NEDERLAND - In early February, complaints of a lingering and ever-present odor at Nederland Town Hall prompted the need for hired professionals to ascertain, and extract, a toxic source from the walls. What was found was a proverbial vault of information uncovering the truth about one of Nederland’s most beloved political figures.

After the mystery material was extracted and brought to a laboratory, scientists determined that the substance packed into the walls of Town Hall was, in fact, over 50-year-old decomposed feline hairballs. 

The hairballs, which were most likely being utilized as a powerful mortar to help hold up the foundation of Nederland Town Hall, were also found to contain the chewed and half-digested remains of Fred the Cat's secret diary from his days as Mayor.

Fred the Cat was a vagabond tabby cat, well-known by members of the community from 1972 to 1989. Known as the “Legend of First Street,” the famous feline experienced a short stint as the “Honorary Mayor of Nederland,” which is still well-remembered and celebrated by the Nederland community.

But these recently discovered diary pages, which were pieced together by an AI trained on true crime documentaries, feline personality matrixes, and cat memes, seemingly prove that Fred was called the “Legend of First Street” for more nefarious reasons than previously thought. 

Fred’s diary, which is assumed he tried to eat and dispose of as evidence of his seedy and abhorrent misdeeds, outlines not just his various criminal activities, but also the detestable actions perpetuated against his constituency that adored him.  

Though Fred has always been considered a “vagabond,” his diary exposes that he actually came from a wealthy family who loved and pampered him. He became addicted to faking homelessness in order to gain access to other people’s homes all throughout downtown Nederland. He would sleep on these people’s beds, eat their food, and just stare at and judge them for hours.

“They just let you do it. The suckers open the door and they let you right in!” Fred wrote in one eye-opening diary entry.

Also detailed within the reconstructed pages of the diary were his more personal exploits with neighborhood royalty. Fred certainly was one to kiss and tell, as he writes in his diary about wooing a Queenie, a Dutchess, and one Princess Prissy Paws. 

But despite this self-prescribed reputation as a ladies man, the dangerous life on Nederland’s shady streets would cause Fred sometimes to resort to dressing up as a lady cat in order to fool his enemies. This survival strategy has certainly added to Fred’s mystique, and is perhaps why there has been confusion amongst historians over Fred’s true gender for decades.

Fred truly earned his “legendary” status when he teamed up with alleycat criminal and infamous thief Bootsy “Many Paws” Malone. The pair built a criminal empire on East 1st Street, with the most egregious of their actions being an international catnip smuggling ring which they ran along the Peak to Peak Highway.

His grip on the mountain community tightened once the criminal activity culminated in Fred running for Mayor of Nederland on the platform of “No More Mice.”

Exposed by a cooked set of accounting books found written in the ancient regurgitations within the walls of Town Hall, it is now proven that the mice were used as political boogeymen to rile Fred’s historical anti-mice base in order to sway the mayoral election in his favor.

Furthermore, the accounting shows that Fred had, in fact, imported the mice from across the border and incentivized them to commit crimes, only to betray them and sell off their lives to his hungry campaign funders.