Terry was also a Vietnam war veteran. Merry didn't know what was going on, so he stopped. "It was the most horrific smells," says Stalf. They need people to know that not everybody who has a tiger or three tucked away behind their house is a Terry Thompson. 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. Directed by: Vlad Yudin. Where do you plan to live when you are released?At my house.Okay. It is believed Thompson released nearly all of his 56 animals, following a mental breakdown which led him to take his own life. And they have every right to think, 'Oh, here's Jack, he had his fun with animalsnow we can't have our fun.' As Ed Hamell pointed . Thompson did speak to other friends in those days. Not the weapon you'd want when you're facing down 350 pounds of charging bear. "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 wanted to clear his head. The only surviving animals from Terrys zoo were the ones that were still in the cage. 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. 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 was tops in everything he did. The general impression seems to have been that it was a case of the good girl drawn to the wild boy. Thompson almost collapsed to his seat. Almost from the moment Mrs. Kopchak picked up her telephone and reported that wild animals were on the loose, it was taken for granted that the manner of Terry Thompson's death explained all anyone needed to know about the life that came before it. He became the local Harley dealer and also got a license to sell guns. We sent Chris Heath to Zanesville, Ohio, to find out where the wild things areand what the hell they're doing there. View the profiles of people named Terry Thompson. View all posts . 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. Zanesville held a special significance for himhe went to school near here, enlisted in the army here, spent his honeymoon night here. Informant: You're crazy.Thompson: That's what they all say. "Everything he had was fast," says Marshall. Still, Lutz said he wasn't busy and would drive over. But I find a few. 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. ", "No other law-enforcement agency in the world has faced thisit's not like there was a manual," says Deputy LeCocq. ", As they passed by the lion cages Thompson talked about the split. The road his and Thompson's properties abutted was named Kopchak Road after his great-uncle. 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. In this era there were also numerous complaints of loose animals. 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. Jack Hanna's lion, at Jack Hanna's animal farm. "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." 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. 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. Nearby, they found bolt cutters and a stainless-steel Ruger .357 magnum revolver. 1 distinct work Similar authors. "But you'll know when I go.". 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. Facebook gives people the power. This is a [Mannlicher-Schoenauer]see the twists in the barrel.I do see that.Okay, hand built in Austria. On one of his last visits, Stilwell walked around the animal cages with Thompson. Somehow, no one was hurt. On the worst days, there were more people to be rescued than they possibly could. 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. A nice girl." ", "Terry, are you sick?" I don't know what happened to it when he left.". He was caught up in dangerously illegal black-market animal sales, dead or alive. It was so bad one time, he ran out of bullets.". I saw a pair of pants on the ground and the belt was twine. How he was treated. From there, looking through a north-facing window, he watched the menagerie grow. 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. one owner nonchalantly inquires, as it nestles up against the fencing inches away from me in his garage.) The final total was fifty-six. What about neutering, which is now considered not merely acceptable but responsible behavior when it comes to many nonexotic pets? 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. Because I can.' The answer to that first question: It's surprisingly easy. And the second occurred when he was a young private owner exhibiting his exotic animals. "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. Most seem to have stumbled into it, impulsively buying a bear or lion cub without thinking through how, as one puts it, "a year from now, it's not going to be so cuddly." "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. "Apparently," Tom Stalf theorizes, "he wanted the animals to eat him. He had been wearing a black T-shirt, blue jeans, and white briefs. Terry Thompson's most popular book is The Martian Diaries: Vol.1 The Day Of The Martians (The . "And he always used to say, 'I don't like animals but I would never hurt one. Personal testimonies from his closest staff and family tell a different story from the daily public barrage of criticisms by of the media. He didn't even trust his own wife. [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. After the sheriff spoke with Hanna and talked him through what happened, he gave interview after interview. Six of Terry Thompson's animals survived. And the guys that had a wife and children are in Arlington?". 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. I think he had a little touch of Agent Orange. Fox Movie,' a documentary about his life. His friend got killed and I guess they're thinking, 'That could be me tomorrow.' Daniel: Prophet at the King's Command, a Novel. But an accident happened. 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. "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." It just broke my heart. In 1977, Thompson went to an auction for exotic animals and bought his wife a baby tiger cub called Simba for her birthday. He remembers Thompson picking up the bodies. Workin' Moms. "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. Their cages had either been cut through or left open. The animal lovers are the ones that hurt them.' It was also in Zanesville where he met his wife, Marian Sharp (Thompson), for the first time. Terry Thompson was born in Belfast, he grew up on the Castlereagh Road in East Belfast. 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. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. 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 first involves his daughter and cancer. He just couldn't keep his brain on the right track. "Terry Thompson was a man who made mountaineering both his profession and his . "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. I just know that I learned the lesson the hard way, that's all.". "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. The bigger the bang that takes someone out, the more likely it is that the person at its center will be obscured. After that, Merry went back for his rifle. "I asked him what he was going to do when they turned the key on him," says Spires. The white tiger had gone. Director Dustin Rikert Writers Fred Hogge Rafael Jordan Stars Caitlin Carmichael Sydney Scotia Jerry O'Connell See production, box office & company info Watch on The Roku Channel with subscription _Thompson: _You might as well keep writing, because when I leave here I'm not fastening my seat belt. Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. Thompson clearly meant this as a testament to his popularity, though Keck wonders. 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. Director Ramon Bloomberg Writer Ramon Bloomberg ". 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? Or $0.00 with a Prime membership. 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. The black bear fell about seven feet in front of Merry. TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. 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. When he arrived, he could see, just inside Thompson's fence, a tiger, a black bear, and two lionesses. The answer to the second question is: What laws? There was, he told her, "a major problem." "Well," Thompson retorted, "find someone to file a complaint on me." Her bond with them certainly seemed real. They'd never had kids. ", 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.' He would rather say he owned it. It was about eighty yards away from him, but it fell at the first shot. 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. He had acted as an animal handler on Wild Kingdom in 2008, and provided a lion cub to a photoshoot with Heidi Klum. 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. Neighbors describe Terry Thompson, the owner of the exotic animal farm where 56 animals escaped 10-19-2011. Day after day. (Nearly everything. The incident made global news. "Yes, they have every right to be angry with me, but do they know that I lost everything I had?" "He threw up his arms," says Stilwell, "and said, 'She can just have it all.' A big digger was brought in and a hole was dug maybe thirty feet deep. Your neighbor could buy as many tigers, lions, cougars, and other exotic animals as he so desired and would be under no obligation to tell anyone. "When he would go into the house another buddy would hold an M16 out, protecting him, and then when he came out he would hold the M16, protecting his buddy. 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. 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). "His eyes were just beautiful." Forty miles away, at the Columbus Zoo, an event was being held for the International Rhino Foundation. He was devastated to find the poor condition of the zoo when he returned, and was also heavily in debt. Because he wouldn't take any clothes with him." 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. Likewise, there is wide disagreement about what kind of human intervention or interaction can be beneficial or justified. "He wanted people to know that he was there. But on their way back to the road, Moore spotted a body near the barn. 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. It's what the Indians wanted.Terry Thompson, secretly recorded in his home by a government informant, May 2008. Code 16 [dead on arrival], possible 58 [suicide]. "He always laughed and would be real pleasant before," says Polk. 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. "Some of them were untrue. [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. 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. Just sitting there on the ground, facing their way. What did he ever do to his country?" One time Marshall discovered that Thompson had some convertibles in the barn next to two kangaroos: "a boat-tailed roadster, a Duesenberg or something like that, covered with dust and crap. The government stole his heart. He was released, forty pounds lighter than a year before, on the day of September 30. "My father didn't like animals," she told me. Sitting up there, rusting away, is a brand-new '34 Ford steel body. He'd already hung up his uniform and finished his dinner when, at around 5:20 p.m., he got the call reporting that Terry Thompson had an animal out. Their assumption was that he had been thinking about the animals, and they couldn't work out his train of thought. Patrolman: Well, sir, this is not personal. 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. TV Shows. So these animals were like her children. But people will believe what they need to believe. Byline: By TONY THOMPSON . That's what happens when your death defines you. And then, as Thompson would tell it, everything changed. "It stood up," says Kanavel, "and was standing there." Terry was Terry. 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. She said, 'We have to goTerry Thompson's animals are out.' 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. The cause of death seemed to be a gunshot to the head. 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. 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. It wasn't quite that straightforward. This 95-minute documentary follows Guy Clark, Susanna Clark, and Townes Van Zandt as they rise from obscurity to reverence. I think he would say, 'That's just what I expect.' 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. I said that he never left Vietnam. On October 18, 2011, Terry opened the cages of around 50 of his animals, and then shot himself in the head. I can see a logic in some kind of extreme libertarian position (people should be able to do what they want with animals unless they are clearly shown to be doing harm) and, conversely, in a hard-core animal-rights position (no animals should be used for any human purpose whatsoever), but the arguments for everything in between seem murky. 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. Inside the shop, along with the bikes and guns, were the kind of animals he favored in those early days. 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. ", Her son remained trapped in the barn. "He raised Dobermans back then," says Stilwell. By Ryan Gajewski Staff Editor, Digital "I'm not gonna lie, it . Blake sounded his horn outside Thompson's house, but there was no response, so he drove back, and at the foot of the drive he met John Moore, the caretaker who regularly fed the animals and had been alerted by a phone call from someone in the neighborhood. The second, bigger mystery is how Thompson managed to let loose fifty animals without being seriously injured by any of them. 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). But it isn't easy to work out what is right when it comes to animals like these, either morally or practically, which may be why there are so many shades of opinion. 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 wounds mentioned in the autopsy report, aside from the gunshot wound, begin with "a 2 1/4 inch vertical laceration on the right lower forehead and along the spine of the nose." The Aftermath From top: a nearby highway sign warns drivers; the gathered bodies of the slaughtered animals. He made mistakes, big mistakes, that the rest of us haven't made.". One was that he had gone under the interstate bridge where it crosses the Muskingum River in the middle of Zanesville. (At 6:04 p.m., Lutz shared this information on the police radio: "Okay, we have located the owner. He was inspecting the body when word came over the radio that some colleagues had a lion cornered near the Thompson residence. "He had been dragged," says Kanavel. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories. Because she loved the animals as much as he did. He then caught the sight of a lion, and then a bear, and soon realized what happened. The Santa Barbara International Film Festival has announced it will return Feb. 7-17. The catastrophic incident that took place in Ohio should have served as a cautionary tale for others in America. When you've been through a firefight and you've got that warm machine gun, that's all you got. He never left it.". After the wolf went down, Merry fired a few more times to make sure. Terry Thompson is known for Murder Comes to Town (2014) and Not for Rent! He took care of that monkey most of the time he was over there. The animals were scooped by the bucketload, placed in the hole, and earth backhoed over them. An incredible true story from the March 2012 issue of GQ. 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. He had a heart of gold. Already, he did things differently from other people. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette May 14, 2012 6:27 AM ZANESVILLE, OHIO -- Residents in this small, struggling town knew a few things about Terry Thompson for sure: He was once an Eagle Scout. And the straw that broke the camel's back was, when he went to jail, he came back and his wife had abandoned him. "When he was in Vietnam," says Mike Marshall, "he told me that he was befriended by a little monkey. Ten years ago, after a heart attack, Taft had a quintuple-bypass operation. One time Thompson offered Dr. Smith a boat for half price. Now he only had his Glock. 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. ", 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. There is little doubt at all that he once landed an ultralight on the county fairgrounds. 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. ". "You couldn't buy nothing off of him. Apparently it worked. 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. He seems to have lived as though there weren't a rule invented that didn't deserve a little bending. It is believed that in 2012, Marian Thompson retrieved the surviving animals from the Zoo. Surely he must have broken every law that prevents your next-door neighbor from secretly housing an ambush of tigers? Menu. GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. She also helped with the feeding, and reminded him of some recent arrivals. "He had accused her of turning him in for the guns. ), 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. My blog posts are this Christ follower's perspectives on important issues facing our blessed America. Terry became so verbally abusive to Marian. Okay, this is a .308, so I could have killed you when you came in the front gate. The Zookeeper Terry Thompson, 62, born and raised in Zanesville, Ohio. All rights reserved. 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. What about giving primates TV to watch? TERRY THOMPSON. Sams 85-year-old mother, Dolores, called 911, and soon the police were in the area. Documentary Animation Short Over the course of 15 years Terry Thompson collected tigers, lions, bears, and other exotic animals. 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." The strange truth is: Nobody knows. 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.' 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. Twenty-one other injuries, or clusters of injuries, were detailed just on the head and neck, the site of the most widespread damage. ", 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. It took his heart. "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 liked speed." "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.". It was also in Zanesville where he met his wife, Marian Sharp (Thompson), for the first time. Kopchak had lived around here all of his life. Fast boats. Or taking them to the McDonald's drive-thru? I also hear about how Thompson would tell people he had slept together with his big white tigerthe same one, presumably, that was with him at the end. 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. "So we shot them," says Polk. (2017). An insightful documentary film has just been released that reveals the true Donald Trump contrary to the constant misleading portrayals by his opposition. ", A bond that tied two people for so long can take time to break completely. 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.
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