Wally the alligator's owner pushes back against online conspiracy theories & accusations
Update: This story has been updated to clarify some information about whether Wally wanted to come in the house or stay outside the morning he disappeared.
Joie Henney returned to his friend’s house in Brunswick, Georgia, from an overnight fishing trip off the coast of Jekyll Island a little after 4 a.m. on Sunday, April 21.
He’s been going down to southeast Georgia from his home in central Pennsylvania for a few years, spending time with friends and fishing and taking his emotional support alligator, Wally, along, penning him in an enclosure at his friend’s house.
It had been a pretty good night. One of his friends caught a bonnethead shark and others snagged a few sting rays.
When he returned in the pre-dawn darkness, he checked on Wally. Wally was lounging in the water. The gate was secure, he said. Everything seemed all right so he went inside to catch some shuteye. He wanted Wally to come inside, but the gator refused, preferring to stay in his pen. Wally hunkered down in the water and blew bubbles, Henney recalled.
Henney woke about three hours later and went outside to check on Wally. He called him, but the gator didn’t respond. Wally, it seemed, was gone.
Henney thought, “There’s no way he could get out of the enclosure.” He checked the latch on the gate, and it was not completely latched, he said. He walked around the enclosure to see if there were signs that Wally had escaped. “There were no tracks whatsoever,” Henney said. “There’s some tall grass there and there were no tracks. He would have left a track; he’s almost 70 pounds.”
He didn’t see any gator tracks in the sand outside the gate either, he said. He saw no signs that Wally had scaled the chain-link fence, even if he were so inclined, he said. “Wally is too lazy for that.”
Wally was gone, the victim of an apparent gator-napping.
Henney has been able to piece together what happened to Wally, but this being the 21st century in America, the ‘gator’s disappearance has unleashed a flood of conspiracy theories circulated on social media, and Wally has lawyered up.
How it came to that, Henney is not sure.
“All I know is I want Wally back,” he said.
'It got a lot of weird'
Reports of Wally’s fate surfaced shortly after stories of his disappearance appeared. The story garnered international media attention, mostly because of Wally’s fame on social and traditional media. (Among the previous stories was one about Wally not being allowed to attend a Philadelphia Phillies game.)
The story that Henney put together from reports is that it appeared that a prankster – described by Henney as “some jerk” – had snagged Wally and placed him in a neighbor’s yard as a joke. The neighbor called the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, which dispatched a trapper who took custody of Wally and released him in a swamp.
The details have shifted somewhat since the early days of Wally’s disappearance. The unidentified neighbor told Fox 43 that she heard about a gator moving through nearby backyards that morning.
When she returned from church at about noon, she told the TV station, she found the gator in her yard, two slats in her fence had been pushed aside. She called the police department’s non-emergency number and was referred to the DNR, which put her in touch with a trapper permitted by the state. While waiting for the trapper, the TV station reported, she and another person wrangled the gator and secured him in a truck.
She met the trapper at a nearby gas station and handed him over. The trapper, the neighbor reported, told her the gator would be relocated and not euthanized.
Henney said the trapper told him initially that Wally had been released into the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge about 60 miles southeast of Brunswick, near the Florida line. Later, Henney said, the trapper told him he released Wally into a swamp on private property. Now, Henney said, “He won’t tell us where he released Wally.”
For its part, the DNR released a statement that its “offices routinely receive calls about nuisance alligators” and that callers “are referred to a permitted alligator agent trapper, per agency protocols.”
The statement continues, “Our offices have confirmed that a permitted trapper responded to a nuisance alligator call in Brunswick, Ga., on 4/21/2024 and secured an alligator on their property. This alligator was later released in a remote location. The agent trapper’s handling of a nuisance alligator was appropriate and routine. We have no information confirming whether this is the same alligator that is being reported as stolen/missing (aka “Wally”). Additionally, we have no further information about the reported stolen/missing alligator.”
Henney doesn’t fault DNR or the trapper. “DNR and the trapper did their job and did their job right,” he said. “I’m not mad at them or upset with them. They didn’t know Wally from another alligator.”
Still, even though Wally has a chip embedded in him, the search hasn’t produced any clues about his whereabouts.
“Then,” Henney said, “it got a lot of weird.”
'It is a mess'
As the story of Wally’s disappearance spread across the globe, a group of keyboard sleuths took to social media – mostly Facebook – to parse its details.
They speculated that Wally was unhealthy, which Henney disputes, saying that Wally routinely had checkups at the vet’s office. They speculated that Wally had escaped. They speculated, Henney said, “It was a fake and it wasn’t true.”
They’ve also speculated that the GoFundMe pages set up to raise money to fund the search and any legal expenses Henney may incur is a scam. One page is raising money to pay legal bills – it has raised $3,200 as of this week – and another to pay expenses incurred by the search and a reward for Wally’s return. Henney has suspended that second page until the situation is cleared up, his lawyer said.
Henney said the accusations are not true and that the accusers haven’t supported their assertions with any evidence. He also said that he can account for “every dollar” that has been raised.
“They’re saying a lot of stuff,” Henney said. “They’re just over there saying that I’m a scammer and I’m a fraud.”
One person, who Henney said “started all this mess,” stopped by his friend’s house and took photos of it and the enclosure. He said his friends in Georgia have been harassed.
Henney has contacted a lawyer, Stephanie Miller, who practices in eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, to respond to those posting about the case on Facebook. The people on Facebook responded by questioning whether Miller is actually an attorney.
“It is a mess,” Miller said. “It’s 110 percent a mess. I’m sick and tired of it. It needs to stop.”
Miller is working on helping Henney retain counsel in Georgia to pursue the case. She said they have “a pretty good idea” who abducted Wally and are prepared “to take whatever legal steps we can take to get Wally back.”
'I'll pay what I have to pay'
Henney is still in Georgia, searching for Wally. He said, “They only thing I’ve done wrong is I didn’t have a permit.”
According to DNR, “only licensed or permitted individuals can retain alligators in captivity. Most native species of wildlife cannot be held without permits or licenses. These licenses are not issued for the purpose of having native wildlife as pets.”
Henney may face fines for violating that law. He said he is fine with that.
“I’ll pay the fine,” Henney, who’s from York Haven and now lives in Grantville east of Harrisburg, said. “I’ll pay what I have to pay. All I want is to get Wally back and go back home to Pennsylvania.”
Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com.
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Saga of Wally the emotional support gator has gotten 'a lot of weird'
