Retired state trooper honored for undercover work that saved dogs

After graduating from the Missouri State Highway Patrol academy in 1979, Terry Mills of Cape Girardeau suited up in the same uniform his father did many years before. Mills' first assignments led him to Lake of the Ozarks, but only a year later he joined the highway patrol's narcotics unit and stayed until 2001. Mills, now 55 and retired, worked hundreds of narcotics investigations as an undercover agent. His most rewarding assignment came in 2006, though, when he worked as an undercover officer in a dogfighting investigation, which resulted in the largest dog seizure in the United States. Mills retired in June.

Q: Were the four years you spent in the U.S. Marine Corps what got you interested in law enforcement?

A: No. My father was a 30-year trooper with the highway patrol. He retired in 1988. He actually started with the Sikeston Police Department the year I was born. Three years later he got on the highway patrol, so when people ask me how long I've been with the highway patrol I say I've been on since I was 3. That's all I've ever known.

Q: How'd you end up in the narcotics division?

A: An academy classmate of mine from the St. Louis area, he had got into narcotics about a year and a half before me and they had conducted an investigation where I was stationed near Lake of the Ozarks. I was part of the arrest at the end of the investigation and I talked to him, of course. He pretty much recruited me into it.

Q: Tell me about some of the highlights of those 17 years.

A: This goes with the highlights and the hardest part of the job. During the first four years we worked what we call long-term investigations, where they placed you in a town and you lived in an apartment or house in that town for the better part of a year to be mixed with the community. Those were some of the most rewarding times, because at the end of that you were arresting 70, 75 drug dealers in a two- or three-county area. That was also the hardest, because I was away from home so much.

Through the years, though, I had other memorable investigations. I was involved in an outlaw motorcycle gang investigation in St. Louis and that was hard, really hard. All those cases were taken federally, which helps us out. We did a huge meth investigation, which was actually when methamphetamine labs first started popping up in the mid-1990s. We didn't know what it was to be honest with you, but our biggest meth investigation was when it was being brought in from the Southwest, probably ultimately out of Mexico. We worked over a year on that.

Q: When did you get to join the dogfighting investigation?

A: I was assigned to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force [in 2006]. I was there for just about three and half years. What took up two years of my life is that pit bull, dogfighting investigation. It actually was a spinoff of the joint terrorism task force, a sideline of that was a source we developed who was involved with dogfighters. It was an eye opener. No one had any idea at that time what was going on with it. Of course, Michael Vick's case made it famous and put it in headlines. We had no idea there were that many dogfighters in the area.

Q: Tell me more about the undercover work.

A: We're talking the greater St. Louis area. But we went to Tennessee, we went to Arkansas; we actually charged about 100 people in eight states. We had about 150 undercover contacts. We had dogs in our dog kennels; we made it look real, we played the part.

On July 28, 2009, we served the 28 federal search warrants in five states and seized 407 [dogs] just in Missouri and Illinois, and another 100 dogs in the other states. The gestation period for a pit bull is 62 days, so, within that time we had 115 puppies, too. They were being handled by the Humane Society of Missouri, who did great work. The investigation itself was conducted by, of course, us and the USDA. It was initially an FBI investigation and after a couple months, once it didn't fit into their guidelines as far what they felt was a federal terrorism case, they backed out.

Q: Do you know what has happened to the dogs?

A: We've followed up since then. Some of these dogs were taken by the Humane Society and other adoptive agency shelters. There were shelters from 20 different states that were brought in to handle the 500-some dogs. [The dogs were tested] to determine how aggressive they are and if they can be rescued, saved or socialized. We originally started the investigation and the Humane Society people told us they thought somewhere between 10 percent and 15 percent of the dogs would be rescued and socialized. It turned out to be closer to 40 percent. A lot of the out-of-state shelters and the Humane Society have went to great lengths to socialize these animals instead of immediately putting them down because they're pit bulls.

Q: How did you feel about contributing to this investigation once it was complete?

A: As you can see I've done a lot of undercover investigations, a lot of criminal investigations. It was refreshing for me to go out in my career and do something I've never done before. I had to learn about the dogs, the breeds, the language and all the names of the paraphernalia, the training processes they go through and all about the rules of the dogfight. It was a crash course.

ehevern@semissourian.com

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