Man who brutally killed two dozen kittens might be in for a rough ride behind bars
Pedophiles, informants, and cops are at the bottom of the prison hierarchy, but where will a sadistic kitten killer land?
WARNING: This story contains disturbing details about animal cruelty.
Jess Nicholls isn’t a pedophile or an informant or a cop, three of the more loathed kind of prisoners behind bars in Canadian institutions.
But the 30-year-old from Brandon, Manitoba, did something so universally abhorrent that he is sure to be looking over his shoulder for the next few years.
Nicholls was sentenced to five years in prison after violently killing nearly two dozen kittens and two rabbits, a case that got some degree of media coverage making it hard to hide from.
"The level of violence involved and the brutality with which he killed them is stunning," Judge Shauna Hewitt-Michta said in a Brandon court on May 8, 2025, as reported by the CBC.
Nicholls was arrested in June 2022 when a roommate told police she found dead kittens outside their home. When officers arrived they found a tote with eight dead kittens with visible injuries.
The then 27-year-old meth addict was purchasing animals online and reselling them, sometimes for a profit.
He was charged with animal cruelty and released on bail with conditions that included an order he not possess animals. Five months later, however, police were told he was again acquiring kittens and other animals through internet ads.
When officers arrived at his home on Nov. 15, 2022, they found pet food, paw prints, rats, and one adult cat. A roommate claimed Nicholls wasn’t home but police found him hiding under a blanket. Already in violation of his bail, they searched the home and found 15 more dead kittens and the two dead rabbits.
The behaviour seemed to be an obsession that he claimed he couldn’t control. In a statement to police he said could “not live without them,” but then sometimes he would have “episodes” that led to the killings.
Nicholls also minimized the number of animals he killed and the nature of the harm, claiming one of the rabbits died of a broken heart.
"The two rabbits were necropsied,” Judge Hewitt-Michta wrote in her decision. “Suffice it to say, neither died of a broken heart.”
Judge Hewitt-Michta accepted Nicholls’ claim that he suffered with suicidal ideation, he was using drugs, and experience withdrawal symptoms at the time of the killings in June. However, she said there was no evidence he suffered from cognitive limitations that would undermine his ability to understand the criminals acts were also morally wrong.
“[H]is moral culpability remains significant,” she said.
"His actions resulted in substantial harm to many animals, and the sentence imposed should aim to acknowledge the harmfulness of his actions."
She sentenced him to five years minus time served and gave him a lifetime ban on owning, or even living in the same place as, animals.
How will a kitten killer fare behind bars?
Anyone who has attended high school or played on a sports team or lived in a capitalist society or, really, lived anywhere among other humans has experienced latent and/or overt hierarchies.
Prison is no different. Imagine taking 300 grown men with terrible decision-making abilities, addictions, mental health issues, and making them live together cheek by jowl, eating meals in a cafeteria, moving around at the same time, spending time outside together.
Just as if you dropped hundreds of people of on a remote island. Informal social orders inevitably emerge as they organize for survival, protection, status, and access to resources.
There are racial and ethnic divisions, especially in American prisons, less so in Canada, according to experts. Gang members dominate the hierarchy taking charge of extortion, rackets, gambling, drugs and phones.
There is an economic hierarchy with contraband such as cigarettes, drugs and phones, but also with canteen items prisoners who have money can buy, such as frozen pizzas and chocolate bars and ramen noodles. This is currency in prison.
Most prisoners don’t stand out and they try to avoid attention, but there are those on the top of this hierarchichal society and those on the bottom.
Respect is also a currency behind bars held by tough guys and gangsters, long-term cons and amateur “lawyers” who help other inmates with appeals and other justice system applications.
That’s who gets respect and survive their time in prison at the top of the hierarchy.
So who’s on the bottom. It shouldn’t be too surprising: pedophiles, informants, and bad cops.
Prison guards and other peace officers who commit offences also don’t fare so well as Jason Kenneth Lee is likely learning in recent months. Nine months into his career as a prison guard, Lee began a months-long conspiracy with gang-connected drug dealers to smuggle illegal drugs, cellphones, tobacco and even weapons into Kent Institution, B.C.’s only maximum security prison.
He was busted on his way to work on Sept. 21, 2023 at the Popkum Tim Hortons, and he was sentenced to five years on March 7, 2025.
“Your time in custody is not going to be easy,” Judge Michael Fortino told Lee that day, pointing out something Lee knew all too well.
Lee’s lawyer Kelly Merrigan requested that he be able to serve his time at William Head Institution in Victoria, the most comfortable minimum security prison in B.C. known as “Club Fed.”
“Every day my client is in custody he will have a target on his back, and that weighs heavily on his mind,” Merrigan said adding that it is well-known that certain offenders in prisons are at exceptional risk of violence.
“It is common knowledge that prisons have protective custody for a reason. For sex offenders or informants. Top of the list is peace officers.”
Whether cops turned criminal or men who sexually abuse children are more loathed depends on the institution and the circumstances of the offence, but suffice it to say they are on the top of the list.
In 2016, I received a hand-written letter from K.D.C., a man who can’t be named because he was convicted of raping his toddler step-daughter. He complained that my coverage of his case made him “look like a monster.”
“There are many individuals in prison that would love to beat the shit out of me, or even kill me if they could,” he wrote.
In April 2019, I was in BC Supreme Court in Chilliwack for the ongoing case of David Paul Kuntz-Angel who was convicted of sexually assaulting a girl for a decade from the age of eight until she became an adult.
Kuntz-Angel – who has several aliases – is a musician with an unusual history of pretending he is David Lee Roth to anyone who might believe him.
As he spoke on the witness stand during a portion of the trial six years ago, he mumbled, and appeared to struggle speaking. He looked to be in some pain or discomfort.
He told the judge: “Forgive my speech, I had a number of teeth knocked out since I last came in here.”
Later in the proceedings he expanded on that: “Things Mr. Henderson printed in the paper, I ended up getting my teeth knocked out from that.”
I derived no schadenfreude from that comment since the sex offender didn’t get beat up because of what I wrote in the newspaper but because he sexually offended against a child.
The point is simply that child sex offenders are subject to scrutiny behind bars.
Various American sub-Reddit chats on this topic include comments from people who have served time in America’s massive prisons and who say, no one knows or cares what you did to get behind bars. That might be true if you are in one of the U.S.’s massive institutions with as many as 5,000 inmates, but Canada is not like that.
When an inmate is new to a Canadian prison, a fish, he is ordered by whomever is on top of the food chain to hand over his paperwork to show what he’s in for. If he is a sex offender, particularly a child molester, or a snitch or a peace officer, it’s likely they will be put in a special handling unit for protection. If they aren’t, they will indeed have a rough ride.
So how about Jess Nicholls? Someone who kills a farm animal or is involved in dog fighting might not face much risk, but a mentally awkward man who brutally killed two dozen kittens could be in for trouble. Puppies and kittens are like children. No non-psychopathic person, often even the worst of the worst hardened criminals, don’t accept grown men who assault or kill the vulnerable.
If Nicholls is forced to show his papers and no inmates are able to search news stories about him, he might do OK. But if and when they do find out what he did to kittens, he might need to be looking over his shoulder.
As for the pedophiles and prison guard mentioned above, how did they do?
Kuntz-Angel may have had his teeth knocked out at Surrey Pretrial but he otherwise survived his time behind bars. He is out of custody and last I heard from a source is that he was living in a homeless camp next to the highway in North Vancouver. I’m not sure where K.D.C. is now. His statutory release date was Oct. 6, 2020 (two thirds of a sentence) and his full 12 year sentence ends some time in 2025.
A reliable source also told me that shortly after his sentencing, Lee was beat up behind bars at an institution he was at before being sent to his long-term home. I also heard that that long-term home is NOT at ‘Club Fed’ as his lawyer requested, Crown counsel didn’t oppose, and the judge recommended. That decision where a convicted offender serves their time isn’t up to any of them. It’s up to Correctional Service of Canada.
Where he is I don’t know but it’s possible that his notoriety might have made him too much of a mark even at cushy William Head so he was shipped out of province.
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Paul J. Henderson
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