Shannon Miranda greets Hope, a dog living at his Fortuna rescue facility.

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Touring the grounds of Miranda’s Rescue is a bit like strolling through a child’s fantasy version of Old MacDonald’s farm. As you walk through the sprawling animal sanctuary and rescue facility, a 50-acre compound of barns, kennels and pastures in the fertile farmland outside Fortuna, familiar animals such as dogs, horses and goats give way to stranger, more exotic critters — vibrant macaws, lumbering land tortoises, gangly emus, miniature hump-backed cows called zebus and much more.

All told — counting every last chicken and koi fish, every lizard, frog and guinea pig — the rescue is home to between 600 and 700 animals according to founder and president Shannon Miranda and his partner, Dean Paris.

A llama checks the scene at Miranda’s Rescue.

Informally launched in 1995, when a 24-year-old Miranda rescued 30 cats and dogs from the mobile home park where he lived, the nonprofit operation has grown to include four thrift stores (which help fund the rescue), 27 employees and more than 70 regular volunteers. It has developed into Humboldt County’s most esteemed safe haven for abused, neglected and unwanted animals, including pitbulls with violent tendencies.

In 2007, Miranda’s Rescue was named “Best Sanctuary for Abused Animals” by the state Assembly. That same year, the Red Cross named Miranda himself one of “Humboldt County’s Heroes.” Last year alone the organization reportedly rescued 866 animals and adopted out 577.

But the past year hasn’t been entirely the fantasy suggested by Miranda’s idyllic property. As he and a couple colleagues gave a recent tour of the place, Miranda was keyed up and exasperated. “This has just been an absolute nightmare,” he said. 

For nearly a year, a Sacramento woman named Marianna Mullins has been waging a campaign against Miranda and his rescue, making accusations online, calling up Miranda’s business associates, and even hiring a local private investigator. Mullins claims that Miranda has been charging excessive cash fees to rescue pitbulls, only to haul them off his property in the dead of night and kill them.

The Facebook page she set up, called “Miranda’s Rescue Fortuna, CA— The Truth Behind The Lies,” has accumulated 575 “likes” to date (mostly from non-locals). Launched on Jan. 25, the page calls Miranda “evil” and “a liar,” refers to his organization as “murdering Miranda’s ‘Rescue’” and features dozens of dog photos — some arranged in collages under the words “ALIVE…. OR DEAD?,” others labeled “escapees.”

Pheasants housed at Miranda’s Rescue.

When the page was brought to the LoCO’s attention last month we contacted Mullins to ask what her specific allegations are and what evidence she has to support them. In a phone conversation, Mullins said that Miranda killed two of her pit bulls, that he has killed many more, and that she and her private investigator have spoken to several witnesses who can attest to his crimes.

Asked why she hasn’t contacted law enforcement, Mullins said she and her private investigator were still gathering evidence. “I cannot disclose everything we have,” she said. A few days later we asked the question again in a Facebook chat and she responded, “local budgets cuts might not allow sheriff department to do the complete investigation; thus; we [are] utilizing PI for an investigation purposes.”

In the month since our first conversation, the LoCO has spoken with Mullins’ private investigator, read six anonymous “witness statements” containing further accusations and interviewed a variety of people who have worked for or with Miranda over the years. In the process we’ve heard no shortage of accusations from both sides — claims of mass animal graves, unwanted sexual advances, stolen files and an armed confrontation on private property.

And while some of the facts behind these charges remain obscured, we’ve gained some insight into the parties involved — who has credibility and who lacks it.

This goat has credibility.

Early in our online correspondence, Mullins forwarded the text from an extended Facebook conversation between herself and a Miranda’s Rescue volunteer named Logan Whiting. The interaction began after Whiting sent Mullins a friend request, and for a while they conversed in wary circles, like fighters sizing each other up.

Mullins was unaware at the time — and may still be unaware — that Whiting is an unequivocal supporter of Miranda, and that he’d contacted her in hopes of figuring out what she was up to. Mullins assumed instead that Whiting had something incriminating to report about Miranda’s Rescue, and she tried to put him at ease, like an FBI agent coaxing a reluctant captive:

“u come forward willingly,u have full imminuty [sic],” she wrote. “if not, once charges are filled-u will be prosecuted to the full extend [sic] of the law. … u want to move? I will move u! I swear to u, I will protect u with all I got. I swear to u on anything and everything has a value to me. please talk to me.”

Eventually, Mullins got around to the story of Buddy, one of the pitbulls she claims Miranda killed. Or, rather, she claims that in the abstract. Her actual story about Buddy is a bit different. (Buddy is one of the dogs pictured at right, according to Mullins.)

Mullins told Whiting that she rescued Buddy and his brother last year from a shelter in Stockton, drove the dogs north to Miranda’s Rescue and paid Miranda $400 per dog. A family adopted Buddy but later had him euthanized after he killed another dog, Mullins said. Regardless, she blames Miranda for not intervening and taking Buddy back before the family put him down — blames him to the point of saying he “murdered” Buddy.

Whiting responded by telling Mullins that he’s friends with the family that adopted Buddy, and that Buddy not only killed another dog but also bit their daughter.

Mullins’ attitude abruptly turned cold. “I do not believe the word u are saing,” she wrote. “we are done talking.”

Dean Paris, Miranda’s Rescue’s CFO and Shannon Miranda’s partner, poses with a zebu.

During the recent tour of his property, Miranda said he witnessed a similar personality flip from Mullins. He first met her when she brought some dogs up from the Central Valley, and she immediately befriended him, he said. After her first visit, she and Miranda continued to communicate via email, he said.

It was in these email exchanges that Miranda said he saw the first signs of trouble. Mullins began making sexually suggestive comments, he said, despite her awareness that he is openly gay. The next time she drove up, Miranda said he walked out to greet her when she arrived.

“I came out, and I thought she was gonna give me a hug,” he said. “She kisses me right on the mouth. I said, ‘Please don’t ever do that again.’”

It didn’t stop there. “She’d posted on other rescue groups that she’s gonna take me out to the barn, make Dean watch, and she was gonna do this, that — all this nasty, filthy shit,” Miranda said.

“The final straw,” he added, “is when she pulled that nasty picture [of naked women] up on her iPad, and asked me if it turned me on in front of my daughter. That’s when I said, ‘You really need to leave.’” Mullins apologized and agreed to go, he said, but before leaving she hugged Ricky Ray Wright, Miranda’s Rescue’s 74-year-old office manager who everyone calls “Granny” (including Wright herself).

“She gave Granny a hug, then turned to give me a hug and she licks my neck,” Miranda said. “And that’s when Ricky said, ‘Get the eff out of here, you nasty old bag.’”

Miranda believes that Mullins’ actions since then — the accusations, the investigation, the innuendo — are all part of a misguided quest for retribution. “This is a personal vendetta,” he said.

Shortly after the confrontation on his property, Mullins began sending texts, emails and Facebook messages demanding contact information for dogs she’d brought up, Miranda said. When he told her that privacy rules prevented him from giving out that information, Mullins began calling him a “fraud” and saying that justice would be served, he said.

Miranda acknowledges that two of the dogs she brought up are dead. Buddy, he said, was euthanized after killing another dog and biting a little girl, exactly as Whiting explained. Mullins, he said, was less than honest about Buddy’s violent streak on his adoption intake form. The other dog, Big Boy, was also adopted out to a family and later jumped out of the family’s car window and got hit by a car, Miranda said.

These explanations apparently didn’t satisfy Mullins. Last May she hired Eureka private investigator James Filomeo, and together they’ve been digging for more than 10 months. In Mullins’ first conversation with the LoCO, she said her campaign is time consuming. “It is a full-time job,” she said.

On the morning of May 23, less than a week after Mullins hired Filomeo, Miranda showed up to work, walked into the office and saw that the blinds were bent out of shape. An employee told him that she’d shown up at 7:30 to find the window open, the blinds askew and a bunch of files on the floor. She thought maybe a cat had messed up the place. 

But when Miranda investigated he found pry marks on the outside of the window frame and discovered that certain files were missing from his desk.

According to the report filed later that day by the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department, Miranda reported that the missing files pertained to the dogs that Mullins had been harassing him about. 

The sheriff’s deputy called Mullins to ask if she was involved. Here’s what the report says about that phone call:

“I asked Marianna if she knew anything about Shannon’s office being broke into or particular files regarding dogs of interest to her being taken. Marianna told me that she had nothing to do with it and that Shannon should consider whether it was an inside job.”

The deputy also called Filomeo, who acknowledged that he’d been hired by Mullins and said he believed her claims that Miranda was making dogs disappear. According to the sheriff’s report,

“Filomeo told me that he believes Shannon has the dogs euthanized and then buried on the Jackson Ranch in Blue Lake.”

The LoCO contacted Jackson Ranch owner Bill Jackson, who seemed taken aback by the allegation. Not only is it untrue, he said, but he’s never even met Shannon Miranda.

The office break-in remains unsolved.

Late last summer, Mullins took out a classified ad in the Times-Standard:

Mullins reportedly claimed to be operating a day care for Miranda’s Rescue when she called in the ad. After the Times-Standard found out that she had misrepresented herself, an ad rep called to tell her she couldn’t run ads in the pet section anymore. The paper issued the following correction:

On Sept. 6, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department got another call from Miranda’s Rescue, this time from Ricky Ray Wright, aka “Granny,” Miranda’s office manager, who told the deputy that she wanted to pursue prosecution for trespassing. 

According to the sheriff’s report, a man named Peter Harrington, who lives in a trailer on Wright’s property, had a confrontation earlier that day with three subjects who he saw hop the fence. Harrington reportedly yelled at them to get off the property. The report continues:

“One of the subjects identified himself as being with [Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office’s] Animal Control, and told Peter that the Sheriff’s Office knew he was there. … [This man] turned his right side toward Peter and put his hand on a pistol carried openly on his right hip. Peter told the subject, ‘What are you going to do, shoot me?’ Then again told the subjects to leave. The subjects walked back to the vehicles and drove away.”

The man with the gun turned out to be Filomeo, the private investigator. When contacted by the sheriff’s deputy he denied claiming to be law enforcement and said he hadn’t put his hand on his gun. He also denied trespassing but admitted that a person he was with hopped the fence. Filomeo told the deputy he was there to investigate animal cruelty.

Wright, the feisty 74-year-old “Granny,” reached out to him, too. She wanted to talk about the gun. “I called Filomeo,” she said in a recent interview, “and I said, ‘If you try that with me I’ll blow your fucking head off.’”

(Mullins later reported this to the LoCO, saying, “We have been threatened with being gunned down.”)

Trespassing charges against Filomeo are pending, according to the Sheriff’s Department.

A macaw, one of Miranda’s Rescue’s many exotic birds.

Mullins’ anti-Miranda Facebook page is chock-full of innuendo and accusations with very little to back it up. (The page is supposedly run by five people, though almost all of posts appear to be written by Mullins.) While she repeatedly refers to “murdering Miranda’s Rescue,” she offers no evidence that even a single adoptable dog has been killed at the facility. When asked to provide such evidence, as people occasionally do, she replies that she can’t because it’s part of the ongoing investigation.

Mullins and others have posted testimonials about dogs they say have “disappeared,” reasoning that since Miranda hasn’t shared photos of the dogs in the company of their new adoptive families then he must have killed them. (Miranda said many adopters simply prefer privacy.)

In a post that has since been deleted, Mullins attempted to tie her accusations of dog-murder to the one blemish on Miranda’s record — an embezzlement conviction from more than two decades ago, when Miranda was a 21-year-old grocery store employee. Here’s the photo that accompanied the post:

Turns out that’s not Shannon Miranda. An online image search revealed it to be a 33-year-old New York man who’s currently on trial for killing a toddler.

Challenged on this apparent manipulation, Mullins defended the photo by saying it was “just a representation” of how Miranda has kept his past “hidden.”

A post from March 16 asks if anyone anywhere might know a woman who, sometime in the last few years, relinquished a horse to the rescue “only to find out days later the horse was picked up and shipped to Nevada to be butchered for meat.” This post was accompanied by a gruesome photo of a prone and bloody horse carcass with its legs severed. This photo, which was evidently grabbed off the Internet, has no connection to Miranda’s Rescue. (Miranda said the anecdote is equally bogus.)

On Jan. 28 Mullins posted a photo of a “cease and desist” letter sent by an attorney representing Miranda. She also posted video of a piece of construction paper with a photo of Miranda pasted under the words, “THE DREAM IS COLLAPSING.” While the video plays you can hear a voicemail that Miranda left on another woman’s phone, asking whether she is “friend or foe.” 

“EVERYONE LISTEN,” Mullins wrote, “to this 1 minute pathetic voice message left by SHANNON MIRANDA as he desperately tries to learn who is still on his side … .”

This is a recurring pattern on the page, where every tidbit of information, no matter how innocuous, gets interpreted as incriminating evidence. When the wording on Miranda’s Rescue’s website changed slightly to reflect the state legislature’s definition of a “no-kill” facility, Mullins suggested it was evidence of a cover-up. When she tracked down an old Times-Standard story in which Miranda was quoted lamenting violence against animals, Mullins cited it as proof that he’s two-faced. And when a woman commented in defense of Miranda’s Rescue, Mullins labeled her a shameless supporter of his killing ways.

When the LoCO posted comments asking for anyone with evidence to contact us, the comments were deleted.

Dean Paris runs with goats released by Shannon Miranda.

Last month, Filomeo, the private eye, called Miranda’s Rescue and spoke with one of the employees. “Granny” Wright reported this call to the Sheriff’s Department, saying Filomeo had again falsely identified himself as a member of the Sheriff’s Office. The deputy called Filomeo and warned him about the legal consequences of pretending to be law enforcement. Filomeo said he hadn’t done so.

On March 9, Filomeo, contacted the LoCO with an offer. He would let us listen to recorded witness statements and speak directly with witnesses, but only if we would sign a written contract promising:

• to keep every witness anonymous because some have “concerns of retribution”
• to encourage other potential witnesses to come forward, and
• to not identify Filomeo or his company by name.

Filomeo explained this latter condition by saying that if his firm were identified, “we would be bombarded with calls and possible threats as this is a very emotional issue … .” 

In a series of back-and-forth emails with Filomeo we tried to explain why it would be journalistically irresponsible to accept his conditions. Filomeo argued that if we didn’t find his witness statements credible — or if, say, we found that his company had done something unethical — we could simply choose to write no story at all. When we continued to argue against his conditions he declared that he would no longer cooperate.

“I at this time am informing you I do not wish to be contacted by you or any representative of your newspaper and I will not be providing you with any statements or access to any of our evidence,” Filomeo wrote in a March 11 email.

Five days later, Mullins’ anti-Miranda Facebook page began posting the anonymous witness statements. So far, six statements have appeared on the page. The first one, allegedly from a former volunteer using the pseudonym “Nancy L.,” claims that Miranda handled dogs aggressively, that they cowered in his presence, and that Nancy was told by “a person she trusted” that Miranda’s brother John was picking up dogs in the night, taking them to the forest and shooting them.

The second statement claims Miranda is faking a back injury to collect social security and that his brother John admitted to killing pitbulls. The third says he failed to keep the aviary or cat shelter clean and that he held a woman’s escaped bird ransom for $300. Each statement contains a variety of far-flung allegations, but since they’re anonymous, and utterly lacking supporting evidence, there’s no way to determine if there’s even a shred of truth in them.

Miranda denies the allegations, and he was able to identify at least two of the anonymous witnesses based on the content of their statements. One is Raymond Christie, the 50-year-old McKinleyville man who stood trial in 2009 for allegedly raising roosters for cockfighting and possessing dozens of cockfighting implements. (The trial resulted in a hung jury, and the charges were ultimately dropped.)

Christie, who has also been cited for letting animals at his 2,000-acre ranch run free, has a longstanding feud with Miranda. The two men were arrested for fighting in public in 2012, though the charges were dismissed.

Reached by the LoCO, Christie admitted that he made the witness statement. He and Miranda were once good friends, he said, but not anymore. 

“He’s a fucking liar is what he is,” Christie said. “A dirty, rotten liar.”

Christie is the only “witness” that LoCO has been able to track down, and even he called the accuracy of the statements into question — namely, his own. Filomeo “got the last part wrong,” Christie said. The final paragraph of Christie’s statement says Miranda once admitted to starving some sheep to death and wanted to know “where he could get more sheep because he liked having sheep at the rescue.”

“I don’t know why that was even in there,” Christie said. “There was nuthin’ about any sheep.”

Several generations of sheep at Miranda’s Rescue.

The witness statements, like Mullins’ string of accusations, bear little resemblance to the reputation Miranda’s Rescue has built in the community. We contacted numerous associates including Ferndale Veterinary, the Eureka Police Department and former volunteers, and they had nothing but positive things to say about the place.

Even out-of-towners hold him in high esteem.

Cheryl Goldsmith, like Mullins, has brought a number of rescued dogs to Miranda’s Rescue from the Central Valley, where she lives. And she, too, has now run afoul of Mullins because she continues to bring him dogs in need of a home. 

“My experiences are all positive,” she said in a recent interview. “I see how he acts with the dogs. You can tell if somebody really loves animals.”

Goldsmith has read Mullins’ claim about Miranda making tens of thousands of dollars by demanding $500 or more in cash for each dog he accepts, and she says it’s false.

“The dogs I bring up from my shelter, he never takes money for those dogs because we don’t have it,” she said. “He pays to get them spayed and neutered. He even pays for the rabies [vaccines].”

Mullins has compared her to the Nazis for continuing to support Miranda, Goldsmith said. And after this much insinuation, Goldsmith feels it’s time to put up or shut up.

“Let’s have it!” she said. “If you’ve got shit on Shannon, let’s see it.”

Miranda himself has tried to stay above the fray. Earlier today he sent the LoCO the following statement:

“In the beginning, I didn’t want to engage in any rumors. That is why I haven’t responded to any negative comments. I didn’t want to feed into the negativity. This isn’t a popularity contest for me. When you rescue animals out of deplorable and neglectful situations, like it or not, you are going to make enemies. I can live with every decision I’ve made when it comes to the best interest for that animal. And remember, as I always say, I never reward a survivor with death.

“This is my first and last response, I will not be engaging in any more false allegations. I am devoting my energy to the animals that need me and to our amazing community. That being said, I am going to stay positive, focus on what I’ve been doing for the last 19 years, which is rescue any and all animals I possibly can, and place them in forever homes. I want to thank all of my loyal supporters for helping me pursue my dream of making the world a safer place for animals. We couldn’t do it without you.”

Miranda has a soft spot for this baby goat.