As Ed Hamell pointed . This was his high school sweetheart. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories. Cages only lead to more cages, unless a far worse reality awaits them. I always thought that was pretty funny." "You couldn't buy nothing off of him. But I lean toward another theorythat in the end the animals were just what they've usually been in human history: incidental collateral damage. "I was at an auction and he had a tiger that had ringworm and he had a baby monkey," says Nancy Wider, another owner. I'm Terry Gross. The 73 acre farmland with the private zoo was owned by Terry Thompson. I just know that I learned the lesson the hard way, that's all.". 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. ", "Terry, are you sick?" 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 kicked into the mode of what they taught him in Vietnambeat people up, kill people. 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." The local police confirmed deaths of 48 animals which included eighteen Bengal tigers, three mountain lions, nine male lions, eight lionesses, six black bears, two grizzly bears, two wolves, one macaque, one monkey and one baboon. I invite you to click around the site right now and come back . 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. 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. "He had accused her of turning him in for the guns. In the later years it became very overwhelming because Terry went a little off the deep end. 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. Even that statistic slightly obscures the situation. It was this ATF raid that also forced real scrutiny for the first time on his exotic animals. 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. As for what actually happened on that day in October, I hear all kinds of theories, though most of them sound recklessly far-fetched. I'm Terry Gross. T's World unpacks the events surrounding his 2011 animal release and suicide. 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. The last few years of Terrys life were when things started going downhill for him. As they moved toward other escapees spread over the hillside, they used the truck to give themselves elevation, trying to engage the animals from seventy to a hundred yards away, firing on them two at a time until they went down. "Well," Thompson retorted, "find someone to file a complaint on me." "So we shot them," says Polk. 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. He didn't know who was who. The final total was fifty-six. Actor: Murder Comes to Town. Given the situationfifty animals, mostly large and potentially aggressive carnivores set loose toward the day's endthings could have gone so much worse. ", "He had an ego that you wouldn't believe," says Stilwell. In this era there were also numerous complaints of loose animals. His gallbladder had been removed earlier in life, and he was suffering from severe atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Read on to find out the details. Or $0.00 with a Prime membership. (Nearly everything. He didn't trust anybody after that. "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. Zanesville Animal Escape took place in October 2011, in Zanesville, Ohio, when over 50 exotic animals were released from Muskingum County Animal Farm. Sheriff Matt Lutz was settling into an evening in front of the TV. "If he liked it, he kept it. Join Facebook to connect with Terry Thompson and others you may know. His neighbor Fred Polk relates how two of Thompson's Rottweilers got out and killed a couple of Polk's calves. Lutz instructed that if there were animals outside Thompson's property they needed to be shot. 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. All the Under-$20 Style, Tech, and Home Goods We're Feeling This May, 62 Excellent Gift Ideas to Spoil All the Deserving Guys Out There, 51 Non-Boring Wedding Gifts for All Kinds of Cool Newlyweds, Why NBA MVP Voter Fatigue Is (Mostly) a Myth. Maybe the animals had somehow busted out, and he was injured, in need of help. "His eyes were just beautiful." "They could only get so many on the helicopter," says Cress, "and they actually had to pry their fingers off the helicopter so they could get off the ground." 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. They'd never had kids. "His favorite song was 'House of the Rising Sun.' While he was waiting for Mrs. Kopchak to answer the door, he saw a large gray wolf running southward along the road behind him. 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. "He was tops in everything he did. Now he only had his Glock. It was beyond anything that you would ever want to experience. So these animals were like her children. ", I reiterate how angry animal owners are with him. He was kind of a loner. An insightful documentary film has just been released that reveals the true Donald Trump contrary to the constant misleading portrayals by his opposition. 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 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. But Thompson explained how upset he was that he used to be able to go around his own private zoo and call his animals by name but could no longer do so. In 2010, he was sentenced to a year in prison on federal weapon charges. In Vietnam we were so much more interested in lightweight because we were on the move a lot. Drug smuggling. I don't know that.Okay. "It was the most horrific smells," says Stalf. And the second occurred when he was a young private owner exhibiting his exotic animals. Since 1957, GQ has inspired men to look sharper and live smarter with its unparalleled coverage of style, culture, and beyond. 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. "Like riding on the end of a pencil, sitting on the hood ornament of your car as it accelerates from zero to 158 miles an hour," says Marshall. "He forgets where he came from," says one owner, Michael Stapleton (five tigers, four bears). Zanesville held a special significance for himhe went to school near here, enlisted in the army here, spent his honeymoon night here. "Terry Thompson was a man who made mountaineering both his profession and his . By the time he got there, the culling had begun. "He would sometimes step on other guys' girlfriends. Together, they returned to the house, finding nothing but two monkeys and a dog in cages. ". "For Terry, it started out as a love. The preserve is located in. It's what the Indians wanted.Terry Thompson, secretly recorded in his home by a government informant, May 2008. The Trump I know Documentary Film. Patrolman: I don't knowprobably seventy-five. "Remember, 1973 was much different than 2011. "Other things will happen, but this is never going to happen again.". I said that he never left Vietnam. 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! "And his answer, to the way I recall, was he didn't know whether she did or she didn't. Only three weeks after getting out, he released the animals, and shot himself. "I was sick, shooting these animals, because they didn't ask to be there," he says. From where they were, they could see the man's body, flat on its back. After returning from war, Terry opened a motorcycle shop which he ran till the 90s, and then sold licensed firearms for some years. He was actually found with a pillowcase over his head and a gunshot wound to his stomach. 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). We didn't talk about the deposition.Okay. Near 5:30 p.m. on October 18, 2011 -- the day the world's remaining wildness seemingly died in Zanesville, Ohio, of all places -- Sergeant Steven Blake, of the Muskingum County sheriff's. ", "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. "When he came back, they had been changed around in the cages. 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. Only then did she call 911 and alert the world. 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. She was my grandmother's sister, one of ten children who grew up in Muhlenberg County Kentucky. When the zoo people returned to the site at five-thirty the next morning, they had been joined by Jack Hanna. Their cages had either been cut through or left open. I asked, 'Why, Terry? "See," says Spires, "that's the way he was." "It's only half a boat," Thompson explained. Workin' Moms. 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. And [Terry] just really beat him up so bad. 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." "He loved blues more than anything," says Spires. "She was saying, 'Please, Mr. Hanna, don't take my children,'" says Hanna. 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. 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. Perhaps it was the first of many telltale signs that Thompson, man of so many friends, didn't call anyone. Terry Thompson is known for Murder Comes to Town (2014) and Not for Rent! The answer to that first question: It's surprisingly easy. 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. Netflixs Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness offers an expansive portrayal of private ownership of exotic animals in America. "), 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. "There would be dogshit all over the showroom. 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? The only surviving animals from Terrys zoo were the ones that were still in the cage. "Everything he had was fast," says Marshall. Month after month. So he settled on what he considered a brisk walking pace for himself and Red. 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. She wasn't, but Terry was. "Fast motorcycles. Thompson almost collapsed to his seat. "Apparently," Tom Stalf theorizes, "he wanted the animals to eat him. Thompson was involved with bad people and had fallen out with them. If there is a line that divides the avid collector from the hoarder, at some point Thompson seems to have crossed it. Just sitting there on the ground, facing their way. "He had been dragged," says Kanavel. How many tickets do you have in that book? Select Page. Maybe. Marian became a well-respected local schoolteacher and a prizewinning rider. (Tigers are reputedly worth as much as $20,000 dead when their body parts are illegally sold off.) Code 16 [dead on arrival], possible 58 [suicide]. You know, Terry always had to be number onethat was Terry," she says. Before she opened the cage, she sang to them a lullaby, and they clung to her as she took them one by one to their carriers. [In 1976] Terry joined the Army Everest Expedition where he met his tragic death in a crevasse accident in the Western Cwm." - Mike Banks The Climber's Club Journal (London) 1976. 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. But the final blow was finding out that his wife, Marian, had left him. He was just going off the deep end. 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. "He was a broken individual," says Phil Cress. "I don't know." 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.
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