The strange truth is: Nobody knows. Capt Terry D Thompson (1938-1976) - Find a Grave Memorial Jim Stilwell only found out that Thompson was back by accident when he drove up to the house in early October, expecting Marian to be there. 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. And none of it was taken care of. "I was sick, shooting these animals, because they didn't ask to be there," he says. "Remember, 1973 was much different than 2011. Vince Gill, Verlon Thompson, and Terry and Jo Harvey Allen, as well as record executive Barry Poss. The tigers are actually bigger than the lions if they're fully grown. One time Thompson offered Dr. Smith a boat for half price. 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. "He had accused her of turning him in for the guns. "They told me," says one owner, Cindy Huntsman, "there were no laws on the books that would allow him to confiscate.". _Thompson: _You might as well keep writing, because when I leave here I'm not fastening my seat belt. "It was the most horrific smells," says Stalf. ", "No other law-enforcement agency in the world has faced thisit's not like there was a manual," says Deputy LeCocq. 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 The incident made global news. When he walked into a room, everyone stood up. At death Terry William Thompson was five feet five inches tall and weighed 174 pounds. Zanesville held a special significance for himhe went to school near here, enlisted in the army here, spent his honeymoon night here. "My dad really loved him, but I remember sitting at the dinner table and he buzzed our house and my dad said, 'I'm going to shoot that [she mumbles wordlessly] out of the sky.' 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. Terry Thompson sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder of John Hernandez. [8] He didn't know who was who. He was the type of person, you weren't real sure what he would do. And it just broke his heartthis is what I think. "You got cancer or something? It just broke my heart. Or, to spell it out: By the time the body was recovered, no part of his external genitalia remained. 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. It is believed Thompson released nearly all of his 56 animals, following a mental breakdown which led him to take his own life. "He would never sell anything," says Marshall. "Terry Thompson was a man who made mountaineering both his profession and his . Never had to think twice about it. ", 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.' People insist that the Terry Thompson they knew was too lazy to go to that kind of trouble. Though Ohio legislators are now scrambling to rectify this, the state where Terry Thompson lived is one of a handful where the regulations on exotic-animal ownership have historically been very light. (Whose feelings, exactly, are being taken into account there?) Thompson also used to insist that he never sold exotic animals, but many in the animal world are scornful at this suggestion. 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. And sometime in this period, Marian told Sam Kopchak that Terry was giving guitar lessons behind bars. If there is a line that divides the avid collector from the hoarder, at some point Thompson seems to have crossed it. "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. Some people just said, 'Oh, that's T.' ". And it planted the seed of caring for wild animals for the rest of his life. He never left it.". Because I can.' "Betrayed by his family. Their cages had either been cut through or left open. All rights reserved. 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. He wanted to clear his head. "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. The 39th Santa Barbara International Film Festival will resume in Santa Barbara, Calif., continuing to take . The government stole his heart. Nearby, they found bolt cutters and a stainless-steel Ruger .357 magnum revolver. Their assumption was that he had been thinking about the animals, and they couldn't work out his train of thought. There is a belief that unites the exotic-animal owners of Ohio: If only the right people had listened, what happened with Terry Thompsonand all the trouble now following in its wakecould have been avoided. "And then," he says, "I saw a tiger. 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. By now they had also decided that they would need to neutralize all of the animals that were loose, even those still on Thompson's property, so they formed a shooting party. 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. She would explain that she had spent $30,000 buying them, and that she used to sleep with the young female. My guest, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, has made his directorial debut with the new documentary "Summer Of Soul." Questlove co-founded The Roots, which is,. 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. Terry Thompson - IMDb She said, 'We have to goTerry Thompson's animals are out.' And there were always planes. Spires says Thompson told him that he only pleaded guilty because otherwise they were also going to charge his wife as a co-owner of the property; Thompson told the judge that he pleaded guilty because he and his wife couldn't afford further legal fees. 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. 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. Okay, this is a .308, so I could have killed you when you came in the front gate. They'd never had kids. Bo Keck, an officer who was there, told him he couldn't pull such a stunt. Only when the shape broke out of the circle could Kopchak see that it was a black bear. The only notable substance in his blood was Benadryl. During the altercation, Thompson's wife, Chauna Thompson, a Harris County Sheriff 's deputy, arrived and called for assistance. You had to watch where you stepped." She wasn't, but Terry was. Now, I may have talked to her a couple times on the phone. He was released, forty pounds lighter than a year before, on the day of September 30. "We didn't have any idea how many there were," Mrs. Kopchak would later reflect. [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. ", As they passed by the lion cages Thompson talked about the split. 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. Bob Thompson Trailer from Jeffrey Cooper on Vimeo.. Facebook; Twitter; RSS; Designed by Elegant Themes | Powered by WordPress Young Queen Charlotte's marriage to King George of England sparks an epic love story and transforms high society in this "Bridgerton" universe prequel. 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. 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. The animal lovers are the ones that hurt them.' "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. In the later years it became very overwhelming because Terry went a little off the deep end. Cages only lead to more cages, unless a far worse reality awaits them. There is little doubt at all that he once landed an ultralight on the county fairgrounds. The Zookeeper Terry Thompson, 62, born and raised in Zanesville, Ohio. Not the weapon you'd want when you're facing down 350 pounds of charging bear. But the horrific tragedy of Zanesvilles animal massacre is enough to haunt the viewers as they see what follows. However, it was devastating to lose so many innocent lives, especially the Bengal tigers who are an endangered species. She sounded calm when she reported what her son had seen, as though there was really nothing too strange or alarming about a lion and a bear running loose on an October afternoon in Ohio. 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. (Tigers are reputedly worth as much as $20,000 dead when their body parts are illegally sold off.) 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. Sheriff Matt Lutz was settling into an evening in front of the TV. That's what it was like. Hanna acknowledges that he is not universally popular for supporting what happened that night, and for supporting the laws being drafted. 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. (At 6:04 p.m., Lutz shared this information on the police radio: "Okay, we have located the owner. 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 knew what he'd do: put Red in the barn, go back to the house, report what he'd seen. This plan soon had to be revised. 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. His friends refer to other such outingsa shoot with Newt Gingrich, for instanceand say that he took animals on two different occasions to a Bloomberg corporate summer picnic in New York. one owner nonchalantly inquires, as it nestles up against the fencing inches away from me in his garage.) He was actually found with a pillowcase over his head and a gunshot wound to his stomach. These included a grizzly bear, three leopards and two monkeys all whom were then taken to the Columbus Zoo. Three days before Thompson died, Chuck Spires, the guitar instructor, spoke with him for about twenty minutes. Shoot to Kill: The Ohio Animal Massacre - Terry Thompson's final day You'll never kill one hundred with an AR because the gun will jam or you'll run out of ammo or someone will shoot you before.Terry Thompson, secretly recorded in his home by a government informant, April 2008. Ordinary Heroes. Given the situationfifty animals, mostly large and potentially aggressive carnivores set loose toward the day's endthings could have gone so much worse. It was very sad to seehow someone clearly had lost their mind. It was his neighbour, Sam Kopchak, who first noticed that Terrys horses were unusually agitated. But maybe she was a little rattled. 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. 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. 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. The road his and Thompson's properties abutted was named Kopchak Road after his great-uncle. It was about eighty yards away from him, but it fell at the first shot. 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. Day after day. T's World: The Over Identification of Terry Thompson - IMDb Thompson almost collapsed to his seat. Starring: Zac Aynsley , Craig Golias , Janea Kroc and Jeff McDunough. Home Red, a half-Arabian pinto, was acting skittish and had moved toward the far corner of the field. Watch I AM A STALKER | Netflix Official Site Forty miles away, at the Columbus Zoo, an event was being held for the International Rhino Foundation. "If he liked it, he kept it. The house itself was disgusting. "He always bragged," says Marshall, "that when he sold his business he had 138 motorcycles, 138 cars, and 138 guns." An incredible true story from the March 2012 issue of GQ. His wife-to-be, Marian Sharp, came from what was considered a good local family, and was an accomplished barrel racer and horsewoman. ", There were also pieces of raw chicken scattered around near the body. The 73 acre farmland with the private zoo was owned by Terry Thompson. They need people to know that not everybody who has a tiger or three tucked away behind their house is a Terry Thompson. Terry Thompson: Exotic animal preserve owner - YouTube 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. As one friend puts it: "Who is the guy who would piss my dad off the most?" ", Her son remained trapped in the barn. For the majority of Americans who know little about the world of exotic animals, the astonishing events in Zanesville begged some obvious questions. This is FRESH AIR. Because she loved the animals as much as he did. "I was at an auction and he had a tiger that had ringworm and he had a baby monkey," says Nancy Wider, another owner. Nobody yet knew where Thompson was, and so there was concern for his safety. Whatever the exact truth, it wasn't that simple, though different people suggest different time frames. And he never differentiated between themhe kind of liked the notoriety." Maybe. 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. Terry Thompson Profiles | Facebook Inside the barn Kopchak locked the doors, then telephoned his mother, sitting in front of the TV about a hundred yards away back in the house. Daniel: Prophet at the King's Command, a Novel. Terry Thompson (Author of Daniel) - Goodreads In 1977, Thompson went to an auction for exotic animals and bought his wife a baby tiger cub called Simba for her birthday. He would have no sense of 'Okay, this is too many.' He hurried back. Thompson let the animals loose then killed himself. "My animals were raised in a magnificent setting, creeks going through the place and everything was gorgeous. 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. You've had no conversation with her about that at all?No. Though ultimately no action was taken concerning the animals after Thompson moved to improve his facilities, Barrie had been horrified at what he saw up there in terms of security, cleanliness, and animal cruelty. 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. Surely he must have broken every law that prevents your next-door neighbor from secretly housing an ambush of tigers? Terry Thompson. 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." He was caught up in dangerously illegal black-market animal sales, dead or alive. I can see that. 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. In Taft's living room, a fence was built around his couch, and that is where he spent most of his time as he recuperated: safely inside a cage inside his own house, man looking out, tiger looking in. "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." 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. Here in the field. You know what I mean? Only once you slide up and down these slippery moral slopes can you see how much easier it is for all of these owners to believe that they are acting with kindness to animals that they love, and that their love is on some level reciprocated. Terry Thompson was born in Belfast, he grew up on the Castlereagh Road in East Belfast. Sitting up there, rusting away, is a brand-new '34 Ford steel body. Only three weeks after getting out, he released the animals, and shot himself. In this era there were also numerous complaints of loose animals. This was his high school sweetheart. Zanesville Animal Massacre Included 18 Rare Bengal Tigers 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. "Well," Thompson retorted, "find someone to file a complaint on me." Before she opened the cage, she sang to them a lullaby, and they clung to her as she took them one by one to their carriers. From there, looking through a north-facing window, he watched the menagerie grow. T's World unpacks the events surrounding his 2011 animal release and suicide. "When he came back, they had been changed around in the cages. he says. When it turned up toward a house, Merry got his rifle from the trunk and followed on foot. Questlove spins the soundtrack of his life in 'Music is History' - NPR It's what the Indians wanted.Terry Thompson, secretly recorded in his home by a government informant, May 2008. And he was like, 'You know, I'm a lover, not a fighter.' Even that statistic slightly obscures the situation. The first is why Thompson seems to have cut open so many of the cages when he simply could have opened them. 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. (Everyone knows somewhere else worse.). (2017). ". And I have no problem with that. Or $0.00 with a Prime membership. From $999 to buy. ", "No," he replied. Terry Thompson sentenced to 25 years in prison for man's murder outside "He hesitated. They needed to find out for sure, and to see whether the person might still be alive. "Fast motorcycles. Director Ramon Bloomberg Writer Ramon Bloomberg Matthew Lutz, the Muskingum County Sheriff described him as a like-to-live-on-the-edge type of person. Friends say that Thompson loved having something that nobody else had, and he industriously accumulated objects that might fit the bill. Perhaps it is obvious to you that removing a monkey's teeth and dressing it up in pseudo-human-children's clothing (Hanna "Monk"tana two-piece panne velvet dress, $38) and diapers (infant starter pack, $35) is wrong? By the time he got there, the culling had begun. (If you visit the Columbus Zoo, his face is everywhereeven on the Pepsi machines.) He seems to have lived as though there weren't a rule invented that didn't deserve a little bending. 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. Week after week. Matthew Lutz, the Muskingum County Sheriff described him as "a like-to-live-on-the-edge type of person". How could a private citizen have amassed a collection of so many unusual and potentially dangerous animals in the first place? While he was waiting for Mrs. Kopchak to answer the door, he saw a large gray wolf running southward along the road behind him. There was gray powder residue on his left hand that appeared to be from a gun being fired. Just sitting there on the ground, facing their way. On the worst days, there were more people to be rescued than they possibly could. Mrs. Thompson chose the spot. The black bear fell about seven feet in front of Merry. "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.". Three were leopards, still in their cages. But for those who'd prefer a Rosebud moment, here's one more story from forty years earlier, from the time when an Ohio youth with beautiful blue eyes found himself forsaken and lost, deep in the kind of darkness and damage that some never completely escape. 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. Usually he never hesitated. Unknown for sure on that. Likewise, there is wide disagreement about what kind of human intervention or interaction can be beneficial or justified. 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). By the time the Columbus Zoo team had arrived at the holding area, it was dark. ), 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. To breed or exhibit or commercially transport animals across state lines he would need a USDA license, requiring that his facilities be inspected periodically to check that they met some basic standardsbut other than that there are no special checks or controls. "Other things will happen, but this is never going to happen again.". I said that he never left Vietnam. Only then did she call 911 and alert the world. ", "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. 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. And that's when he then said, 'I'm gonna die.' 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. Whether he was a daredevil hero or an idiot or an animal lover or an animal hater or a victim or a recluse or a good man betrayed, he was assumed to be a cartoon of a man whose whole life could be extrapolated from its final minutes. 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. Six of Terry Thompson's animals survived. 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. A white tiger appeared to be eating it, and they couldn't get closer. Some owners took food down to Thompson's property themselves, some say they contacted the sheriff's department. Terry William Thompson grew up just east of Zanesville on his parents' farm, close to the airport. And of the time when he and Marianshe seems to have been a full and enthusiastic participant in many of these adventuresturned up with a baby bear at a friend's fiftieth birthday party, held in their friend's newly decorated basement where everythingcarpet, walls, furniturewas white, and seemed quite unperturbed by the upset caused when the bear did what bears tend to do on the nearest white rug. 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. "It's only half a boat," Thompson explained. It broke my heart. "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. "He sold the monkey outside of the auction, because it wasn't legal to sell inside, for $3,500.". . Hanna was a trusted animal advocate, and as he emotively articulated his pain at the deaths that had taken place, his unequivocal insistence that the sheriff's department had no other option than to act as they did served as a powerful antidote to the other obvious narrativethat a thoughtless small-town law-enforcement brigade had murdered dozens of noble beasts because they were too dumb and trigger-happy to think of a better alternative. You finally just stop.". 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. It didn't seem that big a dealthey all knew Thompson had animals and they'd been called out there again and again, mostly for loose horses. Menu. The solution was elegant, if unusual. 'Because I can. Actor: Murder Comes to Town. It also thrust into daylight, if only for a brief moment, a secret world of privately owned exotic animals living off the grid, and often right next door. Terry in particular was always well dressed and in charge of whatever was going on. "She was saying, 'Please, Mr. Hanna, don't take my children,'" says Hanna. "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. I set out to find some of them. ", "Terry, are you sick?" "He felt betrayed by the government, by the army, by society in general," claims Marshall.
Mahinda Rajapaksa Daughter, Just Busted Huntsville, Alabama Mugshots, Countries That Have Never Invaded Another Country, Articles T