Movies. Just sitting there on the ground, facing their way. This reality is revealed to us through Zanesville Animal Escape that briefly makes its presence felt during the first half of the series. Soon, their collection grew into a private mini zoo as the couple took care of rescued animals, and also bought some themselves. 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). He and Red had taken only a few steps toward the barn when Kopchak saw something else, close by, just ahead of them on the other side of the fence. Without Getting Killed or Caught 2023 Cinemaholic Inc. All rights reserved. Netflixs Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness offers an expansive portrayal of private ownership of exotic animals in America. "She was saying, 'Please, Mr. Hanna, don't take my children,'" says Hanna. Thompson almost collapsed to his seat. He reported back to the sheriff that, whether the body was Thompson's or someone else's, it was deceased. Terry Thompson sentenced to 25 years in prison for man's murder outside "He had accused her of turning him in for the guns. An insightful documentary film has just been released that reveals the true Donald Trump contrary to the constant misleading portrayals by his opposition. As they pulled up between the barn and a row of cages, two tigers started out of the barn toward them. Maybe. When a life explodes like this, in a shower of sparks and shrapnel, people pick through the remains and see what suits them best. Byline: By TONY THOMPSON . See, the guys who shot expert got killed in Vietnam.-Terry Thompson, secretly recorded in his home by a government informant, April and May 2008. Encounters with animals that would normally have been remembered for a lifetime were forgotten moments later as the next came along. TERRY THOMPSON - Author, Blogger, Christ Follower 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. Terry Thompson was born in Belfast, he grew up on the Castlereagh Road in East Belfast. "He felt betrayed by the government, by the army, by society in general," claims Marshall. Unfortunately, one of the animals, a leopard-jaguar mix, was euthanized after he was severely injured from a cage door that fell on its neck. "He threw up his arms," says Stilwell, "and said, 'She can just have it all.' Aunt Iris was old the day I met her, or so it seemed. "And then," he says, "I saw a tiger. TV Shows. Capt Terry D Thompson (1938-1976) - Find a Grave Memorial Merry drove back up the hill, until he came across a deputy running back and forth near Thompson's driveway. All rights reserved. The cause of death seemed to be a gunshot to the head. Terry William Thompson grew up just east of Zanesville on his parents' farm, close to the airport. Because he wouldn't take any clothes with him." The exotic-animal world is a close-knit one, and in the year before Thompson's death, after he was sent to prison, word spread that there were problems with his animals. Zanesville held a special significance for himhe went to school near here, enlisted in the army here, spent his honeymoon night here. In this era there were also numerous complaints of loose animals. She had to be convinced that the survivors should be taken to the zoo for safekeeping. He became the local Harley dealer and also got a license to sell guns. Thompson did things his own way even when it led him into trouble. 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. Personal testimonies from his closest staff and family tell a different story from the daily public barrage of criticisms by of the media. "Terry Thompson was a man who made mountaineering both his profession and his . Join Facebook to connect with Terry Thompson and others you may know. It was the guns that eventually landed him in real trouble. 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. Maybe Marian understands. It was presumed that the remaining two animals were eaten by some of the bigger ones. 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 material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. 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. "They could only get so many on the helicopter," says Cress, "and they actually had to pry their fingers off the helicopter so they could get off the ground." We sent Chris Heath to Zanesville, Ohio, to find out where the wild things areand what the hell they're doing there. And there were always planes. 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. Thompson let the animals loose then killed himself. "He sold the monkey outside of the auction, because it wasn't legal to sell inside, for $3,500.". ", 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. But the horrific tragedy of Zanesvilles animal massacre is enough to haunt the viewers as they see what follows. 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. 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. 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. As Ed Hamell pointed . "Some of them were untrue. It's what the Indians wanted.Terry Thompson, secretly recorded in his home by a government informant, May 2008. He was released, forty pounds lighter than a year before, on the day of September 30. After all, this is not the life they are meant to lead, and certainly not the one they deserve. 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. 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. Before he retired four years ago, he used to teach seventh-grade science. It was about eighty yards away from him, but it fell at the first shot. He said he didn't have any control over it. An incredible true story from the March 2012 issue of GQ. Terry Thompson - IMDb 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. The first big public warning sign that, when it came to Thompson's animals, all might not be as it should came in 2005. And he never differentiated between themhe kind of liked the notoriety." But the final blow was finding out that his wife, Marian, had left him. Vince Gill, Verlon Thompson, and Terry and Jo Harvey Allen, as well as record executive Barry Poss. He was just a bit different from the other ones. Thompson's sounds like an idyllic small-town-America '60s childhood: bicycles, Boy Scouts, loving parents, sporting triumphs, souped-up cars, girls. Neighbors describe Terry Thompson, the owner of the exotic animal farm where 56 animals escaped 10-19-2011. to my website where you will find interesting information and inspiration. 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. A nice girl." So these animals were like her children. Mrs. Thompson chose the spot. The charge didn't stick. According to investigators he has been cited in the past for animal abuse and neglect. The local police confirmed deaths of 48 animals which included eighteen Bengal tigers, three mountain lions, nine male lions, eight lionesses, six black bears, two grizzly bears, two wolves, one macaque, one monkey and one baboon. Watch I AM A STALKER | Netflix Official Site Okay, this is a .308, so I could have killed you when you came in the front gate. ", Many of Thompson's friends believe that his time in Vietnam was the defining experience of his life. He wouldn't ever know where the bullet went, though he assumed he must have hit the brain. 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 also a lioness, anxiously scuttering around. 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. "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. "And he always used to say, 'I don't like animals but I would never hurt one. Kopchak had lived around here all of his life. You know, Terry always had to be number onethat was Terry," she says. Personal testimonies from his closest staff and family tell a different story from the daily public barrage of criticisms by of the media. It seems worth taking at least a moment to wonder whether it might be the other way around. 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. The only reason I can think of is that it made it harder to undo what he had done, and so made it more of an act of irreversible destruction. He was kind of a loner. And it planted the seed of caring for wild animals for the rest of his life. "That means they're happy," Stilwell says. And sometime in this period, Marian told Sam Kopchak that Terry was giving guitar lessons behind bars. The catastrophic incident that took place in Ohio should have served as a cautionary tale for others in America. "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.". In Vietnam we were so much more interested in lightweight because we were on the move a lot. 2011 Zanesville, Ohio animal escape - Wikipedia They need people to know that not everybody who has a tiger or three tucked away behind their house is a Terry Thompson. After that, Merry went back for his rifle. I'm not an expert. How could a private citizen have amassed a collection of so many unusual and potentially dangerous animals in the first place? (And continued to becounty records show at least seven citations for failing to wear a seat belt. It just broke my heart. Thompson, 61, was recently released from prison after serving one year on federal weapons charges. 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. I set out to find some of them. Those around him believed that he was changed man after he returned from war, that he never fully recovered from its trauma. 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. Informant: You're crazy.Thompson: That's what they all say. 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. 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." The white tiger had gone. (If you visit the Columbus Zoo, his face is everywhereeven on the Pepsi machines.) 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. "I don't know." "It's only half a boat," Thompson explained. This makes it all the more relevant to remember the tragic event that took place in Zanesville almost a decade ago. "Well," Thompson retorted, "find someone to file a complaint on me." But maybe she was a little rattled. It is believed Thompson released nearly all of his 56 animals, following a mental breakdown which led him to take his own life. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight.