Still, Lutz said he wasn't busy and would drive over. "On the third night," says Spires, "this guy showed up, started beating windows out. Hanna was a trusted animal advocate, and as he emotively articulated his pain at the deaths that had taken place, his unequivocal insistence that the sheriff's department had no other option than to act as they did served as a powerful antidote to the other obvious narrativethat a thoughtless small-town law-enforcement brigade had murdered dozens of noble beasts because they were too dumb and trigger-happy to think of a better alternative. It is believed that in 2012, Marian Thompson retrieved the surviving animals from the Zoo. ", I reiterate how angry animal owners are with him. "There would be dogshit all over the showroom. As they pulled up between the barn and a row of cages, two tigers started out of the barn toward them. [From a court deposition Thompson gave while incarcerated on March 28, 2011] Okay. I guess I am an expert in the military. Yeah, I am. He kicked into the mode of what they taught him in Vietnambeat people up, kill people. They were told that it wasn't safe for them to try to tranquilize anything because so many animals were circulating and others were scattering outward. The first is why Thompson seems to have cut open so many of the cages when he simply could have opened them. After the wolf went down, Merry fired a few more times to make sure. Soon, their collection grew into a private mini zoo as the couple took care of rescued animals, and also bought some themselves. His friends, and there do seem to be many of them, talk of Thompson with a deep devotion, and testify at length to his goodness, generosity, and freeness of spirit, though they concede that he was certainly no lover of authority, and would maybe even go out of his way to rub up against it. He knew that his colleagues would only have the two standard-issue weaponsthe .40-caliber Glock 22 they wear at their side and the shotgun that is locked above their heads in the patrol carsand that he was the only one with a rifle. An incredible true story from the March 2012 issue of GQ. On the other side of the flimsy fence separating them from his neighbor Terry Thompson's property, Kopchak noticed that Thompson's horses seemed even more agitated. Patrolman: I don't knowprobably seventy-five. Thompson's body was taken from the scene for an autopsy at the Licking County Coroner's, where it revealed a few of its secrets. In August, Thompson was moved to a halfway house in Columbus. Some owners took food down to Thompson's property themselves, some say they contacted the sheriff's department. Not that she was the only one who noticed. The 39th Santa Barbara International Film Festival will resume in Santa Barbara, Calif., continuing to take . "Why him? Week after week. But they assumed that these two runaways must have come from there, so the first thing Mrs. Kopchak did was to dial her neighbor's number. "He said, you stand in line for two hours to get to the phone," remembers Stilwell, "and then you call home and there's no answer. Thompson opened a bike shop in town. Inside the shop, along with the bikes and guns, were the kind of animals he favored in those early days. He seems to have lived as though there weren't a rule invented that didn't deserve a little bending. Bo Keck, an officer who was there, told him he couldn't pull such a stunt. But the horrific tragedy of Zanesvilles animal massacre is enough to haunt the viewers as they see what follows. Wayfair Huge Deal-A-Thon - Up to 60% off everything! In the song, the house in question is a New Orleans brothel, and the name was borrowed for similar establishments in Vietnam. Deputy Tony Angelo, a sniper on their SWAT team, had a bolt-action rifle, Deputy Ryan Paisley had a nine-millimeter HK MP5 submachine gun, Deputy Jay Lawhorne and Kanavel had assault rifles. For a while there was a plane on the shop's roof. Thompson, 61, was recently released from prison after serving one year on federal weapons charges. Occasionally there were reports of more unusual creatures running free but nothing too bad had ever happened. Or taking them to the McDonald's drive-thru? Read on to find out the details. His probation officer also visited, and Thompson told him how distraught he was at the prospect of being hooked up for a year's electronic home confinement. Usually he never hesitated. Movies. An African lioness crawled under the livestock fence and ran south down the road then headed toward someone's home, so he shot her before she could go farther. "Some of them were true," says Marshall. On his way home from Vietnam, Thompson found himself in Columbus, Ohio. Whatever the exact truth, it wasn't that simple, though different people suggest different time frames. "He couldn't understand," says his friend Phil Cress, "why he got taken away from his life here to be drafted to go to Vietnam. Never had to think twice about it. 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. For a while he raced drag boats, and is said to have set a world record in his boat Master Blaster by going from zero to 158 miles per hour on a quarter-mile course in an open cockpit. Zanesville held a special significance for himhe went to school near here, enlisted in the army here, spent his honeymoon night here. Terry was also a Vietnam war veteran. "He loved blues more than anything," says Spires. Due to the dangerous circumstances, the police spent nearly seven hours hunting the animals, and shot nearly all of them. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, thenView saved stories. The sentences that go round my brain are ones that were said to me by one of the animal owners I spoke to, Nancy Wider. "He forgets where he came from," says one owner, Michael Stapleton (five tigers, four bears). Smith asked why it was only half price. Thompson was a door gunner on a Huey helicopter; he told Marshall they had to soften up landing zones, drop soldiers off and pick them up under hostile fire, make emergency medical evacuations: "Dragged both bodies and wounded and maimed soldiers into the helicopter," Marshall says. Inside the barn Kopchak locked the doors, then telephoned his mother, sitting in front of the TV about a hundred yards away back in the house. She said, 'We have to goTerry Thompson's animals are out.' 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. When Thompson said that as soon as he had some in his pocket he'd be back for more guitar lessons, Spires told him not to worry about that. When he walked into a room, everyone stood up. Okay? 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. "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. 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. She would explain that she had spent $30,000 buying them, and that she used to sleep with the young female. My blog posts are this Christ follower's perspectives on important issues facing our blessed America. 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. When the ATF raided his home in 2008, they took away 133 firearms and 36 rounds of ammunition. Actor: Murder Comes to Town. How he was treated. Terry Thompson is known for Red Phone 2 (2003), The Red Phone: Manhunt (2002)and Planespotting (2005). 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. (Whose feelings, exactly, are being taken into account there?) Maybe Marian understands. ", After it happened, one thing everyone wanted to understand was how a man who had loved animals enough to have gathered so many grand creatures could then have condemned them to what he had to know was certain death. Her bond with them certainly seemed real. In the fifteen minutes it took him to get to the scene, as the reports he was receiving over the radio escalated, the seriousness and strangeness became clear. After Deputy Merry headed down the road in pursuit of a wolf, Sergeant Steve Blake, who'd been first on the scene, decided he should drive up to Thompson's house. Terry Thompson's best friend Charlie Leasure reflects on his friend's final day. There are two mysteries about what happened along the driveway of 270 Kopchak Road that nobody has been able to explain. John Moore mentally ran through the rows of cages he would feed. She wasn't, but Terry was. And [Terry] just really beat him up so bad. 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. What about giving primates TV to watch? But on their way back to the road, Moore spotted a body near the barn. "He was a broken individual," says Phil Cress. Zanesville Animal Escape took place in October 2011, in Zanesville, Ohio, when over 50 exotic animals were released from Muskingum County Animal Farm. 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. "See," says Spires, "that's the way he was." Forty miles away, at the Columbus Zoo, an event was being held for the International Rhino Foundation. "For Terry, it started out as a love. Just as "good" private owners explain why they should exist and why "bad" private owners should not, sanctuaries may suggest that they should endure while private owners are phased out, and zoos can loftily assume there are clear reasons that they should be cherished while most kinds of non-zoo ownership should be frowned upon. "It kind of took us by surprise," says Kanavel. Though sanctuaries try to avoid pregnancies, sometimes new arrivals are pregnant and occasionally accidents happen, and when there are baby cubs they are hand-raised by humans. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. Those around him believed that he was changed man after he returned from war, that he never fully recovered from its trauma. ", Her son remained trapped in the barn. From award-winning writing and photography to binge-ready videos to electric live events, GQ meets millions of modern men where they live, creating the moments that create conversations. Thompson let the animals loose then killed himself. One time Thompson offered Dr. Smith a boat for half price. Thompson almost collapsed to his seat. "I've had three bad things happen in my life," he says, and proceeds to describe them. Neighbors describe Terry Thompson, the owner of the exotic animal farm where 56 animals escaped 10-19-2011. It just broke my heart. All evening it went on, the slaughter. "Remember, 1973 was much different than 2011. Month after month. Carried herself gracefully. Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. But the final blow was finding out that his wife, Marian, had left him. In the later years it became very overwhelming because Terry went a little off the deep end. I said that he never left Vietnam. Every human who interacts with an animal and then makes claims about what that interaction means to the animalin backyards or zoos or even on the plains of Africais making a claim neither they nor anyone else can verify. Terry became so verbally abusive to Marian. "Terry Thompson was a man who made mountaineering both his profession and his . Aunt Iris was old the day I met her, or so it seemed. Okay, this is a .308, so I could have killed you when you came in the front gate. 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. He only looked back once, when they were about a third of the way to the barn. "Beautiful blues eyesthat's what you noticed first," says Christine Perone, who dated him for some time in high school. Matthew Lutz, the Muskingum County Sheriff described him as "a like-to-live-on-the-edge type of person". How could a private citizen have amassed a collection of so many unusual and potentially dangerous animals in the first place? Twenty-one other injuries, or clusters of injuries, were detailed just on the head and neck, the site of the most widespread damage. There are plenty of colorful stories about his exploits. The general impression seems to have been that it was a case of the good girl drawn to the wild boy. he says. By now they had also decided that they would need to neutralize all of the animals that were loose, even those still on Thompson's property, so they formed a shooting party. (Tigers are reputedly worth as much as $20,000 dead when their body parts are illegally sold off.) 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. "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. He. At first the number of animals he came up with was forty-eight, but then his fiance arrived. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. Whatever the dynamic that drew them together, for the next four decades they presented themselves as a formidable partnership. ", "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. Terry was Terry. Now he only had his Glock. You know, Terry always had to be number onethat was Terry," she says. ". "You couldn't buy nothing off of him. Frequently these are based on a confident assessment of the animals' happiness (a thorny notion), and on the pragmatic need to save animals from a place worse than where they are. Because she loved the animals as much as he did. "He smiled a lot. There was gray powder residue on his left hand that appeared to be from a gun being fired. Tom Stalf at the Columbus Zoo suggests to me that you can buy a lion for $300cheaper than many pedigree dogs. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories. Sheriff Matt Lutz was settling into an evening in front of the TV. "He would sometimes step on other guys' girlfriends. "I was at an auction and he had a tiger that had ringworm and he had a baby monkey," says Nancy Wider, another owner. One detail Sheriff Lutz chose to release to the press at the time was that there was a sizable laceration on Thompson's head that was consistent with a big cat's bite. It was presumed that the remaining two animals were eaten by some of the bigger ones. Thompson did speak to other friends in those days. Here in the field. View all posts . Even when a tranquilizer dose is successfully administered it needs about ten minutes to take effect, and great care is required to establish that it has done soimpossible with so many animals running around. ", As they passed by the lion cages Thompson talked about the split. He then looked back for a moment at his wife and . He had his pilot's license before he was 16. Code 16 [dead on arrival], possible 58 [suicide]. The 73 acre farmland with the private zoo was owned by Terry Thompson. He was the type of person, you weren't real sure what he would do. But, see, I just don't have that stuff, I've got the guts to use it.Terry Thompson and a government informant in conversation at his home, secretly recorded in May 2008. From where they were, they could see the man's body, flat on its back. All he remembered was the sight of the bear's head coming at him, and he also remembered what had been drilled into him at weapons training: Shoot what you see. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. One was that he had gone under the interstate bridge where it crosses the Muskingum River in the middle of Zanesville. This is a [Mannlicher-Schoenauer]see the twists in the barrel.I do see that.Okay, hand built in Austria. He then caught the sight of a lion, and then a bear, and soon realized what happened. The animals were only about ten or twelve feet away. Red, a half-Arabian pinto, was acting skittish and had moved toward the far corner of the field. I set out to find some of them. By the time the Columbus Zoo team had arrived at the holding area, it was dark. ". ), 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. They need people to know that not everybody who has a tiger or three tucked away behind their house is a Terry Thompson. "My father didn't like animals," she told me. Nearby, they found bolt cutters and a stainless-steel Ruger .357 magnum revolver. The truth is that while, on a practical level, we may feel as though we can distinguish between better and worse owners, it is logically impossible to know for certain what the animals are thinking or experiencing. This was his high school sweetheart. Only three weeks after getting out, he released the animals, and shot himself. "That's what happens when they send a guy to prison that don't deserve to go there. I'm going to put it that way. "When he came back, they had been changed around in the cages. I hear many tales of devotion and care that try to emphasize the ordinariness of what is being done ("We live a very normal life," one mother tells me, "besides the fact that I have alternative animals"); I hear from a man who had a bear escape and only averted disaster by luring it back into its cage with a trail of vanilla-cream cookies; I hear from a man who shared his house and bed with a leopard for nineteen years ("I know certainly if I would have done the wrong thing when she was getting possessive about things, she would have certainly killed me"); I hear from a couple who have not been on holiday for seven years because they won't abandon their six bobcats and who are planning to leave the state rather than be separated from their animals; I hear from a woman who says she will do absolutely anything"shoveling shit in hell, sucking cock for fifty bucks"to feed and protect her cats. "And, you know, I'm a cat person.". Unknown for sure on that. Or $0.00 with a Prime membership. "I asked him what he was going to do when they turned the key on him," says Spires. The catastrophic incident that took place in Ohio should have served as a cautionary tale for others in America. Matthew Lutz, the Muskingum County Sheriff described him as a like-to-live-on-the-edge type of person. He really became a hoarder of the animals. "Every day gets tougher," the actor said ahead of the release of 'Still: A Michael J. But it doesnt seem to be the case as 5,000 to 10,000 tigers live in captivity in the country, while less than 4,000 remain in the wild. When a state patrolman stopped him for having a taillight out, this is how Thompson described to Spires what happened next: Patrolman: Oh, by the way, you don't have your seat belt fastenedI've got to ticket you for that. When I interviewed Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson over the summer after the release of his documentary "Summer Of Soul," at the end of the. Terry Thompson(XIII) Visual Effects IMDbProStarmeterSee rank Terry Thompson is known for X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), Terminator Genisys (2015)and Free Guy (2021). It was all about Terry after that. 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. And the second occurred when he was a young private owner exhibiting his exotic animals. So these animals were like her children. He started snarling, and went after the horses.". ", "No other law-enforcement agency in the world has faced thisit's not like there was a manual," says Deputy LeCocq. I don't know that.Okay. He became the local Harley dealer and also got a license to sell guns. Somehow, no one was hurt. Thompson also used to insist that he never sold exotic animals, but many in the animal world are scornful at this suggestion. But an accident happened. Marian became a well-respected local schoolteacher and a prizewinning rider. After a while the four shooters ran low on ammo and called for more, and eventually they headed back toward where the body was. A nice girl." "He had no reason why he was spared," says Cress. And the straw that broke the camel's back was, when he went to jail, he came back and his wife had abandoned him. ", Since Thompson died, Chuck Spires has been told by two people that Thompson had told them the same thing, and that he said it to the first of them before he even went to prison: "Basically, 'I should kill my wife and then me.' I just know that I learned the lesson the hard way, that's all.". He had these wild animals. "Other things will happen, but this is never going to happen again.". "They had split before he actually went to prison," says Huntsman. Nobody yet knew where Thompson was, and so there was concern for his safety. Hanna acknowledges that he is not universally popular for supporting what happened that night, and for supporting the laws being drafted. Not the weapon you'd want when you're facing down 350 pounds of charging bear. [8] Terry Thompson's most popular book is The Martian Diaries: Vol.1 The Day Of The Martians (The . How many tickets do you have in that book? How could you blame a woman you have spent forty years of your life with for that, if you were sane? On the worst days, there were more people to be rescued than they possibly could. 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. And none of it was taken care of. "And he always used to say, 'I don't like animals but I would never hurt one. Select Page. Up near the house, where no media could see them, the officers laid the dead animals out in rows, by species, to ease the counting. Terry Thompson is known for Murder Comes to Town (2014) and Not for Rent! Three were leopards, still in their cages. Ordinary Heroes. He'd have a beautiful '57 or '55 Chevrolet and they'd be sitting there with half an inch of dust and chicken manure all over the top of it." . I think it was the only way he felt that he could really punish Marian was to take something that she loved, too. The only notable substance in his blood was Benadryl. Spires mentions that one morning he found a note from Marian in his mailbox, with a stamped addressed envelope, asking if he would write to Terry in prison. He was pretty distraught." Personal testimonies from his closest staff and family tell a different story from the daily public barrage of criticisms by of the media. Forty-nine animals would be confirmed dead. I saw a pair of pants on the ground and the belt was twine. Their cages had either been cut through or left open. One of the surprising facts about owning animals like these in America right now is that while keeping them may not be cheap, buying them frequently is. He was just a bit different from the other ones. A white tiger appeared to be eating it, and they couldn't get closer. Merry didn't know what was going on, so he stopped. "), That was all the five of them could learn for now because they were urgently redeployed to the southern end of the property where some cats had been spotted readying to cross the boundary fence. ", Thompson went to the Federal Correctional Institution in Morgantown, West Virginia, on November 17, 2010. 2023 Cinemaholic Inc. All rights reserved. His son and wife were off to a literacy night so he was on his own. It kept him sane while he was there. In 2010, he was sentenced to a year in prison on federal weapon charges. (Nearly everything. And sometime in this period, Marian told Sam Kopchak that Terry was giving guitar lessons behind bars. In this era there were also numerous complaints of loose animals. You know, I'm crazy, but I live in the big house on the hill with the biggest horse and the fastest boat, fastest bike. "His eyes were just beautiful." Lutz instructed that if there were animals outside Thompson's property they needed to be shot. He was released, forty pounds lighter than a year before, on the day of September 30. Byline: By TONY THOMPSON . Some people just said, 'Oh, that's T.' ". Nearly all of the exotic-animal owners I speak with, deeply skeptical of the official account, identify the same "true" culprit: animal-rights activists. Why do you need so many?' And there was the lion he had seen before, now pacing back and forth. The Aftermath From top: a nearby highway sign warns drivers; the gathered bodies of the slaughtered animals. 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. Nonetheless it was clearly impossible to allow a boisterous feline to clamber freely over someone who has just had major heart surgery. "My father's gun," he told a government interviewer, "brought home from World War II in Germany, never been shot, never been cleaned, never been handled." See, the guys who shot expert got killed in Vietnam.-Terry Thompson, secretly recorded in his home by a government informant, April and May 2008. 1 distinct work Similar authors. And you've not spoken to your wife since her deposition [five weeks earlier]?No. The first big public warning sign that, when it came to Thompson's animals, all might not be as it should came in 2005. After the sheriff spoke with Hanna and talked him through what happened, he gave interview after interview. GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. He wanted to clear his head. It seems worth taking at least a moment to wonder whether it might be the other way around. When the owners I meet with talk about the proposed new laws (which, in their most inflexible draft versions, would effectively close down everyone in Ohio whom I speak with, and so would inevitably lead to massive animal euthanization), there is one other common target of their ire, aside from Terry Thompson: Jack Hanna. 'Because I can. The road his and Thompson's properties abutted was named Kopchak Road after his great-uncle. When you've been through a firefight and you've got that warm machine gun, that's all you got. He and his wife liked to drive a decommissioned fireman's truck around town until one night he wrecked it. TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. 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. Meanwhile, at the gateway of Thompson's property, the police were wondering how many animals might be loose. I think he would say, 'That's just what I expect.' Friends talk of driving to Columbus, a baby bear with them in the front cab, or having naps at his house with baby lions asleep on them. They were circling, and in the center of their troubled orbit there was some kind of dark shape. What if some of the cats were drawn toward them? Sams 85-year-old mother, Dolores, called 911, and soon the police were in the area. "It's like Noah's Ark wrecking," he proclaimed, "right here in Zanesville, Ohio.". The Santa Barbara International Film Festival has announced it will return Feb. 7-17. Maybe a mile away was a school soccer gamekids yelling and screaming in the open air. "When he was in Vietnam," says Mike Marshall, "he told me that he was befriended by a little monkey. "He always bragged," says Marshall, "that when he sold his business he had 138 motorcycles, 138 cars, and 138 guns." It was this ATF raid that also forced real scrutiny for the first time on his exotic animals. TERRY THOMPSON. Others were noted on his torso and his legs. He wouldn't ever know where the bullet went, though he assumed he must have hit the brain. Thompson seemed to need help, so Stilwell took up his Echo Weed Eater, and his lopper for the thicker growths, and his portable air compressor to pump up the flat tires of Thompson's Dually truck. ", Toward the end, according to Cindy Huntsman, he seemed to treat his collection of animals in the same way. According to investigators he has been cited in the past for animal abuse and neglect. (At 6:04 p.m., Lutz shared this information on the police radio: "Okay, we have located the owner. It was the guns that eventually landed him in real trouble. Only then did she call 911 and alert the world. After that, Merry went back for his rifle. _Thompson: _You might as well keep writing, because when I leave here I'm not fastening my seat belt. Moore said that he had last spoken with Thompson at nine o'clock the previous evening, and that Thompson, who was 62, had told him about a letter he'd received from an unnamed author saying that his wife, Marian, had been unfaithful. The solution was elegant, if unusual. "It stood up," says Kanavel, "and was standing there." "Fast motorcycles. The third is what happened that night in Zanesville.
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