Diana The Huntress Closes In On Beast Of Banffshire
By Matt Bendoris in the The Sun, 24 th September 1997
Mysterious puma-sized cats are prowling the Highlands - and government ministries stand accused of a cover-up. Now big cat hunter Diana Francis is ready to blast the conspiracy wide open after 25 years on the trail of the ferocious beasts.
Armed only with a heavy duty torch, she stalks the cats she claims have flourished undetected in Scotland since Roman Times - living off pure Highland water and a vast intake of protein from plentiful wildlife. Intrepid Di is Europe's leading authority on the mysterious animals - what she calls the greatest zoological mystery in the world.
She tracked the beast of Bodmin - finally photographed two years ago, proving that a mysterious cat was killing sheep in the English West Country. Then she moved to Keith, Banffshire, where she has spent years investigating similar sheep killings on remote farms.
Evidence.
Now, after two best selling books, Di is ready to close the chapter on her life's work with a third volume about the monsters capable of caring off a fully grown dear.
Di said: "After all these years I finally have proof of a new species of big cat living in our country. I got it from a family who were walking on the West side of Loch Ness and came across the body of a big cat which was washed up along the shoreline. They took two close up photographs which I've had looked into by scientists. Its the most important photographic evidence I've ever had handed to me."
"It shows a big, female silver-grey cat with a circle of ginger hair around the yes, just like a pair of spectacles. It's the size of a puma, about 6ft long including the tail - and thats a young one. I reckon it drowned trying to swim in bad weather or took a wrong turning. The thing is, there's no silver-grey coloured cats in existence in the world so it must be the species I've been telling everybody about for years."
"If it was black, people would just say it's a dead puma, but it's not. It's got huge ears and ties in with all the eye-witness reports given to the police and me."
She added: "The experts have examined these pictures and declared that it's not any known species of cat. Unfortunately the family told the local gamekeeper who didn't even bother to inspect it and just brushed it off as a dead wildcat. The body would have been washed out into the loch."
"But 25 years of searching have finally ended and I'm now able to say big cats have been living happily in our country for centuries."
Di has added the new pictures to a life long portfolio - which includes snaps of a terrifying sabre-toothed skull found on Dartmoor in the early 1980's. The region has been plagued by savage sheep attacks for decades. And when Di took the skull North to the post-mortem of a lamb killed near Inverness. The 11 - inch fangs fitted the wounds perfectly - tying in with her theory that big cats live all over Britain.
Di insisted: "There are still attacks happening all the time. We haven't had so many sheep kills this year because there is an abundance of rabbits around after the mild winter. But I'm still out at all hours tracking the cats after a series of sightings near my house. I was in the forest with my torch the other night and I must have really got close to one of the males, because it gave out it's spine-chilling howl. It was just warning me off and I took the hint. The females are smaller than the males and are breathtakingly beautiful. But the males are ugly, terrifying beasts, with bull mastiff faces. One man from a neighbouring village of mine stopped his car to have a cigarette."
Ferocious.
"The next minute he saw a square-skulled big cat about to push its head through the window. It must rank as the closest encounter yet."
Di has already baffled scientists by capturing a black version of the Scottish wildcat - and keeping a pair in her back garden for eight years. She says: "I've already proved an unknown cat was living and breeding in Scotland - so why cant others exist?" I'm still working on trying to capture the rabbit-headed cats that have been shot in places as far afield as Balmoral and East Kilbride. I did some research and found an article in Aberdeen from 1938 about a local gamekeeper."
"He found a kitten and took it home but it just wouldn't adjust to being inside the house. When it grew its head became more and more like a rabbit."
He said it was the most ferocious thing he had ever encountered and it would attack animals twice its size." Di firmly believes that the government has ordered a cover-up after failing to capture one of the monsters during the height of the English sheep slayings of 1980. Royal Marine sergeant Andy Wilkins was deployed with a crack unit for three months to try and track it down. But he failed to get a clean shot at the animal he estimated to be seven feet in length.
Di says: "The Ministry of Agriculture failed to kill any of these cats which made them look ineffective. They simply couldn't stop the farmers from loosing their sheep. So they officially said that these animals didn't exist. They claim the cats people are seeing were just pumas released into the wild by owners after the introduction of the Dangerous Animals act in 1976."
"But that was 21 years ago and these animals would have died off by now. However I have a friend who works for the Ministry of Agriculture and he rang me last week with a very curious story. "A lorry driver who worked for the Ministry of Agriculture was driving along a road near Inverness when he spotted a big cat lying in a ditch. He stopped his lorry, got out and examined it. It was still warm, meaning that it had just been knocked down and killed. It was also silver grey with white on its front and about the size of a puma. The driver said it could only be seen from a high cab as it was deep down in the ditch."
"He told this to my friend at the Ministry who believes in my big cat theories and he immediately drove to the spot. But after searching up and down he couldn't find the cat."
Killing.
"He eventually asked the local gamekeeper who said a white van had pulled up about five minutes before, and something heavy was put in the back. The gamekeeper thought the driver was picking up a dead roe-dear and didn't think much of it. My friend reckons one of his superiors at the Ministry didn't want him to get to the cat first and hastily had it picked up. "It just seems strange that when we come so close to getting a real life specimen it mysteriously disappears."
Di adds: "I will include all these strange coincidences in my new book along with my new pictures. This will finally close the book on the subject and answer the questions about this age-old killing machine."
The Sun, 24 th September 1997
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