Brach’s disappearance, it got a boost in 1987 when Silas died, according to David Hamm, a former state police lieutenant now retired. It was Hamm who suggested pursuing the Brach case at the federal level, where state police hooked up with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
“People were so terrified of Sy that, after he died, people were more willing to talk,” said Hamm.
It was Frank Jayne who introduced Bailey to Brach, authorities said.
Jayne and his wife Kathy were sentenced to 2 years in prison in 1988 in federal court for distributing cocaine from their home and stable in Morton Grove, Northwestern Stables, 9501 N. Austin Ave. Charged and convicted with the Jaynes were J. Michael Hunter and his wife, Donna Rose.
Last week, Hunter was charged with the August 1989 killing of a horse named Rainman. The owner of the horse, Alan Levinson of Highland Park, had Hunter contact Ray, who electrocuted the horse, according to the indictment.
Donna Hunter was charged with arranging with Ray to kill a horse named Emili’s Choice in August 1989 at a stable in Mundelein co-owned by Donna Hunter.