The Schweders loved animals. They adopted and cared for stray cats and dogs, and it seems dishearteningly surreal that the couple was killed by brutal dog attacks.

The bodies of 65-year-old Sherry L. Schweder, a University librarian, and 77-year-old Lothar Karl Schweder, a retired German professor, were discovered near their home off Georgia Highway 77 in Lexington. Jehovah’s Witnesses found the bodies when visiting a house on Howard Thaxton Road on Saturday and alerted authorities.

Officials have not determined how the attacks happened, but the autopsies released Monday show both died from canine bites “from head to toe,” according to Oglethorpe County Coroner James Mathews.

From what Mathews can tell, Sherry Schweder was taking a walk down the dirt road, and, when she was gone for “too long,” Lothar Schweder came to find her. Authorities located his car near the bodies,which were about 12 feet apart on opposite sides of the small road.

“We don’t know if maybe he went to find her and then got out [of the vehicle] to get the dogs off her, and they turned on him,” Mathews said. “Or maybe he was also trying to run.”

Oglethorpe County Sheriff’s investigators initially decided not to rule out foul play and kept the possibilities open while determining the cause of death. The bodies had been laying on the road about 24 hours before they were found.

“There are a lot of weird circumstances with this one,” Mathews said. “I’ve been coroner for 28 years, and this is one of the weirdest cases I’ve investigated.”

As the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Lab in Decatur concluded its findings Monday, Madison County Animal Control helped to capture about a dozen dogs in the area. It’s unclear whether the dogs were stray or neighbors’ pets. Animal control also picked up the dogs of Howard Thaxton, a neighbor who lives on the road where the couple was attacked.

“[Thaxton] fed the dogs every day, and there had been no neighborhood complaints or police reports about the dogs,” Mathews said. “We don’t know if his dogs started the attack or if it was coyotes and his dogs came in for the feeding.”

On Saturday, Athens-Clarke County Animal Control helped to transport the Schweders’ seven cats and dogs to Madison County Animal Shelter, where they are up for adoption.

“If anyone wants to take care of an animal or even donate funds so they can be boarded, they can get in touch with me,” said Nan McMurry, who worked with Sherry Schweder in the Main Library for more than 20 years. “There’s not much we can do for them now, but I know how much they would appreciate help with their pets.”

McMurry and Schweder worked as bibliographers in the library, and Schweder had the “broadest array of subject specialties,” said McMurry, now director for collection development at the library.

Although co-workers described Schweder as “private” and didn’t know much about her outside of the work environment, she was “so good to work with,” McMurry said.

“She was the best kind of work mate. You never felt stupid when you asked a question, and she was very focused on her work,” she said. “The neat thing about her is that if someone left a position at the library, she would be the first in my door to help pick up the work.”

Schweder specialized in German and Slavic languages and over the years also picked up Italian, French and even Arabic collections.

“Her outlook was very intelligent but childlike, and she was an optimist,” said Kristin Nielsen, head reference librarian and English bibliographer who worked in the office next door to Schweder for six years. “She was gentle, kind and loved animals. I could ask her any obscure question. She knew her collections inside and out.”

Sherry Schweder obtained her bachelor of arts in Germanic and Slavic languages from the University in 1973 and worked at the library for 35 years. Lothar Schweder taught German at the University from 1968-1971 and in the summers of ’72 and ’73.

Nielsen described both as “gentle and kind.”

“Sherry just loved North Campus,” she said. “She was always in her office, so she would take breaks and walk around the Founder’s Garden.”