Of all the curiosities about the world Barbara Munroe built for herself and her hundreds of pets, one of the most unnerving for her friends was that the lights in her home never worked.
Munroe, arrested last week in Lee County on animal cruelty charges after 300 living and 200 dead pets were found in her home , had unscrewed the lightbulbs. When the sun went down, she navigated her rooms by flashlight.
Friends knew little of how Munroe lived because she rarely let them in her house and she wouldn’t answer their questions, not even about the lights.
So they hatched their own theories. The most popular says she wanted to block out the reality she had created — a mountain of pets and garbage — but also didn’t want others to see into the home after dark, because if they did, it could all be taken away.
Until her arrest on Oct. 12, friends say, they never knew she was also harboring hundreds of animal carcasses and piles of feces.
But now the lack of lightbulbs make sense.
“She hid everything from everybody,” said Ginny Alberini, 60, a friend of 20 years. “She guarded that house like you wouldn’t believe.”
As Munroe, 65, sits in a Lee County hospital for psychological evaluation, friends say her slide from college-educated, married schoolteacher to an isolationist who slept atop a plastic storage bin filled with dead cats was subtle at first, then snowballed quickly.
“Before that she was a lot of fun — a nice and intelligent person,” Alberini said. “You’d like her, or at least you would have.”
What Lee County authorities found in her home outside Rochelle baffled even her closest friends. In a pungent stench of death and waste, cats swarmed nearly every room and dozens of dogs barked in rusty cages. Litter boxes, floors and a whirlpool tub were covered in feces, and decomposed cats were strewn about, including several that were stuffed in a bag found in the basement.
Authorities seized 160 cats, 105 dogs and 35 birds.
Colleen O’Keefe, division manager for food safety and animal protection at the state Department of Agriculture, said the case appears to be one of the state’s largest instances of hoarding, a mental illness usually linked to obsessive compulsive disorder, depression or anxiety.
“No one knew what was going on in the house, but that’s how hoarders are,” O’Keefe said. “You can have a hoarder down the street from you and until things go bust you never know.”
Munroe was held at the Lee County Jail for several days on a $35,000 bond and treated for fleas and head lice, but she is expected to remain at a Dixon hospital, Lee County District Atty. Paul Whitcombe said.
This week, prosecutors will ask a judge to compel Munroe to pay the cost of caring for the animals since their seizure, which is estimated to be between $30,000 and $100,000. If she does not pay, the animals will be eligible for adoption through the TAILS Humane Society.
Though the grim scene in Rochelle may have built rapidly, friends, government officials and law enforcement members agree there were countless warning signs and say Munroe spurned their many attempts at intervention.
Her friends say Munroe grew up an only child in Joliet, attending Catholic elementary and high schools. Every weekend, she and her mother traveled by train to Chicago, where she trained at a modeling school.
“She was tall and thin with beautiful face, like a china doll,” said Sandra Schroeder, 66, of Libertyville. “If you walked down the street everyone would stop and look at her.”
Munroe had just one pet growing up: a goldfish she got in kindergarten that was still living when she graduated high school. Though not the warmest person, friends say, she was fun-loving and sociable in a circle of relatively conservative friends.
In 1969, she married Kenneth Munroe, whose parents were prominent owners of a Joliet egg hatchery. He did not return calls for this article.
Friends said Barbara Munroe taught history in a Plainfield public school before and shortly after the wedding. Early in the marriage the couple got their first pet, a basset hound. Will County Animal Control Administrator Lee Schild remembers caring for the dog when he was still a practicing veterinarian.
“They were very caring and concerned,” Schild said. “There was nothing that ever gave me a suspicion that there was anything wrong with her.”
The Munroes had no children and, according to public records, divorced in 1994.
“From the way I understand it, he told her he didn’t want no more animals, that’s enough,” said Linda Voelke, 59, of Plainfield, a friend who had talked to Munroe by phone several times a week up until the arrest. Voelke said she and Munroe often went to pet stores or animal shows together, and Munroe rarely left empty-handed.
Shortly after the divorce, Munroe reunited with several childhood friends over dinner and told them that she slept with eight to 10 dogs in her bed, said Mary Kay Nolan, 65, an elementary school friend.
“That was a little alarming, but she was dressed like a million dollars,” Nolan said.
Friends said she moved to a home in unincorporated Plainfield where her lifestyle began to spinning into bedlam.
Responding to various complaints, including a report that she was throwing cat litter out her window, county officials discovered that she owned dozens of dogs and cats — far more than the five allowed by Will County ordinance. In 1999, she was given three weeks to bring her home into compliance.
It was then that she asked Voelke and Alberini to help. When they finally pushed enough junk out of the way to squeeze through the front door, Voelke just shook her head.
“All I could say was, ‘Oh Barb. Oh Barb,'” Voelke said. “She was crying, and I felt very bad. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
It was a sign of what was to come: debris piled almost 2 feet on the floor, including hundreds of empty pet food bags smoothed flat and clothes with the tags still affixed. And none of the lights worked.
Munroe also apparently had stored animals in the Joliet home where she grew up, which she inherited from her parents.
Schild, the Will County Animal Control administrator, said his investigators paid several visits, and though they could never find Munroe there, they repeatedly saw evidence of several cats and piles of garbage inside. They got a search warrant in 2002 and found one cat in horrid living conditions.
A warrant was issued for her arrest on a count of animal cruelty that accused her of harboring the animal in “extremely filthy conditions with large amounts of animal waste, garbage and no heat or fresh water.” The warrant was never served and remains active.
After those two experiences, friends say, Munroe moved to Lee County so she could be left alone with her animals.
“It was a slow decline until she got to Lee County,” Voelke said. “Then it got totally berserk, out of hand.”
Within months, she refused to let friends inside. Lee County Animal Control and Health Department officials said Munroe also was loath to allow them into the home, and that they knew only of about 80 dogs that she kept outside the home. Inside, she told them, she had about a dozen cats.
But county officials visited two weeks ago because she had twice put off getting rabies shots for 35 of her dogs, and the disarray on the porch and around the home led to a search warrant. On Oct. 11, they went inside. The next day, as Munroe was arrested, she loudly protested, saying she had done nothing wrong.
Meanwhile, as twilight fell on Oct. 12, rescue workers began removing the animals one at a time.
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jbnoel@tribune.com
