It was beyond anything that you would ever want to experience. His wife-to-be, Marian Sharp, came from what was considered a good local family, and was an accomplished barrel racer and horsewoman. "You couldn't buy nothing off of him. . Three were leopards, still in their cages. (And continued to becounty records show at least seven citations for failing to wear a seat belt. His gallbladder had been removed earlier in life, and he was suffering from severe atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Lutz instructed that if there were animals outside Thompson's property they needed to be shot. When the ATF raided his home in 2008, they took away 133 firearms and 36 rounds of ammunition. Their cages had either been cut through or left open. They needed to find out for sure, and to see whether the person might still be alive. Practical questions and answers regarding the gospel are presented at the Eternity page. "His eyes were just beautiful." Thompson: Well, where were you when I was in Vietnam in a foxhole, people shooting at me, if you're trying to protect me? She had to be convinced that the survivors should be taken to the zoo for safekeeping. 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. There are two mysteries about what happened along the driveway of 270 Kopchak Road that nobody has been able to explain. 'Because I can. Hanna acknowledges that he is not universally popular for supporting what happened that night, and for supporting the laws being drafted. And there was the lion he had seen before, now pacing back and forth. 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. The black bear fell about seven feet in front of Merry. Carried herself gracefully. 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. ", As they passed by the lion cages Thompson talked about the split. It also thrust into daylight, if only for a brief moment, a secret world of privately owned exotic animals living off the grid, and often right next door. TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. There may still be a market for baby lions and tigers (the consensus seems to be that realistic prices are a little higher than Stalf's figure), but there is virtually no market at all for adult tigers and lions. The Zookeeper Terry Thompson, 62, born and raised in Zanesville, Ohio. "He sold the monkey outside of the auction, because it wasn't legal to sell inside, for $3,500.". Sitting up there, rusting away, is a brand-new '34 Ford steel body. Perhaps it is obvious to you that removing a monkey's teeth and dressing it up in pseudo-human-children's clothing (Hanna "Monk"tana two-piece panne velvet dress, $38) and diapers (infant starter pack, $35) is wrong? Mrs. Thompson chose the spot. "Some of them were untrue. Forty miles away, at the Columbus Zoo, an event was being held for the International Rhino Foundation. They see hypocrisy in much of what he now says, particularly given his past use of animals from private owners as props on TV shows. He took care of that monkey most of the time he was over there. What about neutering, which is now considered not merely acceptable but responsible behavior when it comes to many nonexotic pets? The white tiger had gone. "He would sometimes step on other guys' girlfriends. Jack doesn't need to be telling me anything. There is little doubt at all that he once landed an ultralight on the county fairgrounds. And it planted the seed of caring for wild animals for the rest of his life. The third is what happened that night in Zanesville. When it turned up toward a house, Merry got his rifle from the trunk and followed on foot. "And he did it. Drug smuggling. The preserve is located in. 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." Terry Thompson is known for Red Phone 2 (2003), The Red Phone: Manhunt (2002)and Planespotting (2005). How many tickets do you have in that book? However, it was devastating to lose so many innocent lives, especially the Bengal tigers who are an endangered species. "On the third night," says Spires, "this guy showed up, started beating windows out. The government stole his heart. "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. Surely he must have broken every law that prevents your next-door neighbor from secretly housing an ambush of tigers? I just know that I learned the lesson the hard way, that's all.". TERRY THOMPSON. A nice girl." They agreed on 25 years. (Nearly everything. It probably made all the difference. This was his high school sweetheart. When you've been through a firefight and you've got that warm machine gun, that's all you got. 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. He would rather say he owned it. "I asked him what he was going to do when they turned the key on him," says Spires. Want to Read. Unfortunately, one of the animals, a leopard-jaguar mix, was euthanized after he was severely injured from a cage door that fell on its neck. ", A bond that tied two people for so long can take time to break completely. He had his pilot's license before he was 16. He was devastated to find the poor condition of the zoo when he returned, and was also heavily in debt. He wanted to clear his head. And [Terry] just really beat him up so bad. He made mistakes, big mistakes, that the rest of us haven't made.". ", I reiterate how angry animal owners are with him. Thompson did speak to other friends in those days. It is believed Thompson released nearly all of his 56 animals, following a mental breakdown which led him to take his own life. And that's when he then said, 'I'm gonna die.' "My father didn't like animals," she told me. He didn't know who was who. 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. He said he didn't have any control over it. When a life explodes like this, in a shower of sparks and shrapnel, people pick through the remains and see what suits them best. Fast airplanes. The first came in 1985 when Tommy Adams . "I think it's Terry," he said. That's what it was like. These days many exotic-animal owners have learned to keep what they do to themselves, to avoid the unwanted attention of unhappy neighbors, animal-rights activists, and journalists who treat them as scary eccentrics or worse. ", "Terry, are you sick?" ", "He had an ego that you wouldn't believe," says Stilwell. Thompson, 61, was recently released from prison after serving one year on federal weapons charges. It was decided that the dead animals be buried, there and then, on the property. What if some of the cats were drawn toward them? "), 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. And he never differentiated between themhe kind of liked the notoriety." An incredible true story from the March 2012 issue of GQ. And of the time when he and Marianshe seems to have been a full and enthusiastic participant in many of these adventuresturned up with a baby bear at a friend's fiftieth birthday party, held in their friend's newly decorated basement where everythingcarpet, walls, furniturewas white, and seemed quite unperturbed by the upset caused when the bear did what bears tend to do on the nearest white rug. He lived in a hardback tentyou know, a wood frame and a wood floorand apparently a monkey kinda befriended him. Fred Polk, a farmer and scrap dealer who was one of Thompson's neighbors and sometimes tangled with him, also knew him before and after he went away to war. I hear nothing to substantiate any of this, and the multitude and variety of the tales alone is enough to make one doubt any of them in particular. Why do you need so many?' The only reason I can think of is that it made it harder to undo what he had done, and so made it more of an act of irreversible destruction. [8] I don't know that.Okay. At the second-largest of these, the Exotic Feline Rescue Center in rural Indiana east of Terre Haute, where most of the 230 cats seem to come with their own tale of horror, the center's founder, Joe Taft, tells me an incidental story that won't leave my mind, because it seems to encapsulate, this time in a rather beautiful way, what people will do in the elusive pursuit of accord and communion between man and animal. one owner nonchalantly inquires, as it nestles up against the fencing inches away from me in his garage.) Powered by WordPress.com VIP. Now, the thing is, you know when everyone says this guy went into a schoolyard and kills a bunch of kids and he had an automatic rifle? ". What happened: 10 years ago today, exotic animal collector Terry Thompson set 50 animals loose before fatally shooting himself on his 73-acre farm west of Zanesville. I'm Terry Gross. He didn't even trust his own wife. And it just broke his heartthis is what I think. His friends refer to other such outingsa shoot with Newt Gingrich, for instanceand say that he took animals on two different occasions to a Bloomberg corporate summer picnic in New York. The first big public warning sign that, when it came to Thompson's animals, all might not be as it should came in 2005. And the straw that broke the camel's back was, when he went to jail, he came back and his wife had abandoned him. This is FRESH AIR. "Apparently," Tom Stalf theorizes, "he wanted the animals to eat him. Week after week. The answer to that first question: It's surprisingly easy. Nobody yet knew where Thompson was, and so there was concern for his safety. Rhino experts from around the world had gathered, and the zoo was throwing a cocktail party on the grounds of the polar-bear exhibit. "But you'll know when I go.". Vince Gill, Verlon Thompson, and Terry and Jo Harvey Allen, as well as record executive Barry Poss. This 95-minute documentary follows Guy Clark, Susanna Clark, and Townes Van Zandt as they rise from obscurity to reverence. Here in the field. Sams 85-year-old mother, Dolores, called 911, and soon the police were in the area. But if afterward Thompson would try to present his year of incarceration with the same old bravado, telling people that he was voted "Most Interesting Person in prison," the events in his marriage clearly had taken a toll. My blog posts are this Christ follower's perspectives on important issues facing our blessed America. ", When Deputy Todd Kanavel, who normally heads up the drug squad, arrived at the scene, Sergeant Blake told him about the body that they had spotted. You know what I mean? John Moore mentally ran through the rows of cages he would feed. Matthew Lutz, the Muskingum County Sheriff described him as "a like-to-live-on-the-edge type of person". Where do you plan to live when you are released?At my house.Okay. I think he would say, 'That's just what I expect.' ), 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. 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." Well, let me tell you, if you want to kill a bunch of kids you take that camper and run into a schoolyard full of kids, you'll kill about a hundred of them. Menu. There was an apartment building just on the other side of the interstate that bordered Thompson's land. 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. Cages only lead to more cages, unless a far worse reality awaits them. "There would be dogshit all over the showroom. "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. "He felt betrayed by the government, by the army, by society in general," claims Marshall. ", "No," he replied. He had acted as an animal handler on Wild Kingdom in 2008, and provided a lion cub to a photoshoot with Heidi Klum. She was my grandmother's sister, one of ten children who grew up in Muhlenberg County Kentucky. Because he wouldn't take any clothes with him." They'd never had kids. I don't know what happened to it when he left.". The answer to the second question is: What laws? "So those animals were put down." By the time the Columbus Zoo team had arrived at the holding area, it was dark. "We didn't have any idea how many there were," Mrs. Kopchak would later reflect. 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. After the wolf went down, Merry fired a few more times to make sure. At first the number of animals he came up with was forty-eight, but then his fiance arrived. But an accident happened. For the majority of Americans who know little about the world of exotic animals, the astonishing events in Zanesville begged some obvious questions. Facebook gives people the power. "That's what happens when they send a guy to prison that don't deserve to go there. It is believed that in 2012, Marian Thompson retrieved the surviving animals from the Zoo. But I lean toward another theorythat in the end the animals were just what they've usually been in human history: incidental collateral damage. "Kind of uppity. It was the guns that eventually landed him in real trouble. The white tiger was atop him. 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. Terry Thompson, a Vietnam War veteran, was a lifelong collector of exotic animals. I can see that. You finally just stop.". For a while there was a plane on the shop's roof. Ordinary Heroes. This riddle hardly bolsters any of the conspiracy theoriesif someone did this to Thompson, they too would have had to find a way of releasing the animals without coming to immediate harm (never mind to have escaped from the scene without being spotted). He. Forty-nine animals would be confirmed dead. The animals were scooped by the bucketload, placed in the hole, and earth backhoed over them. And a second bear, this one much larger than the first. The Aftermath From top: a nearby highway sign warns drivers; the gathered bodies of the slaughtered animals. Day after day. And then there was what the coroner described like this: "a 5 3/4 x 4 inch gaping laceration involving the pubic region and bilateral medial thighs with the absence of genitalia, exposure of the pubic bones and adjacent soft tissue." 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. But the final blow was finding out that his wife, Marian, had left him. "He never really got over it," says Marshall. (If you visit the Columbus Zoo, his face is everywhereeven on the Pepsi machines.) The general impression seems to have been that it was a case of the good girl drawn to the wild boy. While animal advocates have agreed that there was little the authorities could do in the matter, the brutal massacre serves as a reminder of why privately owned exotic animals are considered to be ticking bombs. I've shot more rounds through a machine gun than all the cops in Zanesville put together, but I had to stay alive so it wasn't a fun thing. 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. The Trump I know Documentary Film. The exotic-animal world is a close-knit one, and in the year before Thompson's death, after he was sent to prison, word spread that there were problems with his animals. After a while the four shooters ran low on ammo and called for more, and eventually they headed back toward where the body was. The house itself was disgusting. It didn't seem that big a dealthey all knew Thompson had animals and they'd been called out there again and again, mostly for loose horses. It was very sad to seehow someone clearly had lost their mind. "He hesitated. 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. [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. "It stood up," says Kanavel, "and was standing there." "It kind of took us by surprise," says Kanavel. No one is sure how many there are, or where they are. T's World unpacks the events surrounding his 2011 animal release and suicide. In 1997, Terry and Marian attended an exotic animal auction, from which Terry gifted an ailing baby lion to Marian as a birthday gift. "I don't know." Patrolman: I don't knowprobably seventy-five. In the later years it became very overwhelming because Terry went a little off the deep end. 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. he says. I set out to find some of them. "He would never sell anything," says Marshall. They need people to know that not everybody who has a tiger or three tucked away behind their house is a Terry Thompson. Likewise, there is wide disagreement about what kind of human intervention or interaction can be beneficial or justified. 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. Though ultimately no action was taken concerning the animals after Thompson moved to improve his facilities, Barrie had been horrified at what he saw up there in terms of security, cleanliness, and animal cruelty. He liked speed." His farm was reportedly raided June 2008 . to my website where you will find interesting information and inspiration. 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.