She would explain that she had spent $30,000 buying them, and that she used to sleep with the young female. You know what I mean? 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." 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. 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. I don't know that.Okay. He became the local Harley dealer and also got a license to sell guns. That was when he saw the black bear, at first facing him and then running straight toward him. "Other things will happen, but this is never going to happen again.". He started snarling, and went after the horses.". 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. Cages only lead to more cages, unless a far worse reality awaits them. 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. Deliberately or not, he seemed to imply that Thompson's body was, aside from the gunshot wound suggesting a barrel placed in the mouth, otherwise fairly untouched. She wasn't, but Terry was. 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. 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. All rights reserved. He remembers Thompson picking up the bodies. It is believed that in 2012, Marian Thompson retrieved the surviving animals from the Zoo. Thompson's motives aren't exactly known, but he was deep in debt, had an estranged marriage and was facing house arrest after a year in prison for a gun conviction. Thompson seemed to need help, so Stilwell took up his Echo Weed Eater, and his lopper for the thicker growths, and his portable air compressor to pump up the flat tires of Thompson's Dually truck. 'Because I can. Forty miles away, at the Columbus Zoo, an event was being held for the International Rhino Foundation. After the wolf went down, Merry fired a few more times to make sure. It was presumed that the remaining two animals were eaten by some of the bigger ones. 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. In 1977, Thompson went to an auction for exotic animals and bought his wife a baby tiger cub called Simba for her birthday. Meanwhile, at the gateway of Thompson's property, the police were wondering how many animals might be loose. "He forgets where he came from," says one owner, Michael Stapleton (five tigers, four bears). According to investigators he has been cited in the past for animal abuse and neglect. 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. By the time the Columbus Zoo team had arrived at the holding area, it was dark. (2017). His gallbladder had been removed earlier in life, and he was suffering from severe atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. If there is a line that divides the avid collector from the hoarder, at some point Thompson seems to have crossed it. These days many exotic-animal owners have learned to keep what they do to themselves, to avoid the unwanted attention of unhappy neighbors, animal-rights activists, and journalists who treat them as scary eccentrics or worse. "Oh, he didn't like it at all," Polk remembers. These included a grizzly bear, three leopards and two monkeys all whom were then taken to the Columbus Zoo. He kicked into the mode of what they taught him in Vietnambeat people up, kill people. "His eyes were just beautiful." Thompson's sounds like an idyllic small-town-America '60s childhood: bicycles, Boy Scouts, loving parents, sporting triumphs, souped-up cars, girls. Their assumption was that he had been thinking about the animals, and they couldn't work out his train of thought. The only surviving animals from Terrys zoo were the ones that were still in the cage. "His favorite song was 'House of the Rising Sun.' Workin' Moms. It had a special meaning." The Santa Barbara International Film Festival has announced it will return Feb. 7-17. "He threw up his arms," says Stilwell, "and said, 'She can just have it all.' Rhino experts from around the world had gathered, and the zoo was throwing a cocktail party on the grounds of the polar-bear exhibit. Thompson did speak to other friends in those days. Day after day. 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. For the majority of Americans who know little about the world of exotic animals, the astonishing events in Zanesville begged some obvious questions. 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. 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. TV Shows. "It's only half a boat," Thompson explained. The Aftermath From top: a nearby highway sign warns drivers; the gathered bodies of the slaughtered animals. The craziest, most tangentially related rumor that I hear in Zanesville: Jack Hanna was supplying Charlie Sheen's tiger blood. One was that he had gone under the interstate bridge where it crosses the Muskingum River in the middle of Zanesville. He was just a bit different from the other ones. In the song, the house in question is a New Orleans brothel, and the name was borrowed for similar establishments in Vietnam. Thompson had only returned from his prison sentence three weeks before. "There would be dogshit all over the showroom. This plan soon had to be revised. "I think it's Terry," he said. His friend got killed and I guess they're thinking, 'That could be me tomorrow.' Red, a half-Arabian pinto, was acting skittish and had moved toward the far corner of the field. 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. Sitting up there, rusting away, is a brand-new '34 Ford steel body. "He smiled a lot. "And his answer, to the way I recall, was he didn't know whether she did or she didn't. Garbage bags filled with garbage that were knocked over, and the filth. (Tigers are reputedly worth as much as $20,000 dead when their body parts are illegally sold off.) TERRY THOMPSON. But what about declawing cats, something considered quite acceptable in parts of the exotic owners' world? Terry was Terry. 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. What, too, of this practice of removing cubs from their big-cat mothers soon after birth and hand-rearing them by humans? ", Toward the end, according to Cindy Huntsman, he seemed to treat his collection of animals in the same way. "See," says Spires, "that's the way he was." ", "No other law-enforcement agency in the world has faced thisit's not like there was a manual," says Deputy LeCocq. (And continued to becounty records show at least seven citations for failing to wear a seat belt. Secret plane trips. Terry Thompson's most popular book is The Martian Diaries: Vol.1 The Day Of The Martians (The . 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. That's what it was like. 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. As time passed, people got used to the way he might turn up at the local airfield, say, with a baby bear or lion. The government stole his heart. Or $0.00 with a Prime membership. 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. "He would never sell anything," says Marshall. Director Ramon Bloomberg Writer Ramon Bloomberg 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. "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. 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. This reality is revealed to us through Zanesville Animal Escape that briefly makes its presence felt during the first half of the series. That's what happens when your death defines you. After Deputy Merry headed down the road in pursuit of a wolf, Sergeant Steve Blake, who'd been first on the scene, decided he should drive up to Thompson's house. "He used to buzz my house," she says. It is believed Thompson released nearly all of his 56 animals, following a mental breakdown which led him to take his own life.
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