Time and time again, grieving pet owners around the Baltimore region would call Rodney Ward, looking for comfort and assistance when cremating their beloved animals.
Ward would ingratiate himself with the grieving families and then quickly return with what he said were the remains, but were actually sand, debris or other construction material.
During an hour-plus of victim impact statements in court Tuesday, more than a dozen people tearfully recounted how they felt betrayed and taken advantage of during their grief.
Baltimore County Circuit Court Judge Keith R. Truffer handed down a sentence of 20 years and also ordered Ward to pay $12,510 in restitution to about 60 victims.
Truffer said the “scrope, depth and callousness” of Ward’s crimes required a response. He said Ward had “desecrated and dishonored” the memories of all the pets he had lied about cremating.
Ward will be eligible for parole, and Truffer said he would consider reducing his sentence if Ward gives information that leads to the recovery of missing pet remains.
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Nikki Pickens, who gave Ward her cat Norby to be cremated, said she often wonders where his body ended up.
“No amount of money can ever repair what has been done to these families,” Pickens said.
Ward, 56, had run a fraudulent business called Loving Care Pet Cremations out of an address in Catonsville. He would tell bereft pet owners that he would cremate their animals and return the cremains promptly.
Instead, many pet owners discovered they were given bags of other material. Some pet bodies were found along the side of the road; others were found decomposing in a hearse outside of Ward’s house.
Ward, 56, pleaded guilty in February to multiple counts of theft and malicious destruction of property. He chose to remain silent in court.
He was charged, along with his wife, in August 2025. Yalanda McMullen Ward’s trial has been postponed until May, according to online court records.
The charges came after Baltimore County Police announced that they were investigating multiple incidents in which the owners of deceased pets were notified that their animals’ bodies were found on the side of the road or in wooded areas — after they had hired Ward to cremate them.
Since the charges were filed, at least 60 people have come forward as victims of Ward, saying they were given something other than the cremains of their beloved pets.
Lindsay Taylor, of Baltimore, lost her dog Charlie — sometimes referred to as “Prince Charles,” after nearly 16 years together.
“He meant more than the world to me,” Taylor said.
She said she spent “days” working to plan a funeral service for the Chihuahua when he died in October 2024. That included multiple conversations with Ward and his wife to arrange things.
In an interview after the hearing, Taylor said she held the funeral in her mother’s house in Finksburg, and Ward took Charlie’s body to cremate him afterward.
About a week later, in mid-November 2024, she was given what Ward said were the dog’s remains. Taylor said she learned about the other cases on April 2, 2025, and quickly realized she didn’t have Charlie’s remains.
“I felt so betrayed,” she said. “I felt totally taken advantage of.”
Multiple victims described feeling violated or betrayed. Some said they were in therapy or had trouble trusting people. All of them cried or teared up. A court employee distributed tissues and bottles of water.
Riley Thomas described her black Lab, Captain, as “joy in its purest form.”
Thomas wore a T-shirt with Captain’s face printed on it her hands trembling as she spoke. She said she’ll never know where her dog’s body is.
“This was the exploitation of someone in their most vulnerable moment,” she said of Ward.
Ward did not appear to react to any of the testimony, and did not face the victims as they spoke. He sat looking down or facing the judge.
Adam Lippe, the prosecutor, said he believed there were many more victims who chose not to come forward.
Lippe asked the judge to sentence Ward to 25 years.
Sentencing guidelines for the felony theft and property destruction charges Ward pleaded guilty to would have sentenced him to just one year, Lippe said. But he called those guidelines “woefully inadequate” in this case.
“This is about time,” Lippe repeated during his closing statement — time that the victims spent with investigators telling their stories, time that prosecutors “wasted” trying to get answers out of Ward, and time victims spent grieving the loss of pets. And then grieving again upon learning the remains were faked.
“It’s OK to crush the defendant,” Lippe said. “It’s OK to punish him.”
A group of the victims became a tight-knit community and have stayed in contact to track the case, help find the missing remains of their pets, and push for more regulation of pet cremation businesses on the state level.
Clarke Agre, the public defender who represented Ward, turned and offered his condolences to the victims in the gallery. When Agre said that Ward has expressed how badly he feels about what he’s done, some in the audience laughed.
Agre described Ward as having strong family ties, frequently attending church and de-escalating fights in the Baltimore County Detention Center. The attorney did not make a request on sentencing, but asked that it not be overly long.
The case has “incredible emotional weight,” but was “in the end, a nonviolent case,” Agre said.
When the sentence was handed down, Ward did not visibly react, but there were sighs of relief from the gallery.
“I’m glad that he’s getting time,” Taylor said. “But I don’t think there’s any length of time that would have been enough.”
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