A dead goat. A frightened town. A name that went around the world.

In the second week of August 1995, Madelyne Tolentino looked out her front window in Canóvanas, Puerto Rico, and saw something walking on two legs. It stood about four feet tall, with dark gray eyes and three long, skinny fingers. By Halloween the island's loudest tabloid was counting goats and parakeets "sucked dead." The mayor, a former police detective up for reelection, led armed search parties into the brush. The killer had a name: el chupacabras, the goat sucker.

Within a year the reports had spread to Miami, Mexico and beyond. Twelve years later a Texas rancher found ugly, hairless, doglike animals dead along her road and said she had found it at last.

Goat Sucker goes back to the wire stories, the witness interviews and the lab reports. It shows what was recorded at the time, what was added later, and how a dead goat became a worldwide legend.

Strange Shorts No. 3.