To The Man Who Killed My Dog
A letter that moved a nation
In 1955, travel editor Richard Joseph and his wife, Morgan, left the intensity of New York behind and settled into the relative calm of Connecticut. They adapted quickly to the slower pace of life, and before long had welcomed a Basset Hound puppy named Vicky into their home. One Sunday evening, as Richard took her out for a walk, a speeding car veered off course and struck the six-month-old dog, killing her almost instantly. The driver didn’t stop. The following morning, heartbroken and angry, Richard sat down and wrote a letter addressed “to the man who killed my dog” and sent it to the local paper, Westport Town Crier and Herald. To his surprise, it was soon printed on the front page; before long, it had been reprinted across the country. In 1957, it even inspired a book1.
The driver was never found.
To The Man Who Killed My Dog:
I hope you were going some place important when you drove so fast down Cross Highway across Bayberry Lane, Tuesday night.
I hope that when you got there the time you saved by speeding meant something to you or somebody else.
Maybe we’d feel better if we could imagine that you were a doctor rushing somewhere to deliver a baby or ease somebody’s pain. The life of our dog to shorten someone’s suffering—that mightn’t have been so bad.
But even though all we saw of you was your car’s black shadow and its jumping tail lights as you roared down the road, we know too much about you to believe it.
You saw the dog, you stepped on your brakes, you felt a thump, you heard a yelp and then my wife’s scream. Your reflexes are good, we know, because you jumped on the gas again and got out of there fast.
Whoever you are, mister, and whatever you do for a living, we know you are a killer.
And in your hands, driving the way you drove Tuesday night, your car is a murder weapon.
You didn’t bother to look, so I’ll tell you what the thump and the yelp were. They were Vicky, a six-month-old Basset puppy; white, with brown and black markings. An aristocrat, with twelve champions among her forebears; but she clowned and she chased, and she loved people and kids and other dogs as much as any mongrel on earth.
I’m sorry you didn’t stick around to see the job you did, though a dog dying by the side of the road isn’t a very pretty sight. In less than two seconds you and that car of yours transformed a living being that had been beautiful, warm, white, clean, soft and loving into something dirty, ugly, broken and bloody. A poor, shocked and mad thing that tried to sink its teeth into the hand it had nuzzled and licked all its life.
I hope to God that when you hit my dog you had for a moment the sick, dead feeling in the throat and down to the stomach that we have known ever since. And that you feel it whenever you think about speeding down a winding country road again.
Because the next time some eight-year-old boy might be wobbling along on his first bicycle. Or a very little one might wander out past the gate and into the road in the moment it takes his father to bend down to pull a weed out of the driveway, the way my puppy got away from me.
Or maybe you’ll be real lucky again, and only kill another dog, and break the heart of another family.
Richard Joseph
Westport, Conn.
This letter can be found in the book, Letters of Note: Dogs, signed/personalised/gift-wrapped copies of which can be purchased here.
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Long ago, when I was perhaps 12 or so, my family had been given an adult German Shepherd called Duchess. We lived in a rural area with a nature preserve behind our house and I’d go for long rides on my horse with Duchess joining along. Our home was on a busy two-lane road, with one of the fewer straight stretches passing our property. Cars often sped through this stretch.
I was returning from a ride one day and as I always did, we came out of the nature preserve a bit down the road from home. As we were walking alongside the road toward our driveway and the barn, a car sped by and hit Duchess, tossing her body up the road. The car never even tapped the brakes, just continued speeding up the road.
I began screaming and my horse became very unsettled. I dismounted and walked her home to tell my father, tears streaming down my face. He got the station wagon and went to get Duchess. He returned with her wrapped in a blanket and carried her into a wooded area to bury her.
I’m nearly 70 now and I’ve never forgotten it. I wish my father had written this letter.
A beautiful response to a horrible thing. My own letter would read a little closer to Liam Neeson's speech in Taken...