'Not quick kills': Court hears details about Winnipeg couple accused of making videos showing animal torture
CBC
WARNING: This story contains disturbing details.
Details are emerging about a Winnipeg couple charged after police allege they made and sold videos showing animals being tortured and crushed.
Chad Kabecz, 40, and Irene Lima, 55, were arrested on Oct. 9, after police executed a search warrant at a home in Winnipeg's Lord Roberts area, and charged with numerous offences, including killing or injuring animals and causing unnecessary suffering to an animal, Winnipeg police said last week.
During a bail hearing for Kabecz on Tuesday, Crown attorney Sean Sass alleged Kabecz and Lima, who is Kabecz's girlfriend and goes by the name "Goddess May" online, were the owners and operators of a website on the dark web called Goddess May Barefoot Premium Crush.
The prosecutor alleged the two made videos of animals, specifically cats and kittens, being crushed by Lima using her feet.
"These are not quick kills. As the time stamps seem to indicate, some of these videos are five minutes long. They're staged, premeditated torturing that result in the death of very vulnerable animals," Sass told provincial court Judge David Ireland at Kabecz's bail hearing.
Court heard that in August, a city of Winnipeg animal protection officer notified police about an anonymous tip they got from a user of the "dark web" — online content that doesn't show up through regular online searches, and requires special software to access. The tipster discovered the Barefoot Premium Crush website, and believed the couple was from Manitoba.
Winnipeg police started investigating and found an account on the social media site Reddit called "Fit Foot Lover," which they believe belonged to Kabecz.
On the Reddit page, Kabecz talked about Lima's feet, and made reference to his dark web site.
"For anyone who's following my girlfriend's crush adventures, please dm [direct message] me on how to find her newly established group elsewhere," said one Reddit post.
Sass said the tipster continued to engage with Kabecz on Reddit, and got instructions on where to find the videos and how to pay. The person took screenshots of the exchange and gave them to police, said Sass.
Other screenshots taken by the anonymous source show the graphic nature of the crushing site.
The homepage featured "an extremely graphic image that appears to be of a bare foot on top of some animal," said Sass. "It's unrecognizable."
A caption on the title page referred to it as "a place to exchange barefoot hard crush."
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