terry thompson documentary

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. Lutz instructed that if there were animals outside Thompson's property they needed to be shot. Friends say that Thompson loved having something that nobody else had, and he industriously accumulated objects that might fit the bill. When he walked into a room, everyone stood up. "Some of them were true," says Marshall. And I had to go and pick up the arm. He liked speed." Questlove spins the soundtrack of his life in 'Music is History' - NPR Garbage bags filled with garbage that were knocked over, and the filth. "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. "Remember, 1973 was much different than 2011. I'm going to put it that way. Terry Thompson is known for Murder Comes to Town (2014) and Not for Rent! John Moore mentally ran through the rows of cages he would feed. Facebook gives people the power. There was, he told her, "a major problem." 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. From where they were, they could see the man's body, flat on its back. One was that he had gone under the interstate bridge where it crosses the Muskingum River in the middle of Zanesville. "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. For a while there was a plane on the shop's roof. 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. Terry Thompson, a Vietnam War veteran, was a lifelong collector of exotic animals. 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. Their assumption was that he had been thinking about the animals, and they couldn't work out his train of thought. Though sanctuaries try to avoid pregnancies, sometimes new arrivals are pregnant and occasionally accidents happen, and when there are baby cubs they are hand-raised by humans. "Every day gets tougher," the actor said ahead of the release of 'Still: A Michael J. Okay? "He had no reason why he was spared," says Cress. In the later years it became very overwhelming because Terry went a little off the deep end. It kept him sane while he was there. There are plenty of colorful stories about his exploits. "Oh, he didn't like it at all," Polk remembers. His probation officer also visited, and Thompson told him how distraught he was at the prospect of being hooked up for a year's electronic home confinement. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. The only notable substance in his blood was Benadryl. He seems to have lived as though there weren't a rule invented that didn't deserve a little bending. He never left it.". 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. "It kind of took us by surprise," says Kanavel. Want to Read. ", 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. One time Thompson offered Dr. Smith a boat for half price. But I find a few. Thompson did speak to other friends in those days. Not the weapon you'd want when you're facing down 350 pounds of charging bear. The Mexican cartel. 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. Terry Thompson: Songwriter, Storyteller and Actor All evening it went on, the slaughter. "He always laughed and would be real pleasant before," says Polk. There was now only one unaccounted fora macaque. On October 18, 2011, Terry opened the cages of around 50 of his animals, and then shot himself in the head. For the majority of Americans who know little about the world of exotic animals, the astonishing events in Zanesville begged some obvious questions. Only when the shape broke out of the circle could Kopchak see that it was a black bear. "Why him? 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. My guest, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, has made his directorial debut with the new documentary "Summer Of Soul." Questlove co-founded The Roots, which is,. Already, he did things differently from other people. He wouldn't ever know where the bullet went, though he assumed he must have hit the brain. It was about eighty yards away from him, but it fell at the first shot. Because I can.' "He had been dragged," says Kanavel. 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. The preserve is located in. Practical questions and answers regarding the gospel are presented at the Eternity page. Only then did she call 911 and alert the world. After a while the four shooters ran low on ammo and called for more, and eventually they headed back toward where the body was. "It was the most horrific smells," says Stalf. What if some of the cats were drawn toward them? A big digger was brought in and a hole was dug maybe thirty feet deep. Animal attacks are terrible tragedies but so are attacks on animals and none more so than that which transpired in Zanesville, Ohio in 2011.On October 18th 2. Thompson let the animals loose then killed himself. 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. A fully grown male African lion. They agreed on 25 years. Ten years ago, after a heart attack, Taft had a quintuple-bypass operation. "He loved blues more than anything," says Spires. Terry was Terry. The bigger the bang that takes someone out, the more likely it is that the person at its center will be obscured. These days many exotic-animal owners have learned to keep what they do to themselves, to avoid the unwanted attention of unhappy neighbors, animal-rights activists, and journalists who treat them as scary eccentrics or worse. Red, a half-Arabian pinto, was acting skittish and had moved toward the far corner of the field. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. 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. Frequently these are based on a confident assessment of the animals' happiness (a thorny notion), and on the pragmatic need to save animals from a place worse than where they are. 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. one owner nonchalantly inquires, as it nestles up against the fencing inches away from me in his garage.) 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. She had to be convinced that the survivors should be taken to the zoo for safekeeping. 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. 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. 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. In 1997, Terry and Marian attended an exotic animal auction, from which Terry gifted an ailing baby lion to Marian as a birthday gift. Terry Thompson (Author of Daniel) - Goodreads 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. He set down his clipboard on the porch, where it would remain for the next few hours, ran to his patrol car, and followed the wolf. 1 distinct work Similar authors. The tigers are actually bigger than the lions if they're fully grown. The Aftermath From top: a nearby highway sign warns drivers; the gathered bodies of the slaughtered animals. He was released, forty pounds lighter than a year before, on the day of September 30. After the sheriff spoke with Hanna and talked him through what happened, he gave interview after interview. It was very sad to seehow someone clearly had lost their mind. At the time there was a young tiger cub living with him and when Taft returned from the hospital he was unwilling to displace it. Rhino experts from around the world had gathered, and the zoo was throwing a cocktail party on the grounds of the polar-bear exhibit. "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. 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. The solution was elegant, if unusual. The craziest, most tangentially related rumor that I hear in Zanesville: Jack Hanna was supplying Charlie Sheen's tiger blood. "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." "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.". 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. I think that was a lot of it. Netflixs Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness offers an expansive portrayal of private ownership of exotic animals in America. "The Trump I Know" Documentary Film - TERRY THOMPSON Thompson also used to insist that he never sold exotic animals, but many in the animal world are scornful at this suggestion. Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. 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. Informant: You're crazy.Thompson: That's what they all say. The Crazy True Story of the Zanesville Zoo Escape | GQ "He threw up his arms," says Stilwell, "and said, 'She can just have it all.' 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. 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. "He sold the monkey outside of the auction, because it wasn't legal to sell inside, for $3,500.". "They had split before he actually went to prison," says Huntsman. 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). 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. It was all about Terry after that. "Betrayed by his family. "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. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette May 14, 2012 6:27 AM ZANESVILLE, OHIO -- Residents in this small, struggling town knew a few things about Terry Thompson for sure: He was once an Eagle Scout. Because he wouldn't take any clothes with him." I'm Terry Gross. "He raised Dobermans back then," says Stilwell. By Ryan Gajewski Staff Editor, Digital "I'm not gonna lie, it . His friend got killed and I guess they're thinking, 'That could be me tomorrow.' 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? Terry Thompson has 36 books on Goodreads with 326 ratings. From there, he walked the fifty or so miles east to his parents' house. And the guys that had a wife and children are in Arlington?". He became the local Harley dealer and also got a license to sell guns. By the time the Columbus Zoo team had arrived at the holding area, it was dark. Menu. ". 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. "), That was all the five of them could learn for now because they were urgently redeployed to the southern end of the property where some cats had been spotted readying to cross the boundary fence. 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. Zoo Massacre | The Tragic Story of Terry Thompson and the 'Zanesville Why do you need so many?' "My animals were raised in a magnificent setting, creeks going through the place and everything was gorgeous. Terry Thompson - IMDb This plan soon had to be revised. But an accident happened. "I actually think that he expected this when he got home and kind of planned it," says Stilwell. Byline: By TONY THOMPSON . Though no trace would be found of it, dead or alive, it was eventually decided that it had most likely been eaten by one of the cats. Before he retired four years ago, he used to teach seventh-grade science. "He forgets where he came from," says one owner, Michael Stapleton (five tigers, four bears). Movies. 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. He had a heart of gold. Soon after, he bought himself a brand-new Corvette. I don't know how else to explain it." TV Shows. 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. 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. There are all kinds of ways that tragedy and fate can reach across decades to taunt us and trap us. Twenty-one other injuries, or clusters of injuries, were detailed just on the head and neck, the site of the most widespread damage. All rights reserved. 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. Jack Hanna's lion, at Jack Hanna's animal farm. "It stood up," says Kanavel, "and was standing there." As Ed Hamell pointed . 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. And that's when he then said, 'I'm gonna die.' Whatever the exact truth, it wasn't that simple, though different people suggest different time frames. . 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. "It's like Noah's Ark wrecking," he proclaimed, "right here in Zanesville, Ohio.". Ordinary Heroes. He just couldn't keep his brain on the right track. Kopchak wasn't overly alarmed by this sight, unexpected as it was, maybe because the bear wasn't too big as black bears go, and maybe because it was running away from him. Terry was also a Vietnam war veteran. The Trump I know Documentary Film. Tom Stalf at the Columbus Zoo suggests to me that you can buy a lion for $300cheaper than many pedigree dogs. ", 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.' She also helped with the feeding, and reminded him of some recent arrivals. ", As they passed by the lion cages Thompson talked about the split. By now the order had come over the radio: Put the animal down. Soon, their collection grew into a private mini zoo as the couple took care of rescued animals, and also bought some themselves. MY 10 YEARS WITH ADAMS FAMILY; EXCLUSIVE An 'associate' lifts the lid That's what happens when your death defines you. The black bear fell about seven feet in front of Merry. Due to the dangerous circumstances, the police spent nearly seven hours hunting the animals, and shot nearly all 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. 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. The 62-year-old owner of an exotic animal farm freed his 56 wild animals on Tuesday (including lions, Bengal tigers, wolves and. 'Because I can. He had these wild animals. It took his heart. It was the guns that eventually landed him in real trouble. "I got death threats and everything else," he says. What, too, of this practice of removing cubs from their big-cat mothers soon after birth and hand-rearing them by humans? But maybe she was a little rattled. Directed by: Vlad Yudin. "So those animals were put down." Thompson's motives aren't exactly known, but he was deep in debt, had an estranged marriage and was facing house arrest after a year in prison for a gun conviction. It just broke my heart. Zanesville's exotic animal massacre, 10 years later - Axios "He was a broken individual," says Phil Cress. It broke my heart. "Everything he had was fast," says Marshall. The animal lovers are the ones that hurt them.' Zanesville Animal Escape took place in October 2011, in Zanesville, Ohio, when over 50 exotic animals were released from Muskingum County Animal Farm. The Santa Barbara International Film Festival has announced it will return Feb. 7-17. And they have every right to think, 'Oh, here's Jack, he had his fun with animalsnow we can't have our fun.' Fox Movie,' a documentary about his life. The final total was fifty-six. Sams 85-year-old mother, Dolores, called 911, and soon the police were in the area. (2017). The first big public warning sign that, when it came to Thompson's animals, all might not be as it should came in 2005. Mike Marshall, who later flew civilian planes with him, says Thompson brought it up frequently. Code 16 [dead on arrival], possible 58 [suicide]. "And his answer, to the way I recall, was he didn't know whether she did or she didn't. During the altercation, Thompson's wife, Chauna Thompson, a Harris County Sheriff 's deputy, arrived and called for assistance. After the wolf went down, Merry fired a few more times to make sure. He. He was the type of person, you weren't real sure what he would do. Terry Thompson: Ohio Zoo Owner The Inside Story - People 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. Nearby, they found bolt cutters and a stainless-steel Ruger .357 magnum revolver. 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. 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. His friends and neighbour have revealed that he deeply loved his animals, which could explain why he set them free. 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. As he neared the farm buildings he saw more animals. ", Toward the end, according to Cindy Huntsman, he seemed to treat his collection of animals in the same way. Thompson clearly meant this as a testament to his popularity, though Keck wonders. 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. 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. Thompson's wife, Marian, arrived around lunchtime. ", A bond that tied two people for so long can take time to break completely. 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. Books by Terry Thompson (Author of The Construction Zone) - Goodreads 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. In August, Thompson was moved to a halfway house in Columbus. "There was never just one girl in his life," she remembers. Terry Thompson - IMDb 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. " Stalf, who had moved to Columbus only eighteen months earlier, didn't know who Thompson was, but others did. "On the third night," says Spires, "this guy showed up, started beating windows out. He shot the lion while some other deputies shot the cougar. 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. ", "No other law-enforcement agency in the world has faced thisit's not like there was a manual," says Deputy LeCocq. "One of our vets came into the cocktail area," says Tom Stalf, the zoo's chief operating officer, "and you could see the panic on her face. That evening, the zoo assembled its capture-and-recovery team, armed with both tranquilizer-dart guns and regular weapons, and set out for Zanesville. 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. Watch I AM A STALKER | Netflix Official Site View the profiles of people named Terry Thompson. (If you visit the Columbus Zoo, his face is everywhereeven on the Pepsi machines.) Still, Lutz said he wasn't busy and would drive over. Those around him believed that he was changed man after he returned from war, that he never fully recovered from its trauma. Secret plane trips. 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. And the second occurred when he was a young private owner exhibiting his exotic animals. A twelve-year-old girl befriends a quirky teenage mermaid who's anything but mythical, and their friendship could heal an age-old feud. Six of Terry Thompson's animals survived. 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. (Even Mr. Kopchak, forgotten in his barn, safely managed to make his way unescorted back to his house at nightfall.) Cages only lead to more cages, unless a far worse reality awaits them. ", "No," he replied. to my website where you will find interesting information and inspiration.

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