Maybe I'm just getting way too dense in my old age, but this whole thing just doesn't make any sense to me.
First off, no one can just TAKE money out of someone else's PayPal account. The owner of the account has to explicitly initiate the transfer of funds.
Secondly, when a payment is made via PayPal both the payer and the payee get an email notice about it when that funds transfer takes place. That SHOULD have been before the package was shipped. If this was not expected, I would think the payer would raise a question about it right then and there.
Thirdly, if a person receives a package they were not expecting nor wanted, much less aware that they paid for it out of their PayPal account, especially a package quite likely marked as being a live animal shipment, the receiver could have just marked the box as "REFUSED" and had it returned to the sender at no cost to them.
Fourthly, going on two and a half months after the shipment was sent and received, NOW this issue gets raised with PayPal? What happened between the date of receipt and now that slowed down the thought processes of the recipient to take this long to come to the conclusion that they never ordered something that they received over two months ago? Or did they just FORGET that they actually received the package?
Like I said, this all just doesn't make any sense to me and there must be a whole lot more pieces missing to this puzzle than are being shown here.
About the only thing that would make sense to me, outside of outright fraud on the part of the purchaser, is if someone else in the household of the purchaser used that PayPal account unauthorized, received the package without letting anyone else being aware of it, and no one else in the household noticed some new animals in the household. But then there is the matter of the phone call acknowledgment of receipt.
Speaking of that phone call, is there hard copy record of that incoming phone number that can be matched with Dick Goergen? That, quite likely, is going to be the "smoking gun" here.