The man who allegedly killed a breeder of Doberman Pinscher puppies is behind bars after a body was found by a search party in Colorado.
Was Paul Peavey murdered over Doberman Pinscher puppies?
36-year-old Sergio Ferrer was arrested in Nebraska and has been transferred to Clear Creek, Colorado, where he will await charges for allegedly killing Paul Peavey, 57.
Peavey was last seen on Aug. 19 and was officially reported missing on Aug. 21. When deputies visited his camper on August 22, they found the door open with no sign of Peavey.
His body was discovered partially buried on the property by a search party comprising about fifty friends and community members.
The suspect was arrested on an unrelated Nebraska warrant on Aug. 24, the same day Peavey’s body was found.
Ferrer, who was working part-time at Cabin Creek Brewery in Georgetown, was described by owner Craig Abrahamson as having “never had any issues.”
Ferrer’s roommate, Erick Trujillo, mentioned that Ferrer had asked him to cover his shift on the night of Monday Aug. 19.
Suspect’s daughter allegedly sells murdered man’s Doberman Pinscher puppies online
Investigators believe Peavey was killed in his home the same evening. They reported that up to ten puppies were missing and had likely been sold on social media.
The search party members who saw Ferrer’s daughter attempting to sell puppies on Facebook alerted law enforcement.
Additionally, they reported that when they called Peavey’s phone, the person who answered faked an accent, but sounded like Ferrer.
Jeannie Dalrymple, the mother of a friend of one of Ferrer’s children, shared that her daughter had communicated with Ferrer’s daughter, who had sent a photo of seven puppies they were selling.
“Little teenage girls were Snapchatting about puppies, and I put it together,” she remarked.
Dalrymple added that her daughter’s friend had sent her a picture of the Doberman puppies, which seemed too coincidental to be ignored.
Dalrymple shared this information with investigators, contributing to the growing suspicion.
“So the more of us talking to each other, the more suspicious we were getting that this was a clear link,” she explained.
Investigators reportedly discovered some of Peavey’s missing possessions at Ferrer’s home when it was searched, including jewelry and other items.
After he was picked up by police, Ferrer provided rapidly changing accounts to Colorado Bureau of Investigation agents about buying a puppy from Peavey, how much it cost, and how many times he went to the victim’s home.
At one point, he claimed that Peavey was associated with “the cartel” and attempted to murder him over missing drugs, prompting Ferrer to shoot Peavey multiple times in self-defense with a 9mm handgun.
A 9mm gun was discovered at Ferrer’s residence along with Peavey’s phone and his metal detecting equipment.
When questioned about how Peavey’s body ended up at the bottom of a hill on the property, Ferrer initially did not respond.
Later, the suspect said he went back the next day and moved the body to a location where someone would stumble upon the corpse, allegedly covering it “out of respect.”
Ferrer denied ever selling the ten missing Doberman Pinscher puppies, instead insisting that he had driven to Denver the night of Peavey’s murder and gave them away.
Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Office under fire over botched search
The Clear Creek County is under scrutiny for failures surrounding Peavey’s disappearance and subsequent search.
When Peavey was reported missing on Wednesday, deputies did not go out to the property the same day.
A misstep that Clear Creek County Sheriff Matt Harris owned up to during an interview. “That detailed information that reporting part provided us should have necessitated us going up to the property,” he stated.
The situation continued to be dubiously handled when the deputy that did check out the scene, but found no issues to warrant any further investigation.
Friends of Peavey’s disputed the assessment and said that all his vehicles were at the property, his trailer was a disaster, and his remaining dogs were running loose.
“I’m the one that went up to the property and realized things were awry, to the point where the puppies were gone, the house was tossed, anything of value missing,” his friend Bruce Boynton stated.
Even more egregiously, it was the victim’s friends who organized a 50-person strong search party and found his body, with no involvement from local law enforcement.
Harris defended his department by stating that the choices made by deputies were “bad decisions” rather than policy violations.
“There’s things like this that are bad decision making versus violation of policy,” he commented. “You look at those things. Sometimes things are not a violation of policy versus bad decisions.”
that is why they are called Keystone cops.