to my website where you will find interesting information and inspiration. All rights reserved. Want to Read. "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. That's what happens when your death defines you. He was kind of a loner. "Everything he had was fast," says Marshall. "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 Trump I know Documentary Film. Mike Marshall, who later flew civilian planes with him, says Thompson brought it up frequently. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. He became the local Harley dealer and also got a license to sell guns. 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. And he never differentiated between themhe kind of liked the notoriety." 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. There are all kinds of ways that tragedy and fate can reach across decades to taunt us and trap us. "His eyes were just beautiful." ", "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. Thompson, 61, was recently released from prison after serving one year on federal weapons charges. 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. Cages only lead to more cages, unless a far worse reality awaits them. He was just going off the deep end. In the later years it became very overwhelming because Terry went a little off the deep end. 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. Terry in particular was always well dressed and in charge of whatever was going on. He never left it.". Nobody yet knew where Thompson was, and so there was concern for his safety. "He sold the monkey outside of the auction, because it wasn't legal to sell inside, for $3,500.". Their cages had either been cut through or left open. 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. That evening, the zoo assembled its capture-and-recovery team, armed with both tranquilizer-dart guns and regular weapons, and set out for Zanesville. I asked, 'Why, Terry? 1 distinct work Similar authors. T's World unpacks the events surrounding his 2011 animal release and suicide. His death was part of a twenty-five-year plot to rid America of exotic animals. Along came a wolf. 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. Before he retired four years ago, he used to teach seventh-grade science. "He always bragged," says Marshall, "that when he sold his business he had 138 motorcycles, 138 cars, and 138 guns." one owner nonchalantly inquires, as it nestles up against the fencing inches away from me in his garage.) 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. 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. Meanwhile, at the gateway of Thompson's property, the police were wondering how many animals might be loose. Given the situationfifty animals, mostly large and potentially aggressive carnivores set loose toward the day's endthings could have gone so much worse. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. [Talking about the property on which he lived and died]It's the high ground. 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. Jack doesn't need to be telling me anything. From award-winning writing and photography to binge-ready videos to electric live events, GQ meets millions of modern men where they live, creating the moments that create conversations. ", 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. Okay, this is a .308, so I could have killed you when you came in the front gate. There was an apartment building just on the other side of the interstate that bordered Thompson's land. But on their way back to the road, Moore spotted a body near the barn. 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. After that, Merry went back for his rifle. "Kind of uppity. 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. 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. "It's like Noah's Ark wrecking," he proclaimed, "right here in Zanesville, Ohio.". If there is a line that divides the avid collector from the hoarder, at some point Thompson seems to have crossed it. 2023 Cinemaholic Inc. All rights reserved. There was now only one unaccounted fora macaque. When a state patrolman stopped him for having a taillight out, this is how Thompson described to Spires what happened next: Patrolman: Oh, by the way, you don't have your seat belt fastenedI've got to ticket you for that. His gallbladder had been removed earlier in life, and he was suffering from severe atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. 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. TV Shows. 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.' Merry drove back up the hill, until he came across a deputy running back and forth near Thompson's driveway. "He was a broken individual," says Phil Cress. After the wolf went down, Merry fired a few more times to make sure. But maybe she was a little rattled. "You got cancer or something? . Then he turned back, intending to deal with a black bear and a tiger along the roadway, but he was distracted by a cougar heading south, so he followed the cougar into another driveway where he met a male African lion coming the other way. 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. (Thompson was not unusual in routinely taking his cats to the vet for declawing.) In this era there were also numerous complaints of loose animals. Day after day. 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. He started snarling, and went after the horses.". These included a grizzly bear, three leopards and two monkeys all whom were then taken to the Columbus Zoo. I set out to find some of them. It seems worth taking at least a moment to wonder whether it might be the other way around. 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. "They told me," says one owner, Cindy Huntsman, "there were no laws on the books that would allow him to confiscate.". After the sheriff spoke with Hanna and talked him through what happened, he gave interview after interview. Wayfair Huge Deal-A-Thon - Up to 60% off everything! I think he would say, 'That's just what I expect.' You finally just stop.". Thompson opened a bike shop in town. Never had to think twice about it. 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. He had a complicated relationship with the law, and his neighbours. 'Because I can. 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). ", 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.' And also a lioness, anxiously scuttering around. Partly, I think, they talk because they're proud of what they do and the way they do it, but it's also because their way of life is under attack. Rhino experts from around the world had gathered, and the zoo was throwing a cocktail party on the grounds of the polar-bear exhibit. ". The 73 acre farmland with the private zoo was owned by Terry Thompson. From there, he walked the fifty or so miles east to his parents' house. I invite you to click around the site right now and come back . But if afterward Thompson would try to present his year of incarceration with the same old bravado, telling people that he was voted "Most Interesting Person in prison," the events in his marriage clearly had taken a toll. 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. "Fast motorcycles. The bigger the bang that takes someone out, the more likely it is that the person at its center will be obscured. "When he came back, they had been changed around in the cages. "He had no reason why he was spared," says Cress. Why do you need so many?' After all, this is not the life they are meant to lead, and certainly not the one they deserve. That's when you sleep with a machine gun. The black bear fell about seven feet in front of Merry. Here in the field. As one friend puts it: "Who is the guy who would piss my dad off the most?" "And, you know, I'm a cat person.". The 62-year-old owner of an exotic animal farm freed his 56 wild animals on Tuesday (including lions, Bengal tigers, wolves and. They agreed on 25 years. When it turned up toward a house, Merry got his rifle from the trunk and followed on foot. The first is why Thompson seems to have cut open so many of the cages when he simply could have opened them. Only when the shape broke out of the circle could Kopchak see that it was a black bear. This was his high school sweetheart. "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.' 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. There was, he told her, "a major problem." On one of his last visits, Stilwell walked around the animal cages with Thompson. Already, he did things differently from other people. Personal testimonies from his closest staff and family tell a different story from the daily public barrage of criticisms by of the media. Somehow, no one was hurt. By now the order had come over the radio: Put the animal down. 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." 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. Patrolman: I don't knowprobably seventy-five. So these animals were like her children. This is a [Mannlicher-Schoenauer]see the twists in the barrel.I do see that.Okay, hand built in Austria. Three were leopards, still in their cages. Only then did she call 911 and alert the world. Now he only had his Glock. "For Terry, it started out as a love. "Very depressed. There are no sane people that would live in those conditions.". The craziest, most tangentially related rumor that I hear in Zanesville: Jack Hanna was supplying Charlie Sheen's tiger blood. There is little doubt at all that he once landed an ultralight on the county fairgrounds. He was devastated to find the poor condition of the zoo when he returned, and was also heavily in debt. He would have no sense of 'Okay, this is too many.' Young Queen Charlotte's marriage to King George of England sparks an epic love story and transforms high society in this "Bridgerton" universe prequel. It broke my heart. 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. On the worst days, there were more people to be rescued than they possibly could. ", "He had an ego that you wouldn't believe," says Stilwell. 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. Terry Thompson died under the most dramatic of circumstances. Soon after, he bought himself a brand-new Corvette. ", "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. As for what actually happened on that day in October, I hear all kinds of theories, though most of them sound recklessly far-fetched. The first involves his daughter and cancer. He had acted as an animal handler on Wild Kingdom in 2008, and provided a lion cub to a photoshoot with Heidi Klum. 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. The final total was fifty-six. What, then, about the way that male tigers are usually neutered in sanctuaries, but male lions are not, because when neutered they lose their manes? GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. [From a court deposition Thompson gave while incarcerated on March 28, 2011] Okay. But it doesnt seem to be the case as 5,000 to 10,000 tigers live in captivity in the country, while less than 4,000 remain in the wild. "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. He said he didn't have any control over it. Directed by: Vlad Yudin. Thompson had only returned from his prison sentence three weeks before. According to investigators he has been cited in the past for animal abuse and neglect. In 2010, he was sentenced to a year in prison on federal weapon charges. View the profiles of people named Terry Thompson. Maybe. _Thompson: _You might as well keep writing, because when I leave here I'm not fastening my seat belt. Those around him believed that he was changed man after he returned from war, that he never fully recovered from its trauma. Usually he never hesitated. It was also in Zanesville where he met his wife, Marian Sharp (Thompson), for the first time. "He had accused her of turning him in for the guns. ", Her son remained trapped in the barn. "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. Zanesville Animal Escape took place in October 2011, in Zanesville, Ohio, when over 50 exotic animals were released from Muskingum County Animal Farm. 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." Well, let me tell you, if you want to kill a bunch of kids you take that camper and run into a schoolyard full of kids, you'll kill about a hundred of them. 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. Mr Thompson had been released from federal prison three weeks earlier after serving a one-year term on firearms charges, according to the AFP news agency. "We didn't have any idea how many there were," Mrs. Kopchak would later reflect. As they pulled up between the barn and a row of cages, two tigers started out of the barn toward them. Others were noted on his torso and his legs. 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. Together, they returned to the house, finding nothing but two monkeys and a dog in cages. He really became a hoarder of the animals. Thompson almost collapsed to his seat. We sent Chris Heath to Zanesville, Ohio, to find out where the wild things areand what the hell they're doing there. 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. Whatever the exact truth, it wasn't that simple, though different people suggest different time frames. Unknown for sure on that. He was pretty distraught." ", 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. "He wanted people to know that he was there. But an accident happened. He knew what he'd do: put Red in the barn, go back to the house, report what he'd seen. I think that was a lot of it. 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. "Apparently," Tom Stalf theorizes, "he wanted the animals to eat him. Patrolman: Well, sir, this is not personal. The only notable substance in his blood was Benadryl. 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 innocent person was hurt. Thompson's wife, Marian, arrived around lunchtime. They were circling, and in the center of their troubled orbit there was some kind of dark shape. 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. Hannafamous for his TV shows and his appearances on shows like Lettermanestablished his career at the Columbus Zoo and remains its director emeritus. He made mistakes, big mistakes, that the rest of us haven't made.". Only three weeks after getting out, he released the animals, and shot himself. The strange truth is: Nobody knows. As time passed, people got used to the way he might turn up at the local airfield, say, with a baby bear or lion. Fred Polk, a farmer and scrap dealer who was one of Thompson's neighbors and sometimes tangled with him, also knew him before and after he went away to war. 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. When I interviewed Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson over the summer after the release of his documentary "Summer Of Soul," at the end of the. Starring: Zac Aynsley , Craig Golias , Janea Kroc and Jeff McDunough. The house itself was disgusting. 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. 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." An insightful documentary film has just been released that reveals the true Donald Trump contrary to the constant misleading portrayals by his opposition. Red, a half-Arabian pinto, was acting skittish and had moved toward the far corner of the field. There was gray powder residue on his left hand that appeared to be from a gun being fired. I think it was the only way he felt that he could really punish Marian was to take something that she loved, too. After a while the four shooters ran low on ammo and called for more, and eventually they headed back toward where the body was. This is FRESH AIR. 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. Byline: By TONY THOMPSON . Perhaps it was the first of many telltale signs that Thompson, man of so many friends, didn't call anyone. Terry Thompson was born in Belfast, he grew up on the Castlereagh Road in East Belfast. "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. "But you'll know when I go.". He was just a bit different from the other ones. 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. It was decided that the dead animals be buried, there and then, on the property. 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. Director Ramon Bloomberg Writer Ramon Bloomberg "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. All evening it went on, the slaughter. His friends and neighbour have revealed that he deeply loved his animals, which could explain why he set them free. Menu. Matthew Lutz, the Muskingum County Sheriff described him as "a like-to-live-on-the-edge type of person". There are two mysteries about what happened along the driveway of 270 Kopchak Road that nobody has been able to explain. "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. ", A bond that tied two people for so long can take time to break completely. Encounters with animals that would normally have been remembered for a lifetime were forgotten moments later as the next came along. By the time he got there, the culling had begun. IMDbProStarmeterSee rank Add photos, demo reelsAdd to list View contact info at IMDbPro More at IMDbPro Contact info Agent info Known for Red Phone 2 5.7 TV Movie Writer 2003 The Red Phone: Manhunt 4.2 TV Movie Writer 2002 Planespotting 6.5 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. 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. (Nearly everything. A twelve-year-old girl befriends a quirky teenage mermaid who's anything but mythical, and their friendship could heal an age-old feud. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, thenView saved stories. You know, Terry always had to be number onethat was Terry," she says. Now, I may have talked to her a couple times on the phone. And that's when he then said, 'I'm gonna die.' ", Many of Thompson's friends believe that his time in Vietnam was the defining experience of his life. Where were you then? 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. "She was saying, 'Please, Mr. Hanna, don't take my children,'" says Hanna. By the time the Columbus Zoo team had arrived at the holding area, it was dark. The film, partially funded by a Kickstarter campaign, makes good use of Clark's songs, family photographs and . Where do you plan to live when you are released?At my house.Okay. "I've had three bad things happen in my life," he says, and proceeds to describe them. ), 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. 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. This makes it all the more relevant to remember the tragic event that took place in Zanesville almost a decade ago. He didn't trust anybody after that. "He used to buzz my house," she says. At death Terry William Thompson was five feet five inches tall and weighed 174 pounds. 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. Kopchak had lived around here all of his life. The government stole his heart. Lutz instructed that if there were animals outside Thompson's property they needed to be shot. And he was like, 'You know, I'm a lover, not a fighter.' "It was the most horrific smells," says Stalf. "And he always used to say, 'I don't like animals but I would never hurt one. His farm was reportedly raided June 2008 . Terry William Thompson grew up just east of Zanesville on his parents' farm, close to the airport. It wasn't quite that straightforward. Garbage bags filled with garbage that were knocked over, and the filth.
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