Terry Thompson - IMDb ", A bond that tied two people for so long can take time to break completely. A nice girl." But I find a few. "It's like Noah's Ark wrecking," he proclaimed, "right here in Zanesville, Ohio.". 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. "So we shot them," says Polk. The sentences that go round my brain are ones that were said to me by one of the animal owners I spoke to, Nancy Wider. Somehow, no one was hurt. Menu. How could you blame a woman you have spent forty years of your life with for that, if you were sane? 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. Forty-nine animals would be confirmed dead. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. For a while there was a plane on the shop's roof. I invite you to click around the site right now and come back . Zanesville Animal Massacre Included 18 Rare Bengal Tigers My blog posts are this Christ follower's perspectives on important issues facing our blessed America. I think it was the only way he felt that he could really punish Marian was to take something that she loved, too. Sep 12, 2009. 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. I'm going to put it that way. The charge didn't stick. As time passed, people got used to the way he might turn up at the local airfield, say, with a baby bear or lion. "And he always used to say, 'I don't like animals but I would never hurt one. He was caught up in dangerously illegal black-market animal sales, dead or alive. "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. Deputy Jonathan Merry was two hours into his shift, serving a court summons a couple of miles away in Zanesville, when the call came through about a lion and a bear on the loose. He didn't know who was who. The answer to that first question: It's surprisingly easy. 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. Jack Hanna's lion, at Jack Hanna's animal farm. The cats looked healthy enough, apart from one who had ribs showing, and they were rubbing their heads against the fences. Maybe the animals had somehow busted out, and he was injured, in need of help. 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. Home On one of his last visits, Stilwell walked around the animal cages with Thompson. 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. His friend got killed and I guess they're thinking, 'That could be me tomorrow.' It was all about Terry after that. His wife-to-be, Marian Sharp, came from what was considered a good local family, and was an accomplished barrel racer and horsewoman. Lutz described Thompson as "a guy who kind of kept to himself, was always willing to push the envelope a little bit." "He smiled a lot. [Talking about the property on which he lived and died]It's the high ground. It was so bad one time, he ran out of bullets.". Thompson did things his own way even when it led him into trouble. GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Practical questions and answers regarding the gospel are presented at the Eternity page. Friends talk of driving to Columbus, a baby bear with them in the front cab, or having naps at his house with baby lions asleep on them. "He had been dragged," says Kanavel. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. Zoo Massacre | The Tragic Story of Terry Thompson and the 'Zanesville MY 10 YEARS WITH ADAMS FAMILY; EXCLUSIVE An 'associate' lifts the lid 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. It was also in Zanesville where he met his wife, Marian Sharp (Thompson), for the first time. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. "His eyes were just beautiful." 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. 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 are all kinds of ways that tragedy and fate can reach across decades to taunt us and trap us. "Terry Thompson was a man who made mountaineering both his profession and his . Terry Thompson: Songwriter, Storyteller and Actor How many tickets do you have in that book? Not the weapon you'd want when you're facing down 350 pounds of charging bear. 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. ", "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. After the sheriff spoke with Hanna and talked him through what happened, he gave interview after interview. The Aftermath From top: a nearby highway sign warns drivers; the gathered bodies of the slaughtered animals. From there, looking through a north-facing window, he watched the menagerie grow. He really became a hoarder of the animals. Directed by: Vlad Yudin. He had acted as an animal handler on Wild Kingdom in 2008, and provided a lion cub to a photoshoot with Heidi Klum. Or $0.00 with a Prime membership. 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. "There was never just one girl in his life," she remembers. Sams 85-year-old mother, Dolores, called 911, and soon the police were in the area. "They had split before he actually went to prison," says Huntsman. You know, Terry always had to be number onethat was Terry," she says. I said that he never left Vietnam. 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. Neighbors describe Terry Thompson, the owner of the exotic animal farm where 56 animals escaped 10-19-2011. This is a [Mannlicher-Schoenauer]see the twists in the barrel.I do see that.Okay, hand built in Austria. Trump documentary film - TERRY THOMPSON There are no sane people that would live in those conditions.". Meanwhile, at the gateway of Thompson's property, the police were wondering how many animals might be loose. The first is why Thompson seems to have cut open so many of the cages when he simply could have opened them. 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. 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. All he remembered was the sight of the bear's head coming at him, and he also remembered what had been drilled into him at weapons training: Shoot what you see. "And he did it. Just sitting there on the ground, facing their way. Zanesville exotic-animal owner Terry Thompson lived and died on the But the horrific tragedy of Zanesvilles animal massacre is enough to haunt the viewers as they see what follows. What about neutering, which is now considered not merely acceptable but responsible behavior when it comes to many nonexotic pets? ", "He had an ego that you wouldn't believe," says Stilwell. During the altercation, Thompson's wife, Chauna Thompson, a Harris County Sheriff 's deputy, arrived and called for assistance. "He wrestled with the biblical thing: 'I guess I'll never go to heaven because I killed people,' " says Chuck Spires, his friend and guitar teacher. And I have no problem with that. Michael J. Fox: Parkinson's Disease Battle Tougher, Won't Live to 80 Terry was also a Vietnam war veteran. Matthew Lutz, the Muskingum County Sheriff described him as a like-to-live-on-the-edge type of person. And the guys that had a wife and children are in Arlington?". 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. Soon, their collection grew into a private mini zoo as the couple took care of rescued animals, and also bought some themselves. Informant: You're crazy.Thompson: That's what they all say. Want to Read. 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. Okay? The first involves his daughter and cancer. He had a funny look. "It stood up," says Kanavel, "and was standing there." The animal lovers are the ones that hurt them.' But what about declawing cats, something considered quite acceptable in parts of the exotic owners' world? 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. How he was treated. 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. He took care of that monkey most of the time he was over there. ", "No other law-enforcement agency in the world has faced thisit's not like there was a manual," says Deputy LeCocq. Ten years ago, after a heart attack, Taft had a quintuple-bypass operation. He. "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. This plan soon had to be revised. And he never differentiated between themhe kind of liked the notoriety." Terry Thompson died under the most dramatic of circumstances. In the later years it became very overwhelming because Terry went a little off the deep end. 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." 4.74 avg rating 107 ratings published 2021 3 editions. 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 let the animals loose then killed himself. "I was at an auction and he had a tiger that had ringworm and he had a baby monkey," says Nancy Wider, another owner. But they assumed that these two runaways must have come from there, so the first thing Mrs. Kopchak did was to dial her neighbor's number. I'm Terry Gross. 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. Marian insisted on removing the macaques from their cages herself, waving off the zoo personnel's advice about the risk she was taking. Terry Thompson's most popular book is The Martian Diaries: Vol.1 The Day Of The Martians (The . In Vietnam we were so much more interested in lightweight because we were on the move a lot. "When he was in Vietnam," says Mike Marshall, "he told me that he was befriended by a little monkey. It is believed Thompson released nearly all of his 56 animals, following a mental breakdown which led him to take his own life. Three days before Thompson died, Chuck Spires, the guitar instructor, spoke with him for about twenty minutes. Where the Wild Things Were - The New Republic "And his answer, to the way I recall, was he didn't know whether she did or she didn't. I think he had a little touch of Agent Orange. I just know that I learned the lesson the hard way, that's all.". Select Page. But maybe she was a little rattled. 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. 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. 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. He only looked back once, when they were about a third of the way to the barn. Terry Thompson Profiles | Facebook He didn't trust anybody after that. He had these wild 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. Now, I may have talked to her a couple times on the phone. 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. T's World: The Over Identification of Terry Thompson - IMDb And you've not spoken to your wife since her deposition [five weeks earlier]?No. Patrolman: I don't knowprobably seventy-five. Sheriff Matt Lutz was settling into an evening in front of the TV. And the straw that broke the camel's back was, when he went to jail, he came back and his wife had abandoned him. 1 distinct work Similar authors. "You got cancer or something? Rhino experts from around the world had gathered, and the zoo was throwing a cocktail party on the grounds of the polar-bear exhibit. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson He told Spires that he was broke, that all he had was sixty horses, but Spires reassured him that he'd made money before and he could make money again. He had his pilot's license before he was 16. By Ryan Gajewski Staff Editor, Digital "I'm not gonna lie, it . He had a heart of gold. The second, bigger mystery is how Thompson managed to let loose fifty animals without being seriously injured by any of them. Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. "Other things will happen, but this is never going to happen again.". Smith asked why it was only half price. But people will believe what they need to believe. "We didn't have any idea how many there were," Mrs. Kopchak would later reflect. The white tiger had gone. 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. Fast boats. Bob Thompson Documentary | His Life His Family His Painting He shot the lion while some other deputies shot the cougar. 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." TERRY THOMPSON. You've had no conversation with her about that at all?No. This is FRESH AIR. "For Terry, it started out as a love. 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." First they had to deal with a male African lion that managed to run between some junk cars after the first shotthere were dozens and dozens of old cars and RVs and tractors parked in clumps of rusted metal around the hillside, weeds growing around them. There are plenty of colorful stories about his exploits. Thompson was involved with bad people and had fallen out with them. Personal testimonies from his closest staff and family tell a different story from the daily public barrage of criticisms by of the media. In 1997, Terry and Marian attended an exotic animal auction, from which Terry gifted an ailing baby lion to Marian as a birthday gift. "She was saying, 'Please, Mr. Hanna, don't take my children,'" says Hanna. It was also in Zanesville where he met his wife, Marian Sharp (Thompson), for the first time. There was gray powder residue on his left hand that appeared to be from a gun being fired. He was just a bit different from the other ones. She had to be convinced that the survivors should be taken to the zoo for safekeeping. 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. 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 Vince Gill, Verlon Thompson, and Terry and Jo Harvey Allen, as well as record executive Barry Poss. The first big public warning sign that, when it came to Thompson's animals, all might not be as it should came in 2005. Thompson clearly meant this as a testament to his popularity, though Keck wonders. I can see that. ", There were also pieces of raw chicken scattered around near the body. And there was the lion he had seen before, now pacing back and forth. Thompson also used to insist that he never sold exotic animals, but many in the animal world are scornful at this suggestion. He was the type of person, you weren't real sure what he would do. 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. Due to the dangerous circumstances, the police spent nearly seven hours hunting the animals, and shot nearly all of them. 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). As Ed Hamell pointed . "He threw up his arms," says Stilwell, "and said, 'She can just have it all.' "Well," Thompson retorted, "find someone to file a complaint on me." The 62-year-old owner of an exotic animal farm freed his 56 wild animals on Tuesday (including lions, Bengal tigers, wolves and. Nobody yet knew where Thompson was, and so there was concern for his safety. Thompson did speak to other friends in those days. "He always laughed and would be real pleasant before," says Polk. It took his heart. Without Getting Killed or Caught One was that he had gone under the interstate bridge where it crosses the Muskingum River in the middle of Zanesville. Terry Thompson has 36 books on Goodreads with 326 ratings. But the final blow was finding out that his wife, Marian, had left him. 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. It just broke my heart. It's what the Indians wanted.Terry Thompson, secretly recorded in his home by a government informant, May 2008. It was very sad to seehow someone clearly had lost their mind. And they have every right to think, 'Oh, here's Jack, he had his fun with animalsnow we can't have our fun.'