Because of media coverage, Atkinson began receiving calls from other residents of her neighborhood, reporting the disappearances of their own family cats. Over a three week period, eleven lost cat reports were filed with the animal shelter by neighbors of the same small subdivision. Oddly enough, not one of these cats was turned in to either the city or county animal shelter, nor were they listed on any of the highway DOA lists.

Betty Boop Missing since 12/23/00

More and more calls came in to Julie Atkinson, from areas outside her neighborhood, and in the middle of February, she visited the shelter and was alarmed to see that nearly 100 cats had been reported missing from Antioch in the months of December and January. At that time, the Antioch Animal Shelter had no way of logging those incidents, other than the hand-written "reports" by pet owners. Julie offered to create a computer database containing all the information from those reports. The city shelter agreed, and by the end of February, Julie had completed an initial database, along with the plotting of each disappearance on a map of the City of Antioch.

Experts Called In

Dissatisfied with the apparent lack of interest by local law enforcement, Julie sought help from a number of other sources. She met with Dr. Robert Gibbens, the Western Regional Department Head of the USDA-APHIS, who flew from his Colorado office to Sacramento for the meeting. She spoke with an individual involved with Wildlife Management for the State of California. She worked for a period of time with Kat Albrecht, the founder of The National Pet Detective Organization, who completed a profiling of Atkinson's cats, very similar to FBI criminal profiling.