This little piggy went missing from a Mission Hills home. Owner wants sculpture back
When Carolyn Patterson bought a 55-inch bronze sculpture of a winged mother and baby pig a few months ago, she did not expect for it turn into a community treasure.
Patterson, 78, also did not anticipate someone would steal it.
At 4 a.m. Tuesday morning, someone drove up to her Mission Hills home about three blocks west of the Missouri state line and took the tiny winged pig. She said she and her husband, Bill Patterson, 80, have surveillance video that shows a person pulling up to their lawn in a car, “dislodging” the piglet and driving away. Now the mother pig sculpture, designed to sit atop a bronze boulder and watch over her porcine child, looks out over empty grass.
“I don’t know why someone would do this. It brought a little happiness to people,” Carolyn Patterson said.
Several neighbors wrote on the Nextdoor app, an online platform, that they will miss passing by the piece of art on their way to work.
“It looks like there were many of us who were attached to this little pig,” wrote Michael Gaume, one user on the platform. Gaume said in a follow up conversation that he would do “anything to help bring the little guy back.”
The feedback from community members has been overwhelming, Carolyn Patterson said, with many people driving by just to say they enjoyed looking at the pigs.
The art installation is one of hundreds that the Pattersons have collected over the past 50 or so years. They have traveled the world, collecting pigs from the Caribbean to Asia and places in between. Their shelves are lined with pigs made of wood, crystals, sterling silver and metal.
Carolyn Patterson does not know what attracted her to collecting pigs: she enjoys eating pork and has never owned a pig. Yet she and her husband have had architects create new shelves in their home specifically for the purpose of their collection.
“We look around a lot and wonder how this happened. If the time comes that Bill and I meet our demise, our two sons would look at our home and say ‘What do we do with all of this?’” she said chuckling.
She said she intends to go to the artist of the baby winged pig, Margery Torrey, about a replacement if the thief does not have a change of heart.
The Pattersons filed a police report with the Prairie Village Police Department. Police are reviewing the case, Sgt. Adam Taylor, a spokesman for the department said earlier this week.
Anyone with information can call the TIPS Hotline at 816-474-8477.
This story was originally published November 20, 2021 at 9:02 AM.
