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". The preserve is located in. He was caught up in dangerously illegal black-market animal sales, dead or alive. Not that she was the only one who noticed. From there, looking through a north-facing window, he watched the menagerie grow. Terry Thompson is known for Murder Comes to Town (2014) and Not for Rent! After his death, footage emerged showing Thompson handing one of his lion cubs to Heidi Klum on a fashion shoot, and in 2008 he appeared on the Rachael Ray show as an animal handler. And also a lioness, anxiously scuttering around. He was pretty distraught." "He wrestled with the biblical thing: 'I guess I'll never go to heaven because I killed people,' " says Chuck Spires, his friend and guitar teacher. The 73 acre farmland with the private zoo was owned by Terry Thompson. (Everyone knows somewhere else worse.). A nice girl." But of course I've never killed anyone in civilian life.I understand.I don't even kill flies.Terry Thompson and a government informant in conversation at his home, secretly recorded in April 2008. He told Spires that he was broke, that all he had was sixty horses, but Spires reassured him that he'd made money before and he could make money again. The Aftermath From top: a nearby highway sign warns drivers; the gathered bodies of the slaughtered animals. Thompson's wife, Marian, arrived around lunchtime. 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? Thompson opened a bike shop in town. When I interviewed Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson over the summer after the release of his documentary "Summer Of Soul," at the end of the. "Very depressed. Thompson's sounds like an idyllic small-town-America '60s childhood: bicycles, Boy Scouts, loving parents, sporting triumphs, souped-up cars, girls. ), Thompson flew regularly for a local millionaire, including a vintage World War IIera Stearman biplane, and also kept some of his own planes on the Kopchak Road propertyhe had the electric company move the power lines so that he could take off and land there. Because she loved the animals as much as he did. 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. 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. ), 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. In the later years it became very overwhelming because Terry went a little off the deep end. Neighbors describe Terry Thompson, the owner of the exotic animal farm where 56 animals escaped 10-19-2011. "He forgets where he came from," says one owner, Michael Stapleton (five tigers, four bears). Documentary Animation Short Over the course of 15 years Terry Thompson collected tigers, lions, bears, and other exotic animals. Merry didn't know what was going on, so he stopped. "I think people were afraid of Terry. Whatever people knew of the real situation, and of the hard decisions that had to be made, when you saw that image all you could think was: This is a photo of a place where dozens of big beautiful animals were massacred. Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. They need people to know that not everybody who has a tiger or three tucked away behind their house is a Terry Thompson. All rights reserved. But while it seems foolish to expect someone's actions on the verge of suicide to be consistent with their behavior before then, this actionthe cutting of the cagesdoes puzzle some for a different reason. He didn't even trust his own wife. "And, you know, I'm a cat person.". "That means they're happy," Stilwell says. What about giving primates TV to watch? By now the order had come over the radio: Put the animal down. Nonetheless it was clearly impossible to allow a boisterous feline to clamber freely over someone who has just had major heart surgery. 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. Shoot to Kill: The Ohio Animal Massacre - Terry Thompson's final day The seven-part true-crime docuseries dives deep into the dark and meaty underbelly of tiger trade, exposing the devastating reality underneath the eccentricities of Americas so-called animal lovers. "I actually think that he expected this when he got home and kind of planned it," says Stilwell. When the ATF raided his home in 2008, they took away 133 firearms and 36 rounds of ammunition. Forty miles away, at the Columbus Zoo, an event was being held for the International Rhino Foundation. Because he wouldn't take any clothes with him." "And then," he says, "I saw a tiger. A white tiger appeared to be eating it, and they couldn't get closer. It was also in Zanesville where he met his wife, Marian Sharp (Thompson), for the first time. 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. Even that statistic slightly obscures the situation. He had a funny look. Month after month. 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. Zanesville Animal Escape: How Many Animals Died? Terry Thompson Zoo He. I just know that I learned the lesson the hard way, that's all.". Those around him believed that he was changed man after he returned from war, that he never fully recovered from its trauma. Menu. A little before five o'clock on the evening of October 18, 2011, as the day began to ebb away, a retired schoolteacher named Sam Kopchak left the home he shared with his 84-year-old mother and headed into the paddock behind their house to attend to the horse he'd bought nine days earlier. He then looked back for a moment at his wife and . 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. It had a special meaning." As Ed Hamell pointed . Ordinary Heroes. (At 6:04 p.m., Lutz shared this information on the police radio: "Okay, we have located the owner. Okay? It was the guns that eventually landed him in real trouble. Patrolman: I don't knowprobably seventy-five. Twenty-one other injuries, or clusters of injuries, were detailed just on the head and neck, the site of the most widespread damage. . Thompson would speak of his grand plans for what he liked to call T's Wild Kingdom: a large octagonal building, a pond for the bears. ", "No other law-enforcement agency in the world has faced thisit's not like there was a manual," says Deputy LeCocq. Ohio animal Terry Thompson owner shot himself - police - BBC News "He had no reason why he was spared," says Cress. Code 16 [dead on arrival], possible 58 [suicide]. I invite you to click around the site right now and come back . No one is sure how many there are, or where they are. Bob Thompson Trailer from Jeffrey Cooper on Vimeo.. Facebook; Twitter; RSS; Designed by Elegant Themes | Powered by WordPress 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. Actor: Murder Comes to Town. As for what actually happened on that day in October, I hear all kinds of theories, though most of them sound recklessly far-fetched. Vince Gill, Verlon Thompson, and Terry and Jo Harvey Allen, as well as record executive Barry Poss. Wayfair Huge Deal-A-Thon - Up to 60% off everything! "There was never just one girl in his life," she remembers. 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). Join Facebook to connect with Terry Thompson and others you may know. 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. Terry Thompson's story went round the world, but it was also barely told at all. I'm Terry Gross. In Vietnam we were so much more interested in lightweight because we were on the move a lot. The white tiger was atop him. From $999 to buy. He had a heart of gold. Six of Terry Thompson's animals survived. 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. To breed or exhibit or commercially transport animals across state lines he would need a USDA license, requiring that his facilities be inspected periodically to check that they met some basic standardsbut other than that there are no special checks or controls. On October 18, 2011, Terry opened the cages of around 50 of his animals, and then shot himself in the head. Facebook gives people the power. At death Terry William Thompson was five feet five inches tall and weighed 174 pounds. 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. asked Stilwell. He hurried back. Select Page. She was my grandmother's sister, one of ten children who grew up in Muhlenberg County Kentucky. People insist that the Terry Thompson they knew was too lazy to go to that kind of trouble. How he was treated. The previous day he was doing an event at Penn State, and although he'd just had knee surgery, he drove straight here "a hundred miles an hour." Thompson, 61, was recently released from prison after serving one year on federal weapons charges. 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. View all posts . He eventually sold his bike shop and, for the rest of Thompson's life, his hobbies and whatever he did to make a living seemed to mingle in ways that were sometimes ill-defined. ", As they passed by the lion cages Thompson talked about the split. Terry Thompson: Exotic animal preserve owner - YouTube A fully grown male African lion. "Oh, he didn't like it at all," Polk remembers. In 1997, Terry and Marian attended an exotic animal auction, from which Terry gifted an ailing baby lion to Marian as a birthday gift. 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. 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. Terry Thompson - IMDb "Many of them I'm sure died right there in his arms." The second, bigger mystery is how Thompson managed to let loose fifty animals without being seriously injured by any of them. It was this ATF raid that also forced real scrutiny for the first time on his exotic animals. There are no sane people that would live in those conditions.". 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. Terry Thompson, a Vietnam War veteran, was a lifelong collector of exotic animals. "You got cancer or something? "Yes, they have every right to be angry with me, but do they know that I lost everything I had?" John Moore mentally ran through the rows of cages he would feed. 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. 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. "Fast motorcycles. Thompson was a collector of exotic animals, who grew up in Zanesville, and was well-known around the area for the wild things he did. Where were you then? And there were always planes. The only notable substance in his blood was Benadryl. 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." Over the days I spend visiting them I become strangely accustomed to the fact that, just around the back of an otherwise perfectly normal home in Ohio suburbia, there can be a tiger or a cougaror, in some cases, many of each. 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. 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. (Nearly everything. What, too, of this practice of removing cubs from their big-cat mothers soon after birth and hand-rearing them by humans? 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. On May 31, 2017, John Hernandez was murdered by Terry Thompson during a fight outside a restaurant in Sheldon, Texas, part of the Greater Houston area. As he neared the farm buildings he saw more animals. Mike Marshall, who later flew civilian planes with him, says Thompson brought it up frequently. [8] I always thought that was pretty funny." Together, they returned to the house, finding nothing but two monkeys and a dog in cages. "And his answer, to the way I recall, was he didn't know whether she did or she didn't. I'm not an expert. But an accident happened. ", "Terry, are you sick?" 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 innocent person was hurt. That's where the famous, heartbreaking photo was takenit remains unclear who took itof all the bodies together in the early-morning light, the one that went round the world. And it just broke his heartthis is what I think. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. 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. Apparently it worked. Home Terry Thompson has 36 books on Goodreads with 326 ratings. He never left it.". "Our role in life is to care for animals and to educate and inspire people about these great creatures," says Stalf, "and to see them piled in the mudit was just a bad day, you know.". His gallbladder had been removed earlier in life, and he was suffering from severe atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. You finally just stop.". And sometime in this period, Marian told Sam Kopchak that Terry was giving guitar lessons behind bars. The bigger the bang that takes someone out, the more likely it is that the person at its center will be obscured. "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. By the time he got there, the culling had begun. He was charged with animal cruelty relating to some livestock he kept on his parents' old property on the other side of town after three cows and a buffalo were said to have died of starvation and was sentenced to six months' house arrest. Thompson: It'd better not beI'd be out of the truck by now. 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. Practical questions and answers regarding the gospel are presented at the Eternity page. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories. "Jack needs to step back, take a breath, and look at Jack's history. 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 last few years of Terrys life were when things started going downhill for him. 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. When it turned up toward a house, Merry got his rifle from the trunk and followed on foot. You'll never kill one hundred with an AR because the gun will jam or you'll run out of ammo or someone will shoot you before.Terry Thompson, secretly recorded in his home by a government informant, April 2008. He only looked back once, when they were about a third of the way to the barn. He and his wife liked to drive a decommissioned fireman's truck around town until one night he wrecked it. 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. He had his pilot's license before he was 16. ", There were also pieces of raw chicken scattered around near the body. 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. "My father didn't like animals," she told me. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson Soon, their collection grew into a private mini zoo as the couple took care of rescued animals, and also bought some themselves. It broke my heart. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. He took care of that monkey most of the time he was over there. Sheriff Matt Lutz was settling into an evening in front of the TV. An incredible true story from the March 2012 issue of GQ. How could you blame a woman you have spent forty years of your life with for that, if you were sane? 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. "Why him? That's when you sleep with a machine gun. Without a USDA license, he wasn't allowed to supply animals for photo shoots and commercial events, though he sometimes got around it by using fellow owner Cindy Huntsman's animals and accreditation. One time Thompson offered Dr. Smith a boat for half price. "They told me," says one owner, Cindy Huntsman, "there were no laws on the books that would allow him to confiscate.". It was all about Terry after that. That's when Moore told Deputy Jeff LeCocq something that would later appear in the official police report and came to be taken as a kind of explanation for what had happened, albeit one that prompted many further questions. Rhino experts from around the world had gathered, and the zoo was throwing a cocktail party on the grounds of the polar-bear exhibit. 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. The third is what happened that night in Zanesville. He wouldn't ever know where the bullet went, though he assumed he must have hit the brain. 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. The Crazy True Story of the Zanesville Zoo Escape | GQ Thompson apologized and told Polk that he'd never see those dogs again, but three days later they were back and killed two more calves. A big digger was brought in and a hole was dug maybe thirty feet deep. One was that he had gone under the interstate bridge where it crosses the Muskingum River in the middle of Zanesville. Why do you need so many?' _Thompson: _You might as well keep writing, because when I leave here I'm not fastening my seat belt. Matthew Lutz, the Muskingum County Sheriff described him as "a like-to-live-on-the-edge type of person". It probably made all the difference. 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. We didn't talk about the deposition.Okay. As time passed, people got used to the way he might turn up at the local airfield, say, with a baby bear or lion. Not the weapon you'd want when you're facing down 350 pounds of charging bear. Meanwhile, at the gateway of Thompson's property, the police were wondering how many animals might be loose. And it planted the seed of caring for wild animals for the rest of his life. I'm going to put it that way. Workin' Moms. The strange truth is: Nobody knows. He said he didn't have any control over it. Zoo Massacre | The Tragic Story of Terry Thompson and the 'Zanesville Movies. The white tiger had gone. In 2010, he was sentenced to a year in prison on federal weapon charges. "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. "Other things will happen, but this is never going to happen again.". After the wolf went down, Merry fired a few more times to make sure. Partly, I think, they talk because they're proud of what they do and the way they do it, but it's also because their way of life is under attack. The lion was in the same place as a moment ago, still on the other side of the fence, though it was quite obvious that the animal could get over the fence anytime it wanted to. I think it was the only way he felt that he could really punish Marian was to take something that she loved, too. They'd never had kids. "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. "See," says Spires, "that's the way he was." She said, 'We have to goTerry Thompson's animals are out.' I don't know how else to explain it." IE 11 is not supported. Terry William Thompson grew up just east of Zanesville on his parents' farm, close to the airport. Thompson was involved with bad people and had fallen out with them. Read on to find out the details. ", Thompson went to the Federal Correctional Institution in Morgantown, West Virginia, on November 17, 2010. Maybe something went very astray with Terry Thompson, and so of course it is now in the interests of the other owners to draw a firm line between what he did and what they do, but my hunch is that if one had visited him a few years ago, he would have expressed the same love and care and concern for his animals, and done so with conviction. Patrolman: Well, sir, this is not personal. She wasn't, but Terry was. 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. She sounded calm when she reported what her son had seen, as though there was really nothing too strange or alarming about a lion and a bear running loose on an October afternoon in Ohio. "You couldn't buy nothing off of him. (Even Mr. Kopchak, forgotten in his barn, safely managed to make his way unescorted back to his house at nightfall.) one owner nonchalantly inquires, as it nestles up against the fencing inches away from me in his garage.) "We didn't have any idea how many there were," Mrs. Kopchak would later reflect. How could a private citizen have amassed a collection of so many unusual and potentially dangerous animals in the first place? ". "Remember, 1973 was much different than 2011. Because I can.' (Whose feelings, exactly, are being taken into account there?) 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." It wasn't quite that straightforward. "He always bragged," says Marshall, "that when he sold his business he had 138 motorcycles, 138 cars, and 138 guns." In 1977, Thompson went to an auction for exotic animals and bought his wife a baby tiger cub called Simba for her birthday. Just sitting there on the ground, facing their way. 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. TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. 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. ", I reiterate how angry animal owners are with him. He was devastated to find the poor condition of the zoo when he returned, and was also heavily in debt. 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. T's World: The Over Identification of Terry Thompson - IMDb 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. [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. 1 distinct work Similar authors. ". TERRY THOMPSON. After all, this is not the life they are meant to lead, and certainly not the one they deserve. The answer to the second question is: What laws? 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. Personal testimonies from his closest staff and family tell a different story from the daily public barrage of criticisms by of the media. "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. 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. Even if many of the animals were confused or scared, and not bloodthirsty for human flesh, some of the friendliest might have been expected to want to "play" with Thompsonand when a cat this big decides to play with you, you are in little less peril than when it decides to attack you. This plan soon had to be revised. You had to watch where you stepped." And none of it was taken care of. There are all kinds of ways that tragedy and fate can reach across decades to taunt us and trap us. "So those animals were put down." 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. When the 911 operator asked for her first name, Mrs. Kopchak answered "Dolores," the name on her birth certificate but one she never uses: "I've been called Dolly for eighty-four years. But I find a few. I asked, 'Why, Terry? 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. I was in a helicopter so I was a machine gunner with an M60that was on a bipod.