Someone has kidnapped Mr Sheffield. A squad of volunteer detectives is on the case

I’ve got to see a woman about a horse. Or, rather, I’ve got to speak to her on the phone about one — though we’ve been in touch for just shy of seven months, we’ve never met in person. After hours of trying and failing, I’m beginning to fear I’ve finally met the uncontactable subject that the unstoppable force of my journalism can’t beat. Getting an interview with Lord David Blunkett was nowhere near this hard. Securing a chat with Jarvis Cocker might not even be this exhausting.

Lisa Dean, 55, may be one of the busiest women in the world. Though she took early retirement from her job as a preschool teacher, she nevertheless works 24/7 running Beauty’s Legacy, the organisation she founded eight years ago, entirely unpaid. A tragic incident — one so harrowing that she moved halfway across the country to get away from the scene of the possible crime — thrust upon her something akin to a sacred mission. Her passion for it is boundless and infectious. Over the years, as Beauty’s Legacy has grown and grown, it has accumulated hundreds of volunteers up and down the country, of which Lisa estimates 90% are people the charity has previously helped.

Remember the 2008 action film Taken, in which an ex-CIA officer played by Liam Neeson tracks down his teenage daughter after she is kidnapped by human traffickers? Lisa is a pacifist version of Neeson’s character — the beloved pets of the UK are her daughter. She is a woman with a very particular set of skills. Pilfer someone else’s cat, dog or any other pet and she’ll stop trying to find you only when the owner requests it or when the life expectancy of that animal means there is no chance it’s still alive. The charity will not refuse a case, no matter how hopeless it might seem. In the instances where they’re contacted almost immediately, before the leads go cold, she claims they have an astonishing success rate of 70 to 80%.

It’s work that takes her up and down the country, whether to help lasso an escaped goat or uncover an illegal puppy farm. It also entails fielding calls from distressed owners throughout the day and sometimes into the dead of night. That’s why it’s so hard to get her on the phone, and even harder for us to meet in person. She hasn’t set foot anywhere near Sheffield since last Sunday, when she took part in a fundraiser in Grenoside, organised by the owner of one of the charity’s most complex active cases.

Seven months ago, in the dead of night, someone stole Mr Sheffield from the stable of 36-year-old horse breeder Stacey Gill. Lisa Dean will stop at nothing to bring him home. The charity has volunteers on the ground scouring possible locations in Wales and Ireland and 28 different police forces in the country have his description. “We’re working hard,” Lisa assures me, “we’re throwing everything at him and we’re never going to give up.”

This would probably be an appropriate time to admit that I do not care for horses at all. A large part of it is down to fear; though I grew up in London, my mother took great pains to impress upon me the dangers of walking anywhere near the back end of one, a foolish blunder she insisted could only ever lead to instant death from being kicked in the head. It also likely has something to do with the most bizarre assignment of my career so far, in which I was shipped off to Portugal to cover the Golegã Horse Fair as best as someone with no interest in horses could, an experience I made tolerable by necking as many shots of Ginjinha — a sour cherry liqueur — as the local bartenders could be convinced to put into my hands. More to the point, though, I just find horses too large, unpredictable and fundamentally unnerving, although I’m aware these are all complaints that could be made about me.

Even to a heretic like myself, Mr Sheffield seems to be a particularly endearing horse. He wouldn’t look out of place as the animal sidekick in a Disney film and large swathes of the preteen girl population would probably kick each other to death for a chance to plait his hair. In terms of breed, he is a Mini Cob. The “mini” part is very apparent, to the point where his owner Stacey tells me people often mistake him for a Shetland. His colour is chestnut Appaloosa — or white with small brown spots, to a philistine like myself — which makes him something of a rarity. “There’s not many about like him,” Stacey says. “If there were, he would still be in my stable.” It’s unlikely, for example, that anyone would go to the trouble of nicking his sister, whose coat is a more common black and white.

According to previous articles on the early morning heist of Mr Sheffield, he is worth more than £100,000, both because of his distinctive colouring and because he can beget foals that might share it. To Stacey, a breeder from a family of breeders, his monetary value is besides the point. “I’ve had horses all my life but he was special. It’s like someone took one of my kids,” she says. Even for a colt, Mr Sheffield is particularly cheeky and playful. “He would even play with buckets. I walked in one day and he had a bucket on his head. He’s very comical.”

Having raised him from birth, Stacey had always “done absolutely everything” for her favourite charge. “My life revolved around him. Everything I did, I had to think about him before I did it and I never took a day off. My morning routine was to drop the kids at school and then I was straight back to him.” To someone in the horse world, the time she had invested in him would have been obvious from a single glance. “Horses don’t just look like him if they’re left in a field,” she points out. Being Mr Sheffield requires near-constant grooming and feeding. 

What makes the violation of his theft sting even more, then, is that those responsible were almost certainly knowledgeable about horses. They may have even been familiar with Stacey herself. After all, they knew exactly what they were looking for. The Gill property is home to “quite a few” other horses — Stacey is unwilling to reveal how many, having been burned by this experience — and a lot of valuable equipment, all of which were untouched. “It’s just down to pure jealousy, somebody else wants what you have got and they take it,” she says, adding that she had rebuffed many offers to buy him in the past. She’s no longer willing to have visitors at her property anymore, other than family and friends, for fear that one of her other horses will catch someone’s envious eye. “It’s a shame because you breed these animals and you’re proud of them so you want to be able to show them off,” she says. “It will affect our business but I’m leaving that to my other half. I’m just going to stick to looking after them for now.”

According to Lisa, who has supported thousands of victims of pet theft through Beauty’s Legacy, it’s not unusual for the violation to have a profound impact. “We’ve had couples that have split up over this and people that have gone into debt because they put cameras all over their property. People give up their jobs because they’re too focused on finding their animal.” She estimates that only half of the charity’s work is about tracking down stolen or missing animals; the other half is about emotionally supporting the owners left behind. She and two other core volunteers have trained in bereavement counselling and are on hand constantly to talk. “Sometimes people want to phone overnight because they can’t sleep and we take turns to stay up,” she says. “We’ve got a lady with a dog missing in Lancashire and I speak to her every day at the moment. She’s really struggling.”

Lisa is happy to do it, because she knows from personal experience how much it hurts. While Beauty’s Legacy only formally registered as a charity in 2021, it was founded in 2016 — the same year Lisa lost her cat Beauty. The beloved family pet went missing in April of that year; Lisa spent a week covering her neighbourhood in missing posters and putting flyers through letterboxes before someone suggested she offer a £150 reward. That day, a man phoned up to say he’d coincidentally just found Beauty in his front garden, although she was deathly ill. “I got her straight to the vet but unfortunately she passed away in my arms,” she says. “The vet said she could have been poisoned.” 

Lisa returned to the man’s home to offer him the reward money and was surprised by how eagerly he accepted it. “I know I wouldn’t take reward money if I found someone’s pet, but he couldn’t wait to get it out of my hand and shut the door.” It made his convenient discovery of her cat the same day she offered a reward a little suspicious. “I still didn’t realise at the time but, in hindsight, we are very confident she was taken for some reason.”

The man in question lived only a few streets away and the thought of bumping into him around the neighbourhood was too painful to bear. Lisa moved from Kent to Nottinghamshire, where she still lives, the following year. “I still know the anniversary of when Beauty went missing and I’ve got photos of her everywhere,” she says. The only way she could process her pain was to turn the experience into something positive, using the Facebook group she started during her search for Beauty to help others in her position. Hence the name: Beauty’s Legacy. “She has reunited thousands of animals,” Lisa says. “Her legacy lives on and I’m very proud of what we do.” 

At first, Beauty’s Legacy focused mainly on awareness campaigns — making stolen pets “too hot to handle” by plastering the internet and the local area with their picture and information. These days, even though everyone involved is still an unpaid volunteer, the operation has become far more sophisticated. As of a few years ago, the core team boasts “an IT fanatic” who can enhance CCTV footage to make it easier to identify suspects, a man who Lisa describes as “a really important cog in the workings of the charity”. They also have a team of volunteers dedicated to “scouring selling sites up and down the country,” hoping to spot a stolen pet up for sale, plus teams of experienced animal trappers and drone pilots to help spot animals from the sky. 

In the case of Mr Sheffield, there are volunteers tasked with monitoring a handful of locations where anonymous tipsters suggest he might have ended up. Others have attended horse fairs to fish for information from dealers and breeders or even visited stud farms pretending they want to purchase a male Mini Cob, in the hopes of being offered him. “It’s kind of like investigative journalism,” Lisa suggests. “It can be quite addictive.” The floors and walls of her home are often covered in papers relating to their currently active cases.

There are a lot of them — hundreds open at any one time. Pet theft “soared during lockdown,” she says, when demand for animals rose at the same time as reputable breeders and rescues temporarily closed down, and it hasn’t abated since. “Thieves realised how profitable stealing animals can be and that there’s very little consequence: it’s low risk, high profit. While there’s always desired breeds, they’ll often knick anything they can get their hands on.”

It is low risk because pet theft is a “low grade crime,” a fact that often leaves police with their hands tied when it comes to helping distraught owners that report a stolen animal. “They can’t go out and do what we do because they have got more important jobs,” Lisa says. At first, police viewed her and the rest of Beauty’s Legacy as an annoyance but, once they started getting results, that rapidly changed. “It used to be an uphill struggle. I used to dread picking up the phone and speaking to an officer, but now it’s the opposite,” she says. “Now the police phone us up and ask for help.”

It’s incredibly helpful to have them on-side, for the few instances where Lisa worries that confronting a suspected thief without back-up could be dangerous. Experience has taught her to be cautious but, in the more innocent past, she ended up “in some hairy situations”. On one occasion, Beauty’s Legacy was contacted by a woman who said she had seen one of their posters and realised the dog she had just bought was stolen. Would Lisa like to come pick it up from her house? When Lisa and a volunteer arrived, however, it rapidly became very clear that they were not leaving until they handed over the £5,000 reward. “That was a bit scary,” she says. “We were in the property and the door was shut. I looked out the window and saw my car had been blocked off. I had to phone the owner and get them to do a bank transfer there and then.” 

She “learned a valuable lesson” about taking precautions — these days she regularly changes her appearance with wigs, in part to make it harder for a furious thief to track her down. On the whole, however, retrieving animals tends to be far less dramatic most of the time. “If they know we have got them bang to rights, they usually just give it back. It’s amazing how many times they do.” It probably helps that she makes it clear that she’s not police, but could easily come back later with an officer in tow, meaning it’s in a criminal’s best interest to give her what she wants the first time she asks. “We’re not interested in prosecutions, all we’re interested in is getting the animal home.” Still, not everyone would be willing to confront even a low-level criminal to retrieve someone else’s pet. “I don’t know if I’m brave or I’m stupid,” she says. “It’s probably a bit of both.” 

She’s also — and I don’t think she would be offended to read this — clearly obsessed. “This is a major part of my life really and I wouldn’t change a thing,” she says. “Every time we get an animal back, it reminds us why we do this.” She’s always been passionate about animals, an obvious prerequisite for this line of work, but also describes herself as an “empath”, the sometimes controversial term for people with higher than average sensitivity to others’ emotions. Certainly Stacey, who says Lisa kicked off the campaign to find Mr Sheffield only a day after she first got in touch, has felt very supported. “Lisa rings me up every single day,” she tells me, something I can’t help but remember as my own calls keep declining. “I couldn’t have got this far without her.”

What do Lisa’s loved ones think about her all-consuming crusade against pet theft? Her family are very proud, she says — although she concedes they may think she’s “a bit crazy too” — at how she’s turned “something very sad into something very positive”. Her friends just accept that it’s part of knowing her and help as much as they can. “Anyone that knows me wouldn’t question it.” It helps that both of her sons are now all grown up and living in other parts of the country and that she doesn’t have a partner who might resent the time she spends on other people’s pets. “I’m divorced and I don’t think anyone would marry me again now,” she says, laughing.

Her devotion to the cause might not be great for her love life but — fingers crossed — it could be what brings Mr Sheffield home. Despite how many months have passed, and how easy it is to hide a horse of his size, she says Beauty’s Legacy is as determined as ever. “Until someone gives me hard evidence, we are just following every lead,” she says. “If anyone has got any information, please get in touch. You’ll remain 100% anonymous, your details won’t be passed on anywhere else. We just need to get him home.” The charity is keeping an eye on new foals that appear on the market, since they assume he was stolen for breeding purposes, and plan to pay for DNA tests on any that resemble him. 

Stacey, too, is refusing to give up hope. “Losing him made me ill, it absolutely destroyed me,” she says. “As long as I have air in my lungs, I won’t stop looking for him.” What angers her the most, she adds, is the thought that whoever has him in their clutches now is “probably thinking in their daft heads that they own him, but they never will”. 

Could whoever has him now have bought him off the thief, and thus innocently believe they are the rightful owner of Mr Sheffield? She finds it unlikely; certainly no one in the horse world could claim to be ignorant. “Everyone knows about him, all horse people in this country would know they have bought a stolen horse. He’s probably one of the most famous ponies in the country,” she says, before adding wistfully: “And we still can’t find him.”