Lizard Man "attack" on the Rawsons' minivan, Bishopville

Lee County, South Carolina, already had a monster. In the summer of 1988, 17-year-old Christopher Davis described a creature about 7 feet tall, green and "wetlike", with three fingers, red eyes and "snakelike scales". The sheriff's office took plaster casts of three-toed tracks near Browntown. A state biologist blamed a red fox "or a drunk". The Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp became a legend.

Thursday, February 28, 2008. Bob and Dixie Rawson lived about two miles southeast of downtown Bishopville, beside a cattle field. In the early morning hours they found their 2002 Dodge Grand Caravan mauled.

"The whole front half of our van is chewed up," Dixie Rawson said. "There are bite marks right through the front grill. Both sides of the van above the wheel wells were bitten and the metal is bent like a piece of paper." The front fender was chewed. Metal was "crumpled in a wad". Blood streaked the front and sides. Bob Rawson showed reporters the blood and the claw marks.

Then there were the cats. The Rawsons kept more than 20. Several disappeared. Their box-beds had been tampered with. Dixie Rawson began carrying a gun outside.

Sheriff E. J. Melvin was cautious. "You think it's a joke, but you look at the damage to the vehicle, it's hard to say." A dead cow and a dead coyote were found only yards away in the adjoining field. Melvin said he was sticking with the coyote. The SC Department of Natural Resources reported that the first blood sample had somehow been contaminated.

At the end of March, Tom Biscardi of Searching for Bigfoot arrived from California with a five-man team, thermal imagers and cameras. He planned to make molds of the teeth marks. "It wasn't a coyote," he said. "I think what you have here more than likely is a Bigfoot creature." By May he was calling it a swamp ape. No results from his own samples are known.

May 15, 2008. Blood sent to a California forensic lab came back as Canis familiaris. A domestic dog. Not a wolverine, a lizard or a primate. Janson Cox of the Cotton Museum put it plainly: "A very powerful jawed canine." Melvin still suggested a coyote or a wolf. Dixie Rawson was unmoved. "That's all blood in there," she said. "I don't believe it was a domestic dog."

A bear or a coyote was suggested within days. Beth Hedegor of the Lee County Chamber of Commerce suspected a bear. The blogger Lawrence Person argued the punctures looked too deep and too far apart for a bear, and allowed that they might have been faked. Nobody formally accused the Rawsons. The same year, a wildlife journal described a Texas case in which a stray domestic dog had torn and bitten through a metal outbuilding. Later in 2008, Biscardi himself was at the centre of the Georgia "Bigfoot body" hoax.

Bishopville saw an opportunity. Vickie Moniz of the Blossom Shop sold more than 100 "Lizard Man is Back" T-shirts. The wider legend went on to books, television, the 2023 film Legend of Lizard Man and, from 2018, the annual Lizardman Festival. The skeptic Benjamin Radford has written about the 1988 case. The 2008 attack remains its oddest chapter. A monster story in which nobody saw the monster.