47“Whether you’re for the horses or against them,” Nixon
says, “these are horriic crimes, and they need to stop.”
THE SUN CASTS a silver glow across tall, sleepy Ponderosa
pines on a February morning as you near the forest, home to
the oicially designated territory of the Heber herd. Nixon
grew up in Arizona, but became familiar with the wilderness
area after she’d moved to Kansas and would drive to Apache
Junction, Ariz., southwest of the forest, to visit her mother.
The sound of the breeze in those towering trees, the solitude,
and, perhaps more than anything else, the wildlife, drew
Nixon, 66, to retire here in 2018 from suburban Kansas City.
It didn’t take long for her to discover the wild horses, which
would appear silently and suddenly as she hiked in the woods.
“This is my sanctuary,” says Nixon, who as a kid would
gallop around on the playground, pretending to be a horse
or on a horse. “I’ve been horse-crazy all my life. I love horses
and just watching them.”
Then the killings began: two stallions were shot in Octo-
ber 2018; a month later, two more horses were gunned down.
Then, in January 2019, Nixon saw it up close for the irst time
with Raven and his mare after a friend told her of their deaths.
According to Nixon’s records, 14 horses were killed in the for-
est in 2019, 15 in 2020, and seven in 2021.
The moment she saw Raven and Sparrow, Nixon was de-
termined to help ind the killer.
“It’s vicious cruelty. It’s somebody that hates these horses
with a vengeance,” she says, noting that several slain horses
were shot in the face. “Shooting something in the face is per-
sonal,” Nixon says. “The shooter wants these horses to sufer.”CONFLICT WITH WILDLIFE is hardly new. Black bears, white
sharks, wild horses, gray wolves, and other species nation-
wide are bumping up against human concerns that they’re
becoming intrusive and endangering humans and livestock.
The clashes raise questions that resonate beyond the Arizona
forests: What does it mean for an animal to be free, and can
the law truly protect that freedom?
Karrigan S. Bork, acting professor of law at the Univer-
sity of California, Davis, who has written extensively about
wildlife and the law, attributes rising tensions over wildlife
incursions in large part to the wildires, droughts, and storms
nationwide that have dramatically changed animal and plant
life. This has led to a rise in the view, toward some wild ani-
mals, of “how inconvenient they can be” to humans living
of the battered land, Bork says. “It’s creating more conlict;
there are so many species we have to think about.”
But nobody knows the motive for the Arizona killings,
and attacks on wild horses and burros elsewhere have been
blamed on everything from trigger-happy passersby to hunt-
ers using the smelly carcasses of slain horses to lure bears.
Koleszar says the killer is “misguided” or a “psychotic
wacko.” Nixon suspects the shootings are tied to the bigger
debate over land use.
She compares what she’s doing now to her years as an
insurance- claims investigator, studying motorcycle, snow-
mobile, car, and ATV accidents, and examining scenes in
which faces were burned of or bodies were hit by trains.
Later, she specialized in medical- fraud rings, working
with law enforcement to investigate organized crimes. She
trained in evidence collection, background searches, and
social media analysis.
Before that, Nixon was an Army intelligence oicer, sta-
tioned at a listening post in West Berlin from 1982 to 1985,
and trained to intercept radio and telephone communications
of East German oicials.
“These skill sets are ingrained in me, in my DNA,” she says.
Nixon and many locals have been critical of the Forest Ser-
vice law enforcement’s response, questioning why the horse
shootings continue after more than three years.
“I do sympathize with their frustration,” says James Alford,
the special agent in charge of the Forest Service’s southwest-
ern region, but Alford says the challenges to ighting crime in
a wilderness area covering more than 2 million acres might
not be apparent to critics. “Sometimes the public thinks that
all police work is an episode of CSI or an episode of FBI,” he
says. “We know that that’s not reality.”Nixon has documented
40 horse killings since
2018 in the forest