The dog carcasses always appeared late on Wednesday nights, wrapped in black trash bags and stuffed in the Dumpster behind the Piggly Wiggly supermarket.

Over a period of three weeks in the summer of 2005, police officers in the small town of Ahoskie, N.C., pulled the bodies of 80 animals from the trash bin. Some were puppies, some were full-grown. Most were mutts.

On the fourth week, officers set up a stakeout, and when a white van pulled up to the dumpster, they pounced.

If the van's cargo — 10 dead dogs and three dead cats in black bags — was to be expected, its occupants were not. The driver and the passenger were employees of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the vehicle was registered to the organization.

The workers, Adria Hinkle, 28, and Andrew Cook, 25, were arrested and later indicted on 24 felony charges, including 21 counts of animal cruelty, for injecting lethal doses of an anesthetic into strays they had just collected from county shelters and a veterinarian's office.

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For PETA, the largest animal rights organization in the world, it was a public relations nightmare. The group, whose many celebrity supporters include Pamela Anderson and Alec Baldwin, made its name by obtaining and publicizing disturbing images of torturous lab experiments, blood-soaked fur farms and shocking abuse of circus animals.

Andrew Cook still works for PETA.

Now it was confronted with photos of a graphic scene of its own employees' making: a lifeless cream-colored puppy being lifted out off a pile of trash. A dead Dalmatian sprawled on its back. A jet-black cat and her two kittens cinched in a trash bag.

"It's hideous," the president of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, acknowledged two days after the arrests. "I think this is so shocking it's bound to hurt our work."

Despite this assessment, Newkirk and PETA stood by Hinkle and Cook in the coming months, consistently advocating for their innocence and hiring the legal team that will represent them at the trial that begins Jan. 22 in Hertford County Superior Court.