Is Tyler Weinman a Serial Killer in the Making?

Above: Ted Bundy’s last interview.

Theodore Robert Cowell was a strange child. Even at the age of three, he had a tendency to place knives around his aunt while she was sleeping. When she would awake, the toddler would laugh gleefully.

And as he grew older, he reportedly would abuse the family dog and torture neighborhood cats by swinging them around by their tails. This is something he saw his grandfather do.

And he also had a habit of voyeurism, peeping into the windows of sleeping women in his neighborhood. He was arrested twice as a juvenile but those records were expunged.

But those were secrets he kept to himself. On the surface, he was a charming child who grew into a handsome young man with a captivating smile and a smooth personality.  If anything, he was known for having a bad temper.

He had girlfriends. An above-average intelligence. And was pursuing a law degree.

It wasn’t until after he changed his name to Ted Bundy and confessed to killing more than 30 women that the world learned of the monster inside.

And even then, many people close to him, including former girlfriends, were shocked by the revelation.

So it is not surprising that many people are comparing the accused cat killer in Miami to be a Ted Bundy in the making.

Circumstantial Evidence

Bundy was 27 when he first killed a human. Tyler Weinman is 18 years old.

On the surface, Weinman appears to be a socially well-adjusted teen with a sense of humor, a long-term girlfriend and a taste for marijuana. Not much different than many teens his age.

But police believe they have enough evidence to tie him to the rash of cat killings that had plagued a couple of South Miami-Dade neighborhoods since early May.

But they have not ruled out the possibility of more suspects.

And the arrest affidavit remains sealed, forbidding the public to see the actual evidence against Weinman.

The truth is, police appear to only have circumstantial evidence against him.

According to Jim DeFede of CBS, police claim that Weinman had numerous scratches on his arms, neck, chest and hands, as if he had been struggling with a cat.

They also bring up the fact that he had dissected a cat in his high school analogy class, which would make hundreds of students suspects in the case.

Police also say they found his description of what he did in this class “disturbing”, which might indicate nothing more than the detectives are squeamish about these types of anatomical experiments.

They also bring up the fact that they found a set of knives in his bedroom, which might be consistent with a student who took an anatomy class.

Police also say they attached a monitoring device to his car two weeks prior to his arrest, which revealed his whereabouts to be consistent with where the cats were being killed.

And they say he denied being at these locations under further questioning, which in their opinion, indicates his guilt.

But it doesn’t appear they have anything solid against him at this point, which is why they are conducting DNA and other forensic tests to see if cat blood comes up on the knives or on his clothing.

Even the prosecutor admits that he would have preferred to wait for the results of those tests before making an arrest.

One neighbor speculates that Weinman would add poison to cat dishes, then carry them away to dissect them once they had died.

But then how would you explains the scratches on his body?

DeFede’s article states that police are still trying to determine where the actual torture and killings took place, which shouldn’t be hard to answer considering they were monitoring his whereabouts.

Unless, of course, he did not kill the cats.

Other Serial Killers

But if he did kill the cats, then he would be following the pattern of a long line of serial killers.

Jeffrey Dahmer also had a fascination with dead animals as a child. He was known to ride his bicycle around the neighborhood looking for the carcasses of dead animals.

He would then take the dead animals home and dissect them. At one point, he even put the head of a dog on a stake.

Dahmer killed his first human at the age of 18,  burying him in his father’s backyard, and ended up killing 17 men by the time he was caught at the age of 31.

Albert DeSalvo, better known as the Boston Strangler, also tortured animals as a child before he graduated to humans at the age of 31 and supposedly killed 13 people. He was killed in prison before he could be convicted and some theorists believe he wasn’t the killer- even though he had confessed.

And then there is David Berkowitz, known as the Son of Sam serial killer. As a child, he also tortured animals and even killed his mother’s parakeet, “Pudgy”, by slowly feeding it poison.

As he grew older, he claimed to hear voices from dogs and believed them to be Satan. He killed at least one dog and attempted to kill another dog whose insistent barking was said to have prompted a murder spree that began at the age of 23 that left six people dead in a one-year span.

The Denver Cat Killings

So it is natural that when a rash of cats start showing up dead in a neighborhood, the public wants some results.  And not just the animal lovers.

The same thing happened in 2003 when more than 40 mutilated cats appeared in Denver and more than ten mutilated cats appeared in Salt Lake City. The media, of course, fueled the frenzy and animal lovers were out for blood.

News reports from that time sound eerily like the recent articles surrounding the Miami cat killings.

Serial killings are gripping the Salt Lake City (search) and Denver (search) areas, but it’s not people who are turning up dead – it’s cats.

At least 40 felines have been mutilated in the Denver metropolitan area in the last year – four of them over the weekend – and the 11th murdered pet in Salt Lake City was discovered Tuesday at a country club.

Many of the pets have been cut in half, beheaded or disemboweled. Some have had their organs removed. Most are left out for their owners to find the next day.

“I was just confused as to why anyone would want to do that to a cat,” said Matt Isbell, assistant grounds superintendent at the Willow Creek Country Club in Salt Lake City, where the front half of a gray tabby was found Tuesday.

But after conducting necropsies on ten of the cats, officials determined that it was a pack of foxes that had been killing the cats.

And recently, several dead cats showed up mutilated in Broward County, but those were ruled out to be done by a pack of dogs.

But in Miami, police are convinced that at least 19 of the more than 30 cat killings were conducted by a human being. And they are convinced Tyler Weinman had a bloody hand in it.

If so, then one can only wonder when he would have turned to humans.

Related Links: • Tyler Weinman: Portrait of An Accused Serial Cat Killer Related Categories: True Crime Miami: Local News, Carlos Miller is a featured writer at Miami Beach 411. He also operates Photography is Not a Crime, a blog about photographer rights, New Media and First Amendment issues. See more articles by Carlos Miller. See more articles by Carlos Miller Was This Post Helpful? Please Share It With Others! Tweet

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