HOLT - In a noisy farm at the end of a long dirt road on Draggin' Acres, a bleating Louis L'Amour is one of the lucky goats.

He still has his head.

So do the others - Aunt Jemima, Custer and the young Geronimo. In fact, all 75 of the pygmy and Nubian goats milling around on Brooke Broderick's farm appear safe because their owner keeps close watch.

"All you have to do is meet these little goats and you will be angry," Broderick says as she walks among the herd.

She is fuming about the repeated goat decapitations in Fort Walton Beach.

Nine headless goats have been left in the city's streets since Aug. 26, 2007. The case has stymied investigators.

The sheer number of her goats makes Broderick one of the larger goat breeders in Okaloosa County, but she says investigators haven't interviewed her.

She may have a clue, though: A strange phone call she reported to the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office last March, about six months before the first decapitated goat was found.

A call history record from the Sheriff's Office lists a report from Broderick just before 7 a.m. March 2, 2007 describing a bizarre call about an ad she placed.

Broderick sells her animals through word-of-mouth and by postings on the Internet classifieds site craigslist.org - which is how the Daily News found her after a cursory search. She describes the March phone call as "really weird."

"A man left a voice mail to me with an extremely eerie soundtrack - like jungle sounds," she says. "He wanted some of my little goats."

Broderick says she called the man back and claims he had a heavy accent, perhaps Haitian.

"He said, I've never owned goats, but my father owned goats - but he's in jail because he had sex with goats.

"That's why I called the deputy sheriff. It was probably a prankster, but you don't play with me with my goats."

The recording and its originating phone number are gone, Broderick says, but she recalls the call came from Crestview.

With multiple "Beware of Dog" signs hitched to the front gate of her property and a biting Great Pyrenees guard dog in its pen for the Daily News' visit, Broderick is sure she's accounted for the entire herd. She says she doesn't sell a goat without thoroughly screening the buyer and often stays in touch after the sale.

Investigators say there are hundreds of goat farms within a reasonable radius and they've checked auctions as far away as Atlanta.

On Jan. 20, 2007, weeks before the strange message, a pregnant goat was found dead near the Okaloosa-Walton County line. It had been raped by a man, tests showed.

No one was arrested in the case after lawmen said a DNA sample was contaminated, although Broderick says she knows the suspect's name.

In Fort Walton Beach, the goat investigation has grown with each discovery. All of the goats have been found on Sundays or Wednesdays.

Investigators have gone undercover to local auctions in Paxton to search for suspicious buyers but found none, said Dee Thompson, director of animal services for the Panhandle Animal Welfare Society.

Sources say one of two goats found early Wednesday had horns, while the rest haven't. That goat, found in the intersection of Holmes Boulevard and Wright Parkway, appeared to have its head ripped off rather than cut.

There was no blood, said Josh Richardson, who lives nearby and was letting his dog out at about 2 a.m. when he saw police inspecting the goat's body.

Richardson is a Daily News employee.

He said there was a "reddish half-walnut-shaped thing" left near the body - possibly an organ or perhaps just a nut. Police photographed it, he said.

The goat's head was a few feet from its body. It had a branch with green leaves in its mouth.

For Broderick, that gruesome scene is almost unimaginable. She struggles to see how someone could behead such a curious, trusting animal.

"They're like a child that never grew up," she says. "Everyone in the goat community is terribly upset about it."

KNOW SOMETHING?

If you have information on the goat decapitations, contact PAWS at 244-0196 or Fort Walton Beach police at 833-9546

Daily News Staff Writer Andrew Gant can be reached at 863-1111, Ext. 1432.