PUPPY THROAT SLASHER JAILED FOR HORRIFIC ANIMAL CRUELTY
2001: A former police chief’s son, Gareth Robins, aged 24, has been sentenced to prison after slashing a puppy’s throat 15 times with a craft knife.Robins was detained last year after the five-month-old dog, named Ben, was brought to a veterinarian with severe neck injuries requiring 40 stitches.
He appeared before the court, where he was found guilty of two cruelty charges and received a two-month jail term from magistrates.
Despite protesting his innocence and appealing the conviction, Robins faced further allegations when his ex-wife Shelley, aged 25, provided the RSPCA with new evidence implicating him in the deaths of four additional pets.
Shelley revealed that during a 30-month period, three kittens and a Labrador-cross puppy had died under suspicious circumstances while in Robins’s care at their former home on Middleton Road, Chadderton, near Oldham.
Robins described the incidents as follows: one kitten reportedly died after trapping its paw in a back door, another fell from a wall resulting in a broken back, a third perished from a fungal infection, and a 10-week-old Labrador puppy was said to have fallen down stairs, also breaking its back.
Additionally, a hamster named Madge suffered burned fur when its cage was allegedly set alight by a candle.
Relatives described Robins as a "sick and cruel psychopath," recalling an incident where he stabbed Shelley in the back with a knife during their marriage.
Shelley left him three days after he attacked Ben, but was too frightened to report the other animal deaths at the time.
Robins reportedly took away the animal remains before Shelley could see them, and two of the bodies are believed to be buried in his father’s garden.
The attack on Ben resulted in his windpipe and jugular veins being exposed, causing severe blood loss, but he is currently recovering well and is now in a new home.
At Manchester’s Minshull Street Crown Court, Judge Mukhtar Hussain QC upheld Robins’s appeal and sentenced him to two months in prison.
Robins, now residing in Prestwich on Heywood Road, was also handed a decade-long ban on keeping animals.
Following the sentencing, RSPCA Chief Superintendent Phil Wilson condemned the attack as “horrendous” and highlighted the seriousness of Robins’s punishment as a warning to others.
Robins’s father, Gordon, is a retired Chief Inspector of Greater Manchester Police, and his brother Mark was a former professional footballer for Manchester United.
RSPCA officials confirmed that the injuries inflicted on Ben were deliberately caused by Robins using a razor-sharp blade; initially, Robins lied to police about the dog’s location.
He claimed the dog had escaped from his house and suspected others might have harmed it, but evidence pointed to him as the culprit.
