She Doesn't Expect Anything, and Hasn't Been Disappointed Mary Lou Ritter, who is homeless, with her pigeon, Tuffy, in the hood of her parka outside a 7-Eleven in Chelsea. There is a photograph taped to the front of a building on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea that gives pause to people walking by. It shows a smiling old woman holding a striped cat. But any warm feelings fade upon reading a handwritten sign below. "Snap was found dead," the sign explains. He was starved to death. When found he was skin and bones. And: "Teeth pulled out. Nails pulled out. Eyes removed. The message ends: "His abuse is over." The sign mentions a reward, but gives no contact information. There appeared to be an older sign beneath, and on Wednesday night a visitor seeking to take a closer look tugged at the tape holding it up. A voice softly called: "Stop. Stop. It took a moment to figure out where the voice was coming from. Next door, in front of a 7-Eleven, behind a piece of blue tarp, sat a homeless person bundled in a black parka and practically invisible. It was the same woman in the picture with the cat. She thought someone wanted to take her sign. "That was a beautiful animal," she said. I have the signs up all over. It's to let people know I found him dead. Her name is Mary Lou Ritter, 69. Questions about her cat led to others, less welcome, about herself. Ms. Ritter said she was born in the Bronx in 1943 to a mechanic and a housewife, and worked as a filing clerk at different places in the city - a bank, an architect's office, a law firm. She married an older man named Murray Wiesenberg, she said, and when he retired from a job in the city's school system, they moved around the country. "Anyway," she said. You wanted to know about my cats. She adopted Snap a few years ago, Ms. Ritter said. "I had him for a year," she said. They took him while I was sleeping. She hears nothing when she sleeps, she said. She has been living outside on Eighth Avenue long enough that the Google Street View image of the address, taken when it was a laundromat, shows her in the same spot. "What knocked me for a loop," she said, "was the death of my husband." He had a fatal heart attack in 1991 while they were living in New Mexico, she said. Ms. Ritter did not want to say anything more on the matter and would not discuss her family. "Things just happened," she said. While she spoke, a worker from a bodega next door appeared with a cup of coffee for her. She thanked him. "She's a nice lady," another worker in the bodega said later. I feel bad for her. Ms. Ritter sells pictures she colors with markers and signs "Marlo," a combination of her first and middle names. She charges $20 a picture, and she has taped several samples to the window of the 7-Eleven. A worker at the 7-Eleven came out to wash the windows on Thursday. "Excuse me, dear," he said, cleaning around her drawings without disturbing them. Ms. Ritter said she returned to New York in the 1990s, and while dates escape her, she was living on the streets by 2001. She knows this because she was rooting through a trash bin when she looked up and saw what she thought was a small plane hit the World Trade Center on Sept. Then she called 911. "You can bet that day everybody went to Heaven," she said. When Snap disappeared a couple of years ago, she looked for him for months in the course of her search for discarded valuables. Ms. Ritter got another cat, Simon, who would nudge her awake if anything was amiss, she said. But one evening last December, someone stole Simon, as well as her art and $303. Then she found Snap in May - dead in a box. "On 30th and Broadway," she said. Ms. Ritter had no explanation for the seeming mutilation, which she never reported. Now she has a pigeon, named Tuffy, who nestles inside her coat. She feeds it birdseed from a pet store. She does not like homeless shelters, has no arrest record with the Police Department and says she does not use drugs. She is alert and cleareyed - "I don't drink anything but Pepsi and coffee" - and chipper. "I don't expect anything," she said, "and I haven't been disappointed." She will turn 70 in 12 days. Asked what she planned to do, she said, "I don't know yet." Ms. Ritter likes people to notice her cat sign, her plea to the people around her to be aware that strange things happen. "He didn't die in vain," she said.