The calls to the 999 emergency number included a man reporting that "someone robbed my marmalade", a woman saying her sister had brought a stray dog into her house and a man stating that he had seen "a chicken walking down the road".
At 11 p.m. the two pulled up at a dark house with a dirt floor and no electricity--"a place I wouldn't even put mydog, " Parisi recalls. (Make that 13 dogs, all dachshunds.) A wrinkled old man came shuffling toward Parisi in the candlelight.