KAREN VIBERT-KENNEDY/Sun-Gazette Murphy relaxes at his home after returning from a 17-month adventure.

Murphy’s Law says “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong,” but for Murphy the 5-year-old Tuxedo cat, it’s all good.

After almost 17 months of being separated from his family, Murphy is safely home, none the worse for his sabbatical.

It all began when Murphy’s owner, Tom Mulcahy, took the cat on March 12 of last year for a regular checkup at the veterinarian, Lewis Veterinary Clinic, which is located at Linden. After the visit, apparently the pet carrier was not closed all the way, and as cats will do, Murphy worked his way out of the carrier and ran into a woods area.

“We spent the better part of that day, and this was 10 in the morning, I would say, until about five that evening, trying to find the cat,” Mulcahy said.

Unfortunately every time they spotted him, he would run away.

For the next two months, Mulcahy said they searched the area in hopes of spotting Murphy.

“I was there every night, whether it be after a baseball game, which I umpire, or if it could be after work, I’d stay until it was dark,” he said. He also put out traps to see if Murphy could be caught.

Mulcahy travelled slowly through neighborhoods in the vicinity of where Murphy was last seen, trying to catch a glimpse of the illusive feline. He introduced himself to the neighbors, showed pictures of his pet and posted photos on social media.

Still no Murphy.

Mulcahy had given himself a deadline of 60 days. If he hadn’t been able to find Murphy by them, he would stop looking…sort of.

One family in the neighborhood that he had met when he began his search never stopped looking. Brett DiMassimo and his grandchildren, Nicole and Zyler, were actually instrumental in Murphy’s reunion with his owner.

“They never really stopped looking, although it wasn’t a daily routine, but they always had kind of their eyes open. Several times they called and said, we think we might have it. I ran out there, and it wasn’t the same cat. A tuxedo cat has a lot of familiar kind of traits to them, as far as esthetically or appearance wise. But I distinctly know Murphy from different areas of the body that would make it inevitable, that It would be my cat or not,” he explained.

“So after this time period, I pretty much gave up, and gosh, there was never a moment I didn’t, in my travels going by there, that I didn’t wonder if he’s still with us. I wonder if he found a home,” Mulcahy said.

His special bond with Murphy began when the cat, who at the time was about eight months old, wandered onto a job site where Mulcahy, who owns a construction company, was working.

“I never really was a big cat fan, and this cat came on a job site that I had. It would not leave me alone as a kitten and I got talked into taking it home-begrudgingly-that particular day, and this cat became one of my best friends,” he explained.

He was living in a barn near a job site that I was working on, really a tiny kitten. So when he came home with me that night, he kind of was following me everywhere, because I was the only familiar person to him, because he had come up to me at lunchtime, so he kind of had a relationship with me. We bonded, like almost immediately,” he said.

Mulcahy shared that Murphy would often jump up on the bed with him and his wife.

“He would put his head on my chest and just kind of lay with me. But then 10 minutes would be good for him, then he’d get up and leave,” he said. That first night he was there, he immediately did that. Tears came to my eyes. I was just like, Oh my gosh. What a memory. It was just a great moment,” he said.

“It was just amazing how we bonded and then to lose him was just…I never thought I’d be that tied up with a cat. I was really upset about it,” he added.

A year passed and still no Murphy.

Mulcahy admitted that as time went on, he began to just hope and pray that Murphy was doing okay.

Labor Day weekend-now it has been 17 months since Murphy bolted from the cat carrier. Mulcahy was coming home in the evening from his granddaughter’s birthday party in Avis. That’s when he received a call from DiMassimo, whom he hadn’t spoken to for months, saying, “you’re not going to believe this, but I think we saw Murphy.”

DiMassimo told Mulcahy that they were having a picnic when they spotted a black cat three houses down from where they were. His granddaughter asked him “what was that guy’s cat’s name” and he told her, Murphy.

“So she went down a couple of houses and just for the heck of it, said Murphy, and the cat turned and looked at her. So, she called him again and the cat started to walk towards her, Mulcahy said.

“Then his grandson went over, because she was a little timid, and he was able to pick the cat up, put it in a box,” he added.

They did knock on the door of the house to speak with the owner to make sure the cat wasn’t theirs.

The gentleman came to the door, Massimo told him, said that the cat had been coming by for the better part of a year and that he had been feeding it and letting it in his screened in porch in inclement weather if it happened to be there at that particular moment in time. But he had said that it had never come in his house.

Massimo then sent photos to Mulcahy.

“The pictures really looked like it was pretty close and that he responded to his name, I was pretty excited about it, so they packed him up and actually brought him right to meet me down at Trout Run,” he said.

To confirm that this was really Murphy, Massimo had put the cat in a backpack and put the closed backpack in Mulcahy’s truck and closed the door so that he couldn’t escape again.

“I had him in the passenger seat. I opened up the backpack, and his little black head poked out, and he was looking at the people waiting outside trying to see the reaction of this cat to me. I said, Murphy, and he turned his head and looked right at me. I opened it up again, and he crawled across the armrest and sat on my lap,” he explained.

“I’m looking at this cat and I’m going, this isn’t a question, this is Murphy. And every time I said his name, he looked up at me. He was so responsive to his name. And there are a couple things like I said, markings that I knew that were no question it was him, and that was 17 months plus,” he said.

So far, Murphy, after being checked out by the veterinarian, seems to have suffered no consequences from being on his own.

“That leads me to believe that he may have been taken care of by somebody a little bit,” he said.

There was also the fear that he may have become feral while he was on the loose, but that doesn’t seem to be the case either.

“I guess he was around people enough to not become kind of afraid of the human touch,” Mulcahy said.

The big question, for those who are skeptic about the intelligence of cats, would be how did Murphy remember his owner after all that time.

Mulcahy said that the veterinarian told him that cats don’t have a good short term memory, as any cat owner will attest to.

They don’t recognize facial things so much, but they are really keen on-for about five to seven years-it has been documented, according to the vet, that they will remember a voice and a smell,” Mulcahy said.

For now, Murphy is staying inside. In fact he doesn’t seem to want to go outside after his ordeal. “My concern now is making sure he doesn’t get out anytime soon. I don’t know what would happen, but that would be horrific. This miracle happened and again, I initially didn’t want a cat, but I would feel terrible,” he added.