Feature | Taylorsville 911!: A messy tale of cops, robbers ... and a little dog, too 

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PUPPY LOVE
Jim and Debbie Evans bought Oscar when he was eight weeks old at a puppy farm in Apopka, Fla., in early 1996. They say they paid $100 for the puppy, which came without papers.

“It was a dirty, filthy house,” Jim Evans recalls. Oscar had a wound in his head because the dog’s sire nipped him for getting into his food bowl. The puppy also had worms and lice. A local PetSmart took pity on the puppy-mill victim and treated him for free, Evans says.

Jim Evans had a Boston terrier as a teenager and wanted one for his children. “They’re a very loving, social breed of dog,” he says. Breeder Carol Enright says Boston terriers are an acquired taste. “They think they are a big dog in a small package,” she says.

Evans had known Eyring since 1991, when he taught Evans how to fly and they became friends. When the Evanses wanted to move back to Salt Lake City in 2002, they asked Eyring to look after Oscar. At that time, Eyring, then 33, was living with Dirker, 10 years his junior. They had met in 2001, Eyring says, “on the downside of my second marriage.”

In 2004, the Evanses moved back to Utah. They wanted the dog back. Dirker had become attached to Oscar. She and Eyring were going through problems. “Be patient with me a little while,” Eyring said to Jim Evans.

In September 2005, Dirker moved out. She wanted to take Oscar with her. Eyring told her she couldn’t. “She collapses in my driveway, balling with tears,” Eyring says. He says he thought they would get back together, so he let her take the dog.

By October, Jim Evans’ patience had run out. On Oct. 19 he went to Murray Police to file a stolen dog report. Murray Police told him it was a civil matter. The only way to get the dog back was for Evans to take her to court. Since Dirker lived in Taylorsville with her mother and stepfather, Murray officials advised Evans to contact Taylorsville police.

Later that day, Evans met a beat cop, Officer Blake Schroder, at Dirker’s mother’s residence. The cop went inside. Dirker had been on the graveyard shift and was asleep. Her stepfather told Schroder, according to the Taylorsville police report, Dirker “would not give the dog back because the dog was hers and Chris’s [Eyring] and he thinks Chris is trying to get back at her.” Schroder told Evans he “would have to pursue the situation through civil court.” Case closed.

Evans recalls what Schroder told him in blunter terms. “They’re not giving the dog back, they don’t want to hear any more about it,” he paraphrases Schroder as saying. “The gist was basically take it and shove it.”

DOGNAPPED
Over the next six months, Eyring tried to find a peaceful solution. A convert to Boston terriers, he purchased a female. He offered to pay for breeding and planned to give puppies to Dirker and the Evans. “Everybody wins in this deal,” he says.

Things, however, deteriorated between Dirker and Eyring. In March 2006, she filed a stalking complaint against him over an e-mail. Eyring says he told Jim Evans “all bets are off. Do what you want.”

On May 11, Jim and son Justin Evans drove by Dirker’s mother’s home. Antonia Lenning and her husband David were in the driveway with Oscar. Evans and his son got out the car and walked up to the Lenning’s driveway. The Lennings claimed Evans and his son came on to their property. Evans denies that. Either way, Oscar came running to them.

“Don’t worry, he doesn’t bite,” Antonia Lenning called out.

“I know,” Jim Evans said. He bent down, scooped the dog into his arms, then went back to his car and drove away.

When Jim Evans filed his stolen-dog complaint, the police told him it was a civil matter and conducted a “keep the peace”—essentially an attempt at mediation. When Dirker made the same complaint, she received a very different response. A week after Jim Evans took Oscar home, he and Det. Casey Davies began phone-jousting over the whereabouts of the dog.

Davies had clocked up nine months as a detective at Taylorsville when he started investigating the Evanses’ case. According to a 2001 article in the Taylorsville High School paper, The Warrior Ledger, for a while, Davies was the school’s police officer. He told the paper “his favorite part about his job are the adrenaline rushes during car chases and fighting off people.”

Veteran ex-Salt Lake County cop Morgan in his report for the Evanses’ civil case, focused on why Davies “pursued the retrieval of the dog as if he was a valuable commodity.” Ae also noted, “It can certainly be alleged that Detective Davies took a personal interest in this case because of his friendship with Andrea Dirker.”

Quite what their friendship may be is not clear from Morgan’s report. In court documents, Taylorsville City’s attorneys accept that Davies’ brother, Kip, worked

for Dirker’s mother Antonia Lenning and her stepfather David, providing security at their condominium’s board meeting. The attorneys denied, however, in those documents, plaintiffs’ allegations that Casey Davies also worked for the Lennings. Either way, Morgan noted, “it is apparent that good law enforcement practices and policies were not followed” in returning Oscar to Dirker.

For Morgan, how the investigation began sowed the problems that followed. “Shouldn’t ownership of the dog have been established prior to issuance of the [search] warrant?” He continued in his report, “At this point, it is only a civil dispute as acknowledged by Det. Davies and Taylorsville Police Department.”

Morgan noted Davies did not interview Chris Eyring, “a key figure in this case.” Davies also did not contact the Murray Police Department, even though he knew Evans had gone there with his original complaint. It wasn’t until the very day Taylorsville police descended upon the Evanses’ household that Murray Police received a fax from their westward counterpart stating, “We have a search warrant involving the ownership of the dog that is listed in this report. This would greatly help out our detectives.”

According to defense transcripts of conversations between Davies and Jim Evans, the cop told Jim Evans he wanted to keep him out of the court system. He also told him he’d screened charges—meaning sent them to prosecutor Howard Lengke’s office for review—on Jim Evans, his son, and his wife.

Davies admitted to Jim Evans that the dispute over the dog’s ownership was a civil matter. If he handed over the dog, Davies said, there would be no charges. That Davies was pursuing it as a criminal case came down to one thing—the value of replacing the dog. That value apparently also concerned the Salt Lake District Attorney’s office. Davies noted in one police report that the DA “wanted to make sure how much the dog was worth.”

According to a police report, Dirker told Davies she’d been looking for a female companion for Oscar and the cheapest she could find ranged between $600 and $700. On KSL.com, Boston terriers range in price from $300 to $800. These dogs, however, vary from the 11-year-old Oscar in two respects: They have papers documenting their purebred status, and they’re puppies.

Davies told Jim Evans he valued the missing dog at $600. “That’s how much it costs to get a new one right now,” he said. “So we figured we go the lowest amount.” Although Dirker and Davies may have put the dog’s value at $600, Jim Evans was charged with stealing an animal worth $300 or less.

Davies encouraged Evans to give up Oscar. “You have no criminal history, so I’m surprised that it had to go this far,” he told him. “I was hoping that we could keep your record clean and not have nothin’ on it.”

Evans wouldn’t bite. He accused Davies of being biased towards Dirker in his investigation. Davies wasn’t interested. “There’s a right and a wrong way to do things,” he told him. Evans, he said, had done it the wrong way. Evans told Davies not to show up on his property without a search warrant. A few days later, Davies did exactly that.