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." "There would be dogshit all over the showroom. 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. 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. ", "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. 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. And then Terry makes this statement back to him: 'Well, I have a plan to find out, and you will know it when it happens.' This was his high school sweetheart. (Whose feelings, exactly, are being taken into account there?) 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. 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. Here in the field. He had these wild animals. Thompson did speak to other friends in those days. As time passed, people got used to the way he might turn up at the local airfield, say, with a baby bear or lion. 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. 'Because I can. And the straw that broke the camel's back was, when he went to jail, he came back and his wife had abandoned him. But the final blow was finding out that his wife, Marian, had left him. 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. 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. It was presumed that the remaining two animals were eaten by some of the bigger ones. 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. 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. ", "No," he replied. "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. What did he ever do to his country?" Daniel: Prophet at the King's Command, a Novel. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories. It probably made all the difference. The tigers are actually bigger than the lions if they're fully grown. This reality is revealed to us through Zanesville Animal Escape that briefly makes its presence felt during the first half of the series. It is believed that in 2012, Marian Thompson retrieved the surviving animals from the Zoo. "His favorite song was 'House of the Rising Sun.' "He was tops in everything he did. Sitting up there, rusting away, is a brand-new '34 Ford steel body. Twenty-one other injuries, or clusters of injuries, were detailed just on the head and neck, the site of the most widespread damage. No one is sure how many there are, or where they are. He was upset with the army because he saw some horrible, ugly things." I always thought that was pretty funny." 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. Friends say that Thompson loved having something that nobody else had, and he industriously accumulated objects that might fit the bill. So he settled on what he considered a brisk walking pace for himself and Red. ", A bond that tied two people for so long can take time to break completely. In 1997, Terry and Marian attended an exotic animal auction, from which Terry gifted an ailing baby lion to Marian as a birthday gift. 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." Fast boats. He and his wife liked to drive a decommissioned fireman's truck around town until one night he wrecked it. Thompson had only returned from his prison sentence three weeks before. 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. 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. They'd long known that there were strange and unusual animals kept out of sight over the brow of the hill around Thompson's houseoften they could hear lions bellow and roar. 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. There was now only one unaccounted fora macaque. He didn't know too much about lions, but he had heard that it was unwise to challenge them by looking them in the eye, and that if you ran away they had a tendency to chase you. In the bottom of my heart, I think Terry was thumbing his nose at everybody, and he wanted to destroy that which Marian loved the most. But what about declawing cats, something considered quite acceptable in parts of the exotic owners' world? "On the third night," says Spires, "this guy showed up, started beating windows out. Where were you then? 1 distinct work Similar authors. Not that she was the only one who noticed. "Why him? He set down his clipboard on the porch, where it would remain for the next few hours, ran to his patrol car, and followed the wolf. The general impression seems to have been that it was a case of the good girl drawn to the wild boy. Where they should have been, there was nothing but a raw gap. 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. "He was a broken individual," says Phil Cress. His neighbor Fred Polk relates how two of Thompson's Rottweilers got out and killed a couple of Polk's calves. 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. In August, Thompson was moved to a halfway house in Columbus. 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. And they have every right to think, 'Oh, here's Jack, he had his fun with animalsnow we can't have our fun.' 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. Aunt Iris was old the day I met her, or so it seemed. Fox Movie,' a documentary about his life. View all posts . His son and wife were off to a literacy night so he was on his own. Nonetheless it was clearly impossible to allow a boisterous feline to clamber freely over someone who has just had major heart surgery. "There was never just one girl in his life," she remembers. There are no sane people that would live in those conditions.". 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. "Terry Thompson was a man who made mountaineering both his profession and his . "It kind of took us by surprise," says Kanavel. After all, this is not the life they are meant to lead, and certainly not the one they deserve. Sheriff Matt Lutz was settling into an evening in front of the TV. People insist that the Terry Thompson they knew was too lazy to go to that kind of trouble. [From a court deposition Thompson gave while incarcerated on March 28, 2011] Okay. Zanesville Animal Escape took place in October 2011, in Zanesville, Ohio, when over 50 exotic animals were released from Muskingum County Animal Farm. to my website where you will find interesting information and inspiration. 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. Sams 85-year-old mother, Dolores, called 911, and soon the police were in the area. ". "And he did it. 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 final total was fifty-six. Kanavel's tactic was to shoot for the head a couple of times, and then move on to the body and keep putting rounds into it. Young Queen Charlotte's marriage to King George of England sparks an epic love story and transforms high society in this "Bridgerton" universe prequel. The craziest, most tangentially related rumor that I hear in Zanesville: Jack Hanna was supplying Charlie Sheen's tiger blood. 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. ", "No other law-enforcement agency in the world has faced thisit's not like there was a manual," says Deputy LeCocq. "And he always used to say, 'I don't like animals but I would never hurt one. Never had to think twice about it. Patrolman: Well, sir, this is not personal. 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." Facebook gives people the power. "See," says Spires, "that's the way he was." Whatever the exact truth, it wasn't that simple, though different people suggest different time frames. When I interviewed Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson over the summer after the release of his documentary "Summer Of Soul," at the end of the. Thompson: It'd better not beI'd be out of the truck by now. 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. "And then," he says, "I saw a tiger. It wasn't quite that straightforward. First they had to deal with a male African lion that managed to run between some junk cars after the first shotthere were dozens and dozens of old cars and RVs and tractors parked in clumps of rusted metal around the hillside, weeds growing around them. 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 always laughed and would be real pleasant before," says Polk. Those around him believed that he was changed man after he returned from war, that he never fully recovered from its trauma. _Thompson: _You might as well keep writing, because when I leave here I'm not fastening my seat belt. 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. Just sitting there on the ground, facing their way. His gallbladder had been removed earlier in life, and he was suffering from severe atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. "I was sick, shooting these animals, because they didn't ask to be there," he says.
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