'Puppy Doe': Reward offered for tortured pit bull's abuser

A young female pit bull, dubbed "Puppy Doe" by animal rescue officers, was found with injuries so severe that veterinarians were forced to euthanize her.

According to Boston's Animal Rescue League, Puppy Doe was found starved, broken-boned, burned, stabbed in the eye and with her tongue sliced down the middle in a park in Quincy, Mass., late last month.

“They’re a freak, a total freak,” Dr. Martha Smith-Blackmore, who performed Puppy Doe's autopsy, told CBS Boston last week. “Splitting her tongue, burning her nose, stabbing her eye, it’s the totality of the types of injuries. Not only was she beaten she was stabbed she was burned its all kinds of injures. It’s a sick mind that can do this to an animal.”

"We take it very seriously,” Quincy Police Chief Paul Keenan said of his team's hunt for the abuser. “We don’t have an awful lot to go on right now, but we are canvassing the area to see who belongs to this dog or where the dog came from.”

Authorities also said it was important to find the person capable of inflicting such cruelty on another living thing, because he or she is likely to do it again.

“It is highly unlikely that this level of sadistic cruelty could be shown to one animal and not be part of a pattern involving other animals or perhaps vulnerable people. We need to find the person who did this and see what else they are doing,” Norfolk District Attorney Michael W. Morrissey said in a statement.

The Boston Herald reportedly discovered Puppy Doe's former owner, Laura Hankins, who said she gave her pit bull Kiya to a Grafton woman.

She said her landlord wouldn't allow her to keep a pit bull.

“No one was willing to rent to someone with a pit bull and two other dogs. We looked for four months,” she said. “We even offered our landlord more money."

“She seemed so wonderful and she seemed like she could offer Kiya more than I could,” Hankins said, though updates about Kiya stopped coming in May.

Meanwhile, the Animal Rescue League is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the culprit's arrest, while others have started a Facebook page calling for justice and raising reward money.