Week after week. "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. 4.74 avg rating 107 ratings published 2021 3 editions. All evening it went on, the slaughter. Or taking them to the McDonald's drive-thru? As for the enemy: "He said he just had to keep mowing them down. Personal testimonies from his closest staff and family tell a different story from the daily public barrage of criticisms by of the media. Occasionally there were reports of more unusual creatures running free but nothing too bad had ever happened. The Mexican cartel. Likewise, there is wide disagreement about what kind of human intervention or interaction can be beneficial or justified. I can see that. "I don't know." Thompson: It'd better not beI'd be out of the truck by now. 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. Fast boats. ", There were also pieces of raw chicken scattered around near the body. 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. 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. 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 actually found with a pillowcase over his head and a gunshot wound to his stomach. At death Terry William Thompson was five feet five inches tall and weighed 174 pounds. 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. But what about declawing cats, something considered quite acceptable in parts of the exotic owners' world? After the sheriff spoke with Hanna and talked him through what happened, he gave interview after interview. "Very depressed. He seems to have lived as though there weren't a rule invented that didn't deserve a little bending. Month after month. He was the type of person, you weren't real sure what he would do. But maybe she was a little rattled. 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. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, thenView saved stories. Whatever the exact truth, it wasn't that simple, though different people suggest different time frames. He got off one shot. Unknown for sure on that. He was kind of a loner. He didn't know who was who. There are all kinds of ways that tragedy and fate can reach across decades to taunt us and trap us. From there, looking through a north-facing window, he watched the menagerie grow. 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. 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." In Vietnam we were so much more interested in lightweight because we were on the move a lot. He shot the lion while some other deputies shot the cougar. 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. And that's when he then said, 'I'm gonna die.' Even that statistic slightly obscures the situation. The Trump I know Documentary Film An insightful documentary film has just been released that reveals the true Donald Trump contrary to the constant misleading portrayals by his opposition. On his way home from Vietnam, Thompson found himself in Columbus, Ohio. Still, Lutz said he wasn't busy and would drive over. 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. Smith asked why it was only half price. Where they should have been, there was nothing but a raw gap. Maybe. 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. I think that was a lot of it. [Talking about the property on which he lived and died]It's the high ground. That was Terry Thompson's final grotesque parting gifta last meal for one of his animals, sometime before it, too, met its death by bullet on the sad night of October 18, 2011, near Zanesville, Ohio. A lot of things seemed to be missing from the property and it was a mess: "The weeds were up over the cageshe couldn't even get in his house when he got home." "If he liked it, he kept it. Patrolman: I don't knowprobably seventy-five. It was also in Zanesville where he met his wife, Marian Sharp (Thompson), for the first time. Terry Thompson, a Vietnam War veteran, was a lifelong collector of exotic animals. 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. ". "Well," Thompson retorted, "find someone to file a complaint on me." "He would never sell anything," says Marshall. And finally, out back near the empty swimming pool, was a small grizzly bear, also in a birdcage. "On the third night," says Spires, "this guy showed up, started beating windows out. "I was at an auction and he had a tiger that had ringworm and he had a baby monkey," says Nancy Wider, another owner. Zanesville held a special significance for himhe went to school near here, enlisted in the army here, spent his honeymoon night here. to my website where you will find interesting information and inspiration. 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 had been wearing a black T-shirt, blue jeans, and white briefs. The answer to that first question: It's surprisingly easy. 1 distinct work Similar authors. This is FRESH AIR. I said that he never left Vietnam. The cats looked healthy enough, apart from one who had ribs showing, and they were rubbing their heads against the fences. By now the order had come over the radio: Put the animal down. Okay? Maybe the animals had somehow busted out, and he was injured, in need of help. Patrolman: Well, sir, this is not personal. "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." On one of his last visits, Stilwell walked around the animal cages with Thompson. Whatever the dynamic that drew them together, for the next four decades they presented themselves as a formidable partnership. Along came a wolf. It probably made all the difference. The last few years of Terrys life were when things started going downhill for him. As he got out of the car, he grabbed for his rifle on the passenger seat, but it snagged on the computer stand so he left it. [From a court deposition Thompson gave while incarcerated on March 28, 2011] Okay. It was beyond anything that you would ever want to experience. ", I reiterate how angry animal owners are with him. "Betrayed by his family. This was his high school sweetheart. 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. The white tiger had gone. 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. "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. The Aftermath From top: a nearby highway sign warns drivers; the gathered bodies of the slaughtered animals. 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? "Some of them were untrue. Thompson clearly meant this as a testament to his popularity, though Keck wonders. "He wanted people to know that he was there. Personal testimonies from his closest staff and family tell a different story from the daily public barrage of criticisms by of the media. The animals were only about ten or twelve feet away. Matthew Lutz, the Muskingum County Sheriff described him as a like-to-live-on-the-edge type of person. Terry was also a Vietnam war veteran. And [Terry] just really beat him up so bad. Bob Thompson Trailer from Jeffrey Cooper on Vimeo.. Facebook; Twitter; RSS; Designed by Elegant Themes | Powered by WordPress A twelve-year-old girl befriends a quirky teenage mermaid who's anything but mythical, and their friendship could heal an age-old feud. It was about eighty yards away from him, but it fell at the first shot. 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. "He felt betrayed by the government, by the army, by society in general," claims Marshall. He then looked back for a moment at his wife and . His neighbor Fred Polk relates how two of Thompson's Rottweilers got out and killed a couple of Polk's calves. Documentary Animation Short Over the course of 15 years Terry Thompson collected tigers, lions, bears, and other exotic animals. Bo Keck, an officer who was there, told him he couldn't pull such a stunt. He and his wife liked to drive a decommissioned fireman's truck around town until one night he wrecked it. In 1977, Thompson went to an auction for exotic animals and bought his wife a baby tiger cub called Simba for her birthday. Inside the shop, along with the bikes and guns, were the kind of animals he favored in those early days. The final total was fifty-six. 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. Or $0.00 with a Prime membership. 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). ", "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. ". (At 6:04 p.m., Lutz shared this information on the police radio: "Okay, we have located the owner. "That's what happens when they send a guy to prison that don't deserve to go there. 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. Some owners took food down to Thompson's property themselves, some say they contacted the sheriff's department. Terry Thompson's story went round the world, but it was also barely told at all. It was presumed that the remaining two animals were eaten by some of the bigger ones. Cages only lead to more cages, unless a far worse reality awaits them. "He smiled a lot. Together, they returned to the house, finding nothing but two monkeys and a dog in cages. He took care of that monkey most of the time he was over there. Only when the shape broke out of the circle could Kopchak see that it was a black bear. He was like royalty." The family stayed at the top of London's criminal tree for so long thanks to a string of extraordinary acquittals by juries. When he arrived, he could see, just inside Thompson's fence, a tiger, a black bear, and two lionesses. Though no trace would be found of it, dead or alive, it was eventually decided that it had most likely been eaten by one of the cats. He hurried back. He was caught up in dangerously illegal black-market animal sales, dead or alive. "It's like Noah's Ark wrecking," he proclaimed, "right here in Zanesville, Ohio.". Hanna acknowledges that he is not universally popular for supporting what happened that night, and for supporting the laws being drafted. That's when you sleep with a machine gun. What if some of the cats were drawn toward them? I wonder how I might bring up the dark moment that the exotic-animal owners think of as his great never mentioned dirty secret, but I don't need to. How he was treated. TV Shows. There was gray powder residue on his left hand that appeared to be from a gun being fired. His friend got killed and I guess they're thinking, 'That could be me tomorrow.' Instead, he walked over to Walmart, bought a Schwinn cruiser bicycle and rode nearly fifty miles through the rainy night along the old Route 40 until he reached his home. They'd never had kids. I hear different versions of what was being said: dead catsa white tiger and a cougarobserved lying on the property; animals getting loose; a 2-year-old lion being allowed to run around in the open; multiple animals in such bad health that they would have to be euthanized. He wanted to clear his head. "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." Three were leopards, still in their cages. How many tickets do you have in that book? I'm not an expert. Forty miles away, at the Columbus Zoo, an event was being held for the International Rhino Foundation. IMDbProStarmeterSee rank Add photos, demo reelsAdd to list View contact info at IMDbPro More at IMDbPro Contact info Agent info Known for X-Men: Days of Future Past 7.9 "There was never just one girl in his life," she remembers. Kopchak had lived around here all of his life. "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. The white tiger was atop him. 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'm Terry Gross. (Even Mr. Kopchak, forgotten in his barn, safely managed to make his way unescorted back to his house at nightfall.) He was just going off the deep end. 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. 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. Menu. After that, Merry went back for his rifle. He didn't trust anybody after that. She had to be convinced that the survivors should be taken to the zoo for safekeeping. He really became a hoarder of the animals. Because she loved the animals as much as he did. I'm going to put it that way. The Zookeeper Terry Thompson, 62, born and raised in Zanesville, Ohio. Maybe there's a letter or a note that explains it all. I was in a helicopter so I was a machine gunner with an M60that was on a bipod. But people will believe what they need to believe. "Yes, they have every right to be angry with me, but do they know that I lost everything I had?" 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. The 39th Santa Barbara International Film Festival will resume in Santa Barbara, Calif., continuing to take . And the second occurred when he was a young private owner exhibiting his exotic animals. (Nearly everything. 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. In 1997, Terry and Marian attended an exotic animal auction, from which Terry gifted an ailing baby lion to Marian as a birthday gift. Blake drove Kanavel's Silverado crew cab, and four others sat on the bed of the truck behind him so that they wouldn't have to fire out of windows. Actor: Murder Comes to Town. After all, this is not the life they are meant to lead, and certainly not the one they deserve. An insightful documentary film has just been released that reveals the true Donald Trump contrary to the constant misleading portrayals by his opposition.