Matthew Lutz, the Muskingum County Sheriff described him as "a like-to-live-on-the-edge type of person". "I've had three bad things happen in my life," he says, and proceeds to describe them. [8] ), Spires is one of the best-known guitar teachers in this part of the country and was Thompson's teacher in his other great passion of these years. 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). 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 was at an auction and he had a tiger that had ringworm and he had a baby monkey," says Nancy Wider, another owner. Menu. On October 18, 2011, Terry opened the cages of around 50 of his animals, and then shot himself in the head. Up near the house, where no media could see them, the officers laid the dead animals out in rows, by species, to ease the counting. Starring: Zac Aynsley , Craig Golias , Janea Kroc and Jeff McDunough. There was, he told her, "a major problem." He seems to have lived as though there weren't a rule invented that didn't deserve a little bending. He kicked into the mode of what they taught him in Vietnambeat people up, kill people. 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. to my website where you will find interesting information and inspiration. That was when he saw the black bear, at first facing him and then running straight toward him. In August, Thompson was moved to a halfway house in Columbus. He said he didn't have any control over it. Thompson almost collapsed to his seat. Encounters with animals that would normally have been remembered for a lifetime were forgotten moments later as the next came along. "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. Her bond with them certainly seemed real. Maybe. "Beautiful blues eyesthat's what you noticed first," says Christine Perone, who dated him for some time in high school. When I interviewed Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson over the summer after the release of his documentary "Summer Of Soul," at the end of the. Usually he never hesitated. 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." An incredible true story from the March 2012 issue of GQ. While animal advocates have agreed that there was little the authorities could do in the matter, the brutal massacre serves as a reminder of why privately owned exotic animals are considered to be ticking bombs. Friends say that Thompson loved having something that nobody else had, and he industriously accumulated objects that might fit the bill. ". [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. Unfortunately, one of the animals, a leopard-jaguar mix, was euthanized after he was severely injured from a cage door that fell on its neck. He had been wearing a black T-shirt, blue jeans, and white briefs. 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. "A little boy loses his arm to an African lion, 1972 or 1973, Tennessee," he remembers. It seems worth taking at least a moment to wonder whether it might be the other way around. The cause of death seemed to be a gunshot to the head. Fast airplanes. He was kind of a loner. And you've not spoken to your wife since her deposition [five weeks earlier]?No. He only looked back once, when they were about a third of the way to the barn. 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. 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. At first the number of animals he came up with was forty-eight, but then his fiance arrived. Two more were the macaques kept in the living room of the house in two small birdcages. "He smiled a lot. I will hear confident estimates of the number of big catstigers, lions, and so onin Ohio that vary from the low hundreds to the low thousands. (Everyone knows somewhere else worse.). 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. From there, looking through a north-facing window, he watched the menagerie grow. Occasionally there were reports of more unusual creatures running free but nothing too bad had ever happened. He was actually found with a pillowcase over his head and a gunshot wound to his stomach. Informant: You're crazy.Thompson: That's what they all say. (And continued to becounty records show at least seven citations for failing to wear a seat belt. "I actually think that he expected this when he got home and kind of planned it," says Stilwell. "When he came back, they had been changed around in the cages. "For Terry, it started out as a love. Terry was also a Vietnam war veteran. 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. That evening, the zoo assembled its capture-and-recovery team, armed with both tranquilizer-dart guns and regular weapons, and set out for Zanesville. When you've been through a firefight and you've got that warm machine gun, that's all you got. "We didn't have any idea how many there were," Mrs. Kopchak would later reflect. "Fast motorcycles. 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. Jack doesn't need to be telling me anything. A twelve-year-old girl befriends a quirky teenage mermaid who's anything but mythical, and their friendship could heal an age-old feud. "And his answer, to the way I recall, was he didn't know whether she did or she didn't. Here in the field. A fully grown male African lion. Where they should have been, there was nothing but a raw gap. Fast boats. And they have every right to think, 'Oh, here's Jack, he had his fun with animalsnow we can't have our fun.' As one friend puts it: "Who is the guy who would piss my dad off the most?" 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. "Garbage, and feces. The preserve is located in. Secret plane trips. The Zookeeper Terry Thompson, 62, born and raised in Zanesville, Ohio. TERRY THOMPSON. He was upset with the army because he saw some horrible, ugly things." 'Because I can. After returning from war, Terry opened a motorcycle shop which he ran till the 90s, and then sold licensed firearms for some years. No one is sure how many there are, or where they are. Or taking them to the McDonald's drive-thru? Powered by WordPress.com VIP. he says. That's when Moore told Deputy Jeff LeCocq something that would later appear in the official police report and came to be taken as a kind of explanation for what had happened, albeit one that prompted many further questions. After the sheriff spoke with Hanna and talked him through what happened, he gave interview after interview. But maybe she was a little rattled. If there is a line that divides the avid collector from the hoarder, at some point Thompson seems to have crossed it. Terry Thompson is known for Murder Comes to Town (2014) and Not for Rent! 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. 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. When he arrived, he could see, just inside Thompson's fence, a tiger, a black bear, and two lionesses. Their assumption was that he had been thinking about the animals, and they couldn't work out his train of thought. 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. Maternity leave is over and it's time for these four moms to return to work while navigating kids, bosses, love and life in modern-day Toronto. Thompson apologized and told Polk that he'd never see those dogs again, but three days later they were back and killed two more calves. He was just a bit different from the other ones. Apply Bed Bath and Beyond Coupon and save 25% Off your entire purchase, Target Circle: up to 50% Off with Target promo code, Shop the new Polo Ralph Lauren x ASOS Exclusive Collection from $99, Michael Kors Promo Code: sign up for KORSVIP + Get 10% Off on first order, 2023 Cond Nast. Because I can.' Thompson's sounds like an idyllic small-town-America '60s childhood: bicycles, Boy Scouts, loving parents, sporting triumphs, souped-up cars, girls. He made mistakes, big mistakes, that the rest of us haven't made.". ", "He would not have his position now," echoes another, Evelyn Shaw (one cougar, two servals, one lemur, one macaw, one skunk), "if he had not started out as a private owner. Rhino experts from around the world had gathered, and the zoo was throwing a cocktail party on the grounds of the polar-bear exhibit. 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. 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. 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. Not the weapon you'd want when you're facing down 350 pounds of charging bear. Thompson: Well, where were you when I was in Vietnam in a foxhole, people shooting at me, if you're trying to protect me? "But you'll know when I go.". 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. Those around him believed that he was changed man after he returned from war, that he never fully recovered from its trauma. There was gray powder residue on his left hand that appeared to be from a gun being fired. By now the order had come over the radio: Put the animal down. The animals were only about ten or twelve feet away. And finally, out back near the empty swimming pool, was a small grizzly bear, also in a birdcage. And he was like, 'You know, I'm a lover, not a fighter.' There are two mysteries about what happened along the driveway of 270 Kopchak Road that nobody has been able to explain. Thompson had only returned from his prison sentence three weeks before. He really became a hoarder of the animals. 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 asked him what he was going to do when they turned the key on him," says Spires. Bo Keck, an officer who was there, told him he couldn't pull such a stunt. "And he always used to say, 'I don't like animals but I would never hurt one. Only when the shape broke out of the circle could Kopchak see that it was a black bear. Soon after, he bought himself a brand-new Corvette. It took his heart. He wanted to clear his head. In Vietnam we were so much more interested in lightweight because we were on the move a lot. "Some of them were untrue. 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 ", "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. 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. It was very sad to seehow someone clearly had lost their mind. According to investigators he has been cited in the past for animal abuse and neglect. He shot the lion while some other deputies shot the cougar. All rights reserved. "So we shot them," says Polk. Jack Hanna's lion, at Jack Hanna's animal farm. 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. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. 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. "Many of them I'm sure died right there in his arms." My guest, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, has made his directorial debut with the new documentary "Summer Of Soul." Questlove co-founded The Roots, which is,. 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. ", 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. And [Terry] just really beat him up so bad. "There would be dogshit all over the showroom. 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. "Well," Thompson retorted, "find someone to file a complaint on me." 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." Personal testimonies from his closest staff and family tell a different story from the daily public barrage of criticisms by of the media. 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. 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. It was presumed that the remaining two animals were eaten by some of the bigger ones. 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. On his way home from Vietnam, Thompson found himself in Columbus, Ohio. 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. The second, bigger mystery is how Thompson managed to let loose fifty animals without being seriously injured by any of them. "Yes, they have every right to be angry with me, but do they know that I lost everything I had?" As they pulled up between the barn and a row of cages, two tigers started out of the barn toward them. Red, a half-Arabian pinto, was acting skittish and had moved toward the far corner of the field. Some people just said, 'Oh, that's T.' ". The Mexican cartel. Terry Thompson was born in Belfast, he grew up on the Castlereagh Road in East Belfast. 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. He had these wild animals. 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." I always thought that was pretty funny." I saw a pair of pants on the ground and the belt was twine. But the horrific tragedy of Zanesvilles animal massacre is enough to haunt the viewers as they see what follows. Garbage bags filled with garbage that were knocked over, and the filth. The government stole his heart. Or $0.00 with a Prime membership. This is FRESH AIR. The answer to the second question is: What laws? 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). 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 couldn't understand," says his friend Phil Cress, "why he got taken away from his life here to be drafted to go to Vietnam. 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. And the guys that had a wife and children are in Arlington?". The first involves his daughter and cancer. On one of his last visits, Stilwell walked around the animal cages with Thompson. "He sold the monkey outside of the auction, because it wasn't legal to sell inside, for $3,500.". What, too, of this practice of removing cubs from their big-cat mothers soon after birth and hand-rearing them by humans? ", A bond that tied two people for so long can take time to break completely. He got off one shot. "That's what happens when they send a guy to prison that don't deserve to go there. Surely he must have broken every law that prevents your next-door neighbor from secretly housing an ambush of tigers? ", "No other law-enforcement agency in the world has faced thisit's not like there was a manual," says Deputy LeCocq. 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. Whatever the exact truth, it wasn't that simple, though different people suggest different time frames. And none of it was taken care of. During the altercation, Thompson's wife, Chauna Thompson, a Harris County Sheriff 's deputy, arrived and called for assistance. Whatever the dynamic that drew them together, for the next four decades they presented themselves as a formidable partnership. And a second bear, this one much larger than the first. It was also in Zanesville where he met his wife, Marian Sharp (Thompson), for the first time. I can see that. (At 6:04 p.m., Lutz shared this information on the police radio: "Okay, we have located the owner. The general impression seems to have been that it was a case of the good girl drawn to the wild boy. But an accident happened. John Moore mentally ran through the rows of cages he would feed.
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