Lee, who was not represented by a lawyer in court, was remanded at the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) for assessment.

It is not known whether Lee, who was arrested on Sunday, Dec. 27, will face additional charges.

At least 19 cats have been found dead or injured since September

If the alleged cat killer is indeed the perpetrator, the cat welfare community, especially the Yishun cat welfare group 'Yishun 326 Tabby cat', will heave a sigh of relief.

Since September, 17 cats have died, with two left severely injured.

In the last three months, grassroots "fast response teams" were set up with volunteers patrolling the Yishun neighbourhood for the cat killer.

MP-elect Louis Ng — also the president of ACRES, a wildlife rescue group — got involved; and dialogues with the press and cat welfare volunteers were held.

On Dec. 19, Ng stressed at a dialogue session with several cat welfare representatives that the authorities had been doing their best to arrest the killer. The ranking officer-in-charge of the case was present at a press briefing, said Ng, and frequent meetings had been held with the volunteers on the ground.

"We are determined to ensure that justice is served,” Ng told The Straits Times after a cat was found floating in a pond next to Khoo Teck Puat Hospital on Dec. 26.

This took too long

Yet the time it took to arrest and charge Lee was telling. At the same dialogue session, many expressed frustration at how cat abuse cases are not dealt with adequately.

Volunteers did not know if the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA), who was in charge of the investigations, had the resources and skills to conduct the investigations, reported The Online Citizen. Volunteers also said that the AVA and police did not share forensic resources that would have helped identify suspects.

At a press briefing held between Ng, Cat Welfare Society (CWS) and Yishun 326 Tabby cat, CWS committee member Veron Lau told Channel NewsAsia that CWS had pushed AVA for more details on cat deaths, but was told that the statutory board did not have access to the same forensics resources as the police.

Throughout the three months, AVA stressed that it needed direct verifiable evidence of the cat abuse happening in order to prosecute any offender. The lack of direct witnesses willing to testify in court, and videographic footage pointing to the suspects, led to no case being established against any of them. This was despite high-resolution cameras installed around the neighbourhood; residents were also being alerted to suspected cases of abuse in the hope that they would be able to provide witness accounts or footage from their in-car cameras.

“There must be more to police work than in the collection of videographic evidence,” Lau told Mothership.sg. She adds that there are still gaps, because currently, various types of information about abuse cases sit with the AVA, police, SPCA and vets separately, and there is no one place for it all to be collated for proper investigation.

“Also, everyone from top to bottom must be privy to the evidence gathering protocol as many times, carcasses are cleared by cleaners and contractors even though there was an eyewitness to the crime.”

The lack of communication between authorities and cat welfare volunteers, for another, only seemed to communicate that the volunteers’ efforts to nab abusers was for naught, as more dead cats appeared at void decks, and the acts of abuse became more and more brazen.

Are these crimes the act of one culprit?

The ordeal may not be over — it was suspected that there could be more than one culprit.

Only four to five cases matched Lee’s modus operandi — throwing cats off a height — while other cats were found with severe trauma to the head and back, injuries to the intestinal organs, gouged eyes and chopped limbs. The most recent was found in a pond on Saturday, a day before Lee was arrested.

“While this is good news, let's not let our guard down and remain vigilant,” said Ng in a statement on Facebook announcing Lee’s arrest.