The mystery of the Luck horse-killer

Horses have been dropping like dead horses over on the set of Luck, leading HBO to cancel the show. With three dead, we ask: who is Luck's on-set horse-killer and when will he strike again?

After the death of three horses on set and a protest by PETA, high-profile drama series Luck has been cancelled by HBO. Three in two seasons, though? This is far too coincidental. Clearly, there was a malign force at work.

We have narrowed the list of suspects down to four.
Dustin Hoffman



Chief suspect Hoffman has form, having at various stages of his life kidnapped small children to hold hostage on his pirate ship, won hundreds of thousands of dollars in Las Vegas casinos in a suspected card-counting scheme while ripped to the tits on orange soda, and cross-dressed to win a part on a soap opera.

"He's old and he looks shifty," said an on-set source. "You know those old men you see in Sainsbury's hanging around the tinned fruit and you think to yourself, Hello, he's going to nick some prunes any second, and then sure enough he whips a can into his tartan wheely-shopper and makes for the hills?

"He's like them."
Nick Nolte



Half-man, half-polar bear Nolte had a reputation on the set of Luck for clubbing small creatures to death with a polo mallet to keep himself amused between takes, so it's no stretch to imagine that his bloodlust moved up a gear, leading him to seek out larger prey.

"I've seen it with my own eyes," said an HBO insider. "As soon as the director said 'Cut', Nolte would lumber off to his trailer where he had a gallery of woodland animals lined up outside like some sort of grim Watership Down identity parade.

"Then he just started swinging at them with the mallet. I saw a badger's head fly clean off. And a vole turn inside out.

"Yeah, he could take out a horse, definitely.

"Just give him a bigger hammer."
Dennis Farina



As a long-time moustache-wearer, Farina has been the subject of several investigations for sex offences, including more than one case of horse interference.

"I don't trust him," said a source close to Farina. "You could hide anything in that moustache. Horse porn. A machete big enough to kill a horse. Another horse which is really angry and has turned on its own kind. Anything."

The allegations against Farina were all found to be without basis in fact or even vaguely credible grounds for suspicion.
Ian Hart



Investigations into Hart's murky past revealed that he once tried to murder a pupil while working as a teacher at a private school, and that his best friend died suddenly in mysterious circumstances after they had spent some time playing in a rock and roll band together in a Hamburg beer cellar in 1960.

A spokesman for Hart said: "There is no foundation to these rumours. Ian has never killed a horse, despite some quite acute provocation over the course of his life.

"A horse called his dad a poof once, and Ian just shrugged it off."
We prepared a dossier of these facts and sent it to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which conducts investigations into animal mistreatment in the state. Some weeks later we received the following reply.

This isn't over.