When he walked into a room, everyone stood up. This makes it all the more relevant to remember the tragic event that took place in Zanesville almost a decade ago. Hannafamous for his TV shows and his appearances on shows like Lettermanestablished his career at the Columbus Zoo and remains its director emeritus. ", There were also pieces of raw chicken scattered around near the body. ", "He had an ego that you wouldn't believe," says Stilwell. There is a belief that unites the exotic-animal owners of Ohio: If only the right people had listened, what happened with Terry Thompsonand all the trouble now following in its wakecould have been avoided. "He felt betrayed by the government, by the army, by society in general," claims Marshall. ", Many of Thompson's friends believe that his time in Vietnam was the defining experience of his life. That's what it was like. I think that was a lot of it. As he got out of the car, he grabbed for his rifle on the passenger seat, but it snagged on the computer stand so he left it. Meanwhile, at the gateway of Thompson's property, the police were wondering how many animals might be loose. Marian became a well-respected local schoolteacher and a prizewinning rider. They are effectively worthless, because there are usually more people trying to unload them than wanting to purchase them, which is also why across America there are a surprising number of sizable big-cat sanctuaries, several with over a hundred animals. If there is a line that divides the avid collector from the hoarder, at some point Thompson seems to have crossed it. The final total was fifty-six. (Whose feelings, exactly, are being taken into account there?) He didn't trust anybody after that. His gallbladder had been removed earlier in life, and he was suffering from severe atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Terry became so verbally abusive to Marian. Somehow, no one was hurt. "That's when Terry actually goes to [Moore] and asks him about Marian having cheated on him while he was in prison," says Deputy LeCocq. "Why him? The guy was able to stumble to his feet and try to run, and Terry caught up to him, so at that moment he took off to run it was no longer self-defense." ), Spires is one of the best-known guitar teachers in this part of the country and was Thompson's teacher in his other great passion of these years. Merry drove back up the hill, until he came across a deputy running back and forth near Thompson's driveway. Want to Read. Or $0.00 with a Prime membership. Kopchak wasn't overly alarmed by this sight, unexpected as it was, maybe because the bear wasn't too big as black bears go, and maybe because it was running away from him. Thompson's motives aren't exactly known, but he was deep in debt, had an estranged marriage and was facing house arrest after a year in prison for a gun conviction. Thompson told Spires of a visit on the day a friend of his had been killed. IE 11 is not supported. Forty miles away, at the Columbus Zoo, an event was being held for the International Rhino Foundation. Mike Marshall, who later flew civilian planes with him, says Thompson brought it up frequently. It was also in Zanesville where he met his wife, Marian Sharp (Thompson), for the first time. I'm Terry Gross. Matthew Lutz, the Muskingum County Sheriff described him as a like-to-live-on-the-edge type of person. The 73 acre farmland with the private zoo was owned by Terry Thompson. "His favorite song was 'House of the Rising Sun.' But for now most of the animals were kept in connected rows of cages along the driveway leading to his house, and to feed them he would often illegally collect roadkill deer. The miracle of the great Zanesville zoo escapewhich began last fall when a depressed, desperate man named Terry Thompson set free his vast collection of exotic animalswas that not a single. (Everyone knows somewhere else worse.). The common assumption after the catastrophe at Zanesville was that when it came to Terry Thompson and his animals, he must have been a terrible man doing a terrible thing. Dr. Michael Barrie, the zoo's director of animal health, had been up at Thompson's property to inspect his large private collection of animals in 2008, accompanying an ATF raid that eventually led to Thompson's imprisonment for a year on gun charges. (If you visit the Columbus Zoo, his face is everywhereeven on the Pepsi machines.) "He sold the monkey outside of the auction, because it wasn't legal to sell inside, for $3,500.". However, it was devastating to lose so many innocent lives, especially the Bengal tigers who are an endangered species. Directed by: Vlad Yudin. Animal attacks are terrible tragedies but so are attacks on animals and none more so than that which transpired in Zanesville, Ohio in 2011.On October 18th 2. Nonetheless it was clearly impossible to allow a boisterous feline to clamber freely over someone who has just had major heart surgery. Terry Thompson Profiles | Facebook He and Red had taken only a few steps toward the barn when Kopchak saw something else, close by, just ahead of them on the other side of the fence. "There was never just one girl in his life," she remembers. His friend got killed and I guess they're thinking, 'That could be me tomorrow.' "Back in the '70s," says Stilwell, "if you saw him with a toothbrush in his back pocket, you'd know he was going to go somewhere. It's what the Indians wanted.Terry Thompson, secretly recorded in his home by a government informant, May 2008. ". "Apparently," Tom Stalf theorizes, "he wanted the animals to eat him. Patrolman: I don't knowprobably seventy-five. I will hear confident estimates of the number of big catstigers, lions, and so onin Ohio that vary from the low hundreds to the low thousands. So, she hasn't told you that during her deposition, she told me that you weren't going to be living with her, you two were not going to be living together when you got out?No. On his way home from Vietnam, Thompson found himself in Columbus, Ohio. Soon he was instructed to patrol the border between the Thompson property and Interstate 70, and over the evening he shot another wolf, two more lions, a tiger, andlater on, after its hiding place was revealed by a fireman's thermal-imaging cameraa grizzly bear. There are no sane people that would live in those conditions.". His neighbor Fred Polk relates how two of Thompson's Rottweilers got out and killed a couple of Polk's calves. TERRY THOMPSON. And it planted the seed of caring for wild animals for the rest of his life. Terry was also a Vietnam war veteran. "Betrayed by his family. He'd already hung up his uniform and finished his dinner when, at around 5:20 p.m., he got the call reporting that Terry Thompson had an animal out. This is a [Mannlicher-Schoenauer]see the twists in the barrel.I do see that.Okay, hand built in Austria. First they had to deal with a male African lion that managed to run between some junk cars after the first shotthere were dozens and dozens of old cars and RVs and tractors parked in clumps of rusted metal around the hillside, weeds growing around them. Then he turned back, intending to deal with a black bear and a tiger along the roadway, but he was distracted by a cougar heading south, so he followed the cougar into another driveway where he met a male African lion coming the other way. I just know that I learned the lesson the hard way, that's all.". The government stole his heart. Encounters with animals that would normally have been remembered for a lifetime were forgotten moments later as the next came along. The first involves his daughter and cancer. Whether he was a daredevil hero or an idiot or an animal lover or an animal hater or a victim or a recluse or a good man betrayed, he was assumed to be a cartoon of a man whose whole life could be extrapolated from its final minutes. I set out to find some of them. You know, Terry always had to be number onethat was Terry," she says. "He threw up his arms," says Stilwell, "and said, 'She can just have it all.' Menu. In the end, as his friends point out, Thompson was only convicted for ownership of a gun without a serial number (he said it was too old to have one) and the possession of a single machine gun. Thompson's wife, Marian, arrived around lunchtime. Already, he did things differently from other people. The police took guidance from wildlife expert Jack Hanna, who insisted that killing the animals was a necessity in order to ensure the safety of the public. Deputy Jonathan Merry was two hours into his shift, serving a court summons a couple of miles away in Zanesville, when the call came through about a lion and a bear on the loose. As Tiger King reaches its gnawing conclusion, it makes us aware that not a single animal benefitted from all the greed, rivalries and betrayals that unravel in the series. Terry Thompson, a Vietnam War veteran, was a lifelong collector of exotic animals. Because I can.' The wounds mentioned in the autopsy report, aside from the gunshot wound, begin with "a 2 1/4 inch vertical laceration on the right lower forehead and along the spine of the nose." Your neighbor could buy as many tigers, lions, cougars, and other exotic animals as he so desired and would be under no obligation to tell anyone. He lived in a hardback tentyou know, a wood frame and a wood floorand apparently a monkey kinda befriended him. The Zookeeper Terry Thompson, 62, born and raised in Zanesville, Ohio. "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson" is a lively and insightful documentary about the late great journalist who exploded the myth of objectivity. Kanavel's tactic was to shoot for the head a couple of times, and then move on to the body and keep putting rounds into it. A Mermaid's Tale (2017) - IMDb As he neared the farm buildings he saw more animals. Bob Thompson Trailer from Jeffrey Cooper on Vimeo.. Facebook; Twitter; RSS; Designed by Elegant Themes | Powered by WordPress Zanesville Animal Massacre Included 18 Rare Bengal Tigers You know what I mean? As Ed Hamell pointed . Merry didn't know what was going on, so he stopped. I think he would say, 'That's just what I expect.' And you've not spoken to your wife since her deposition [five weeks earlier]?No. The bigger the bang that takes someone out, the more likely it is that the person at its center will be obscured. I'm telling you, the lion is bad enough, and the lioness is bad enough, and the wolf is bad, and the bear, butdon't be around the tiger. Maybe a mile away was a school soccer gamekids yelling and screaming in the open air. [7] In the years leading up to his death, he went to prison on federal gun charges, was heavily in debt, and his wife had left him. Terry Thompson - IMDb Some people just said, 'Oh, that's T.' ". His son and wife were off to a literacy night so he was on his own. "Well," Thompson retorted, "find someone to file a complaint on me." He didn't know too much about lions, but he had heard that it was unwise to challenge them by looking them in the eye, and that if you ran away they had a tendency to chase you. Only once you slide up and down these slippery moral slopes can you see how much easier it is for all of these owners to believe that they are acting with kindness to animals that they love, and that their love is on some level reciprocated. From there, looking through a north-facing window, he watched the menagerie grow. It was all about Terry after that. GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. "When he came back, they had been changed around in the cages. "And his answer, to the way I recall, was he didn't know whether she did or she didn't. But for those who'd prefer a Rosebud moment, here's one more story from forty years earlier, from the time when an Ohio youth with beautiful blue eyes found himself forsaken and lost, deep in the kind of darkness and damage that some never completely escape. But I lean toward another theorythat in the end the animals were just what they've usually been in human history: incidental collateral damage. He once told Spires about someone repeatedly breaking the windows of his shop and vandalizing the place, and how he'd waited for three nights to catch the culprit. He set down his clipboard on the porch, where it would remain for the next few hours, ran to his patrol car, and followed the wolf. "But you'll know when I go.". He didn't know who was who. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. It was also in Zanesville where he met his wife, Marian Sharp (Thompson), for the first time. He became the local Harley dealer and also got a license to sell guns. Trump documentary film - TERRY THOMPSON He was like royalty." The family stayed at the top of London's criminal tree for so long thanks to a string of extraordinary acquittals by juries. He was caught up in dangerously illegal black-market animal sales, dead or alive. Questlove spins the soundtrack of his life in 'Music is History' - NPR She was my grandmother's sister, one of ten children who grew up in Muhlenberg County Kentucky. "My dad really loved him, but I remember sitting at the dinner table and he buzzed our house and my dad said, 'I'm going to shoot that [she mumbles wordlessly] out of the sky.' Terry Thompson sentenced to 25 years in prison for man's murder outside She had to be convinced that the survivors should be taken to the zoo for safekeeping. View the profiles of people named Terry Thompson. "See," says Spires, "that's the way he was." Thompson did things his own way even when it led him into trouble. It was presumed that the remaining two animals were eaten by some of the bigger ones. And he said, 'Well, I got through Vietnam' ", When John Moore told the police about a letter accusing Marian Thompson of adultery that Thompson had received on the day before his death, the implication seemed to be that he had received some fresh, devastating news about his marriage. "He used to buzz my house," she says. By Ryan Gajewski Staff Editor, Digital "I'm not gonna lie, it . There are all kinds of ways that tragedy and fate can reach across decades to taunt us and trap us. Mr Thompson had been released from federal prison three weeks earlier after serving a one-year term on firearms charges, according to the AFP news agency. And a second bear, this one much larger than the first. "He'd ride his bicycle over, watch the airplanes, and wanted to fly," says Dr. Ralph Smith, a local vet who now lives on a lake where Terry used to go camping as a Boy Scout. I think it was the only way he felt that he could really punish Marian was to take something that she loved, too. Okay? Now he only had his Glock. They agreed on 25 years. "I think people were afraid of Terry. As time passed, people got used to the way he might turn up at the local airfield, say, with a baby bear or lion. He only looked back once, when they were about a third of the way to the barn. Maybe the animals had somehow busted out, and he was injured, in need of help. Those around him believed that he was changed man after he returned from war, that he never fully recovered from its trauma. "Remember, 1973 was much different than 2011. But people will believe what they need to believe. I saw a pair of pants on the ground and the belt was twine. Terry Thompson's most popular book is The Martian Diaries: Vol.1 The Day Of The Martians (The . When it turned up toward a house, Merry got his rifle from the trunk and followed on foot. It's hard to tell whether Thompson pushed his luck more as he got older, or whether he couldn't (or wouldn't) adapt as the looser times of his youth tightened up, or whether his luck just ran out. Some owners took food down to Thompson's property themselves, some say they contacted the sheriff's department. Terry Thompson's story went round the world, but it was also barely told at all. That evening, the zoo assembled its capture-and-recovery team, armed with both tranquilizer-dart guns and regular weapons, and set out for Zanesville. Others were noted on his torso and his legs. One was that he had gone under the interstate bridge where it crosses the Muskingum River in the middle of Zanesville. The cats looked healthy enough, apart from one who had ribs showing, and they were rubbing their heads against the fences. By the time the Columbus Zoo team had arrived at the holding area, it was dark. It probably made all the difference. And then Terry makes this statement back to him: 'Well, I have a plan to find out, and you will know it when it happens.' She also helped with the feeding, and reminded him of some recent arrivals. Spires says Thompson told him that he only pleaded guilty because otherwise they were also going to charge his wife as a co-owner of the property; Thompson told the judge that he pleaded guilty because he and his wife couldn't afford further legal fees. Thompson did speak to other friends in those days. Thompson: It'd better not beI'd be out of the truck by now. The animal lovers are the ones that hurt them.' In Taft's living room, a fence was built around his couch, and that is where he spent most of his time as he recuperated: safely inside a cage inside his own house, man looking out, tiger looking in. For the majority of Americans who know little about the world of exotic animals, the astonishing events in Zanesville begged some obvious questions. Most seem to have stumbled into it, impulsively buying a bear or lion cub without thinking through how, as one puts it, "a year from now, it's not going to be so cuddly." 'Because I can. ", "He would not have his position now," echoes another, Evelyn Shaw (one cougar, two servals, one lemur, one macaw, one skunk), "if he had not started out as a private owner. "He loved blues more than anything," says Spires. After that, Merry went back for his rifle. ", "I think he knew when he did what he did that he was going to put himself and Zanesville, Ohio, on the map," Stilwell says. This is FRESH AIR. The Aftermath From top: a nearby highway sign warns drivers; the gathered bodies of the slaughtered animals. They need people to know that not everybody who has a tiger or three tucked away behind their house is a Terry Thompson. His farm was reportedly raided June 2008 . But the final blow was finding out that his wife, Marian, had left him. "You were able to tell that he had laid at one spot for a while and then he was dragged, it looked like by an arm, and his pants and stuff had been pulled down, and he had been chewed on. I don't know how else to explain it." "And he always used to say, 'I don't like animals but I would never hurt one. Maybe there's a letter or a note that explains it all. Ad Choices, 18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars, 2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque, and 1 Man Dead in Ohio. So he settled on what he considered a brisk walking pace for himself and Red. He had his pilot's license before he was 16. When he arrived, he could see, just inside Thompson's fence, a tiger, a black bear, and two lionesses. And there was the lion he had seen before, now pacing back and forth. (Tigers are reputedly worth as much as $20,000 dead when their body parts are illegally sold off.) The house itself was disgusting. 2023 Cinemaholic Inc. All rights reserved. ". [8] ", "No other law-enforcement agency in the world has faced thisit's not like there was a manual," says Deputy LeCocq. ", As they passed by the lion cages Thompson talked about the split.