Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  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. 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. 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. Every human who interacts with an animal and then makes claims about what that interaction means to the animal—in back yards or zoos or even on the plains of Africa—is making a claim neither they nor anyone else can verify.

  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. 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.

  “He forgets where he came from,” says one owner, Michael Stapleton (five tigers, four bears). “Jack needs to step back, take a breath, and look at Jack’s history. Okay? Jack doesn’t need to be telling me anything.”

  “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. He made mistakes, big mistakes, that the rest of us haven’t made.”

  Hanna acknowledges that he is not universally popular for supporting what happened that night, and for supporting the laws being drafted. “I got death threats and everything else,” he says. 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’ve had three bad things happen in my life,” he says, and proceeds to describe them. The first involves his daughter and cancer. The third is what happened that night in Zanesville. And the second occurred when he was a young private owner exhibiting his exotic animals.

  “A little boy loses his arm to an African lion, 1972 or 1973, Tennessee,” he remembers. Jack Hanna’s lion, at Jack Hanna’s animal farm. “My animals were raised in a magnificent setting, creeks going through the place and everything was gorgeous. But an accident happened. And I had to go and pick up the arm. It was beyond anything that you would ever want to experience.”

  I reiterate how angry animal owners are with him. “Yes, they have every right to be angry with me, but do they know that I lost everything I had?” he says. “Remember, 1973 was much different than 2011. And they have every right to think, ‘Oh, here’s Jack, he had his fun with animals—now we can’t have our fun.’ I can see that. And I have no problem with that. I just know that I learned the lesson the hard way, that’s all.”

  There is a belief that unites the exotic-animal owners of Ohio: If only the right people had listened, what happened with Terry Thompson—and all the trouble now following in its wake—could have been avoided. 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.

  I hear different versions of what was being said: dead cats—a white tiger and a cougar—observed lying on the property; animals getting loose; a two-year-old lion being allowed to run around in the open; multiple animals in such bad health that they would have to be euthanized. Some owners took food down to Thompson’s property themselves, some say they contacted the sheriff’s department. “They told me,” says one owner, Cindy Huntsman, “there were no laws on the books that would allow him to confiscate.”

  As for what actually happened on that day in October, I hear all kinds of theories, though most of them sound recklessly farfetched. Thompson was involved with bad people and had fallen out with them. He was caught up in dangerously illegal black-market animal sales, dead or alive. (Tigers are reputedly worth as much as $20,000 dead when their body parts are illegally sold off.) Drug smuggling. Secret plane trips. The Mexican cartel. His death was part of a twenty-five-year plot to rid America of exotic animals. He was actually found with a pillowcase over his head and a gunshot wound to his stomach. Nearly all of the exotic-animal owners I speak with, deeply skeptical of the official account, identify the same “true” culprit: animal-rights activists.

  I hear nothing to substantiate any of this, and the multitude and variety of the tales alone is enough to make one doubt any of them in particular. The craziest, most tangentially related rumor that I hear in Zanesville: Jack Hanna was supplying Charlie Sheen’s tiger blood.

  There are two mysteries about what happened along the driveway of 270 Kopchak Road that nobody has been able to explain. The first is why Thompson seems to have cut open so many of the cages when he simply could have opened them. 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. Maybe. But while it seems foolish to expect someone’s actions on the verge of suicide to be consistent with their behavior before then, this action—the cutting of the cages—does puzzle some for a different reason. People insist that the Terry Thompson they knew was too lazy to go to that kind of trouble.

  The second, bigger mystery is how Thompson managed to let loose fifty animals without being seriously injured by any of them. Even if many of the animals were confused or scared, and not bloodthirsty for human flesh, some of the friendliest might have been expected to want to “play” with Thompson—and when a cat this big decides to play with you, you are in little less peril than when it decides to attack you.

  This riddle hardly bolsters any of the conspiracy theories—if 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). But people will believe what they need to believe. When a life explodes like this, in a shower of sparks and shrapnel, people pick through the remains and see what suits them best. That’s what happens when your death defines you. The bigger the bang that takes someone out, the more likely it is that the person at its center will be obscured. Terry Thompson’s story went round the world, but it was also barely told at all. 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. 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.

  It seems worth taking at least a moment to wonder whether it might be the other way around.

  Part 3: A Man Called Terry Thompson

  In Vietnam we were so much more interested in lightweight because we were on the move a lot. I was in a helicopter so I was a machine gunner with an M60—that was on a bipod. I always had an M16 with me…. I’ve been to Southeast Asia for a year in a hole in the ground…. 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. That’s when you sleep with a machine gun. And it’s the only thing that keeps you warm…. When you’ve been through a firefight and you’ve got that warm machine gun, that’s all you got. You don’t have anything else…. I’m not an expert. I guess I am an expert in the military…. Yeah, I am. But so what does that mean anything? … See, the guys who shot expert got killed in Vietnam.

  —Terry Thompson, secretly recorded in his home by a government in
formant, April and May 2008

  Terry William Thompson grew up just east of Zanesville on his parents’ farm, close to the airport. “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. Thompson’s sounds like an idyllic small-town-America sixties childhood: bicycles, Boy Scouts, loving parents, sporting triumphs, souped-up cars, girls. “Beautiful blues eyes—that’s what you noticed first,” says Christine Perone, who dated him for some time in high school. “His eyes were just beautiful.” Not that she was the only one who noticed. “There was never just one girl in his life,” she remembers. “He would sometimes step on other guys’ girlfriends. And he was like, ‘You know, I’m a lover, not a fighter.’ I always thought that was pretty funny.” He had his pilot’s license before he was sixteen. “He used to buzz my house,” she says. “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.’”

  And then, as Thompson would tell it, everything changed.

  “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.”

  Many of Thompson’s friends believe that his time in Vietnam was the defining experience of his life. Mike Marshall, who later flew civilian planes with him, says Thompson brought it up frequently. “He wanted people to know that he was there. He was upset with the army because he saw some horrible, ugly things.” 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. “Many of them I’m sure died right there in his arms.” On the worst days, there were more people to be rescued than they possibly could. “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.” As for the enemy: “He said he just had to keep mowing them down. It was so bad one time, he ran out of bullets.”

  “He never really got over it,” says Marshall.

  “He had no reason why he was spared,” says Cress. “Why him? And the guys that had a wife and children are in Arlington?”

  “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.

  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. “He always laughed and would be real pleasant before,” says Polk. “He smiled a lot. When he came back … he had a funny look. You know what I mean? He was kind of a loner. He was just a bit different from the other ones. I think he had a little touch of Agent Orange. I said that he never left Vietnam. I’m going to put it that way. He never left it.”

  Now, the thing is, you know when everyone says this guy went into a schoolyard and kills a bunch of kids and he had an automatic rifle? 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. 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

  On his way home from Vietnam, Thompson found himself in Columbus, Ohio. From there, he walked the fifty or so miles east to his parents’ house. He wanted to clear his head. Soon after, he bought himself a brand-new Corvette. His wife-to-be, Marian Sharp, came from what was considered a good local family and was an accomplished barrel racer and horsewoman. “Kind of classy—you know,” says Jim Stilwell, a longtime friend of Thompson’s who went to school with Sharp. “Kind of uppity. Carried herself gracefully. A nice girl.” The general impression seems to have been that it was a case of the good girl drawn to the wild boy. As one friend puts it: “Who is the guy who would piss my dad off the most?” Apparently it worked.

  Whatever the dynamic that drew them together, for the next four decades they presented themselves as a formidable partnership. Marian became a well-respected local schoolteacher and a prizewinning rider. Thompson opened a bike shop in town. He became the local Harley dealer and also got a license to sell guns. Already, he did things differently from other people. “Back in the seventies,” says Stilwell, “if you saw him with a toothbrush in his back pocket, you’d know he was going to go somewhere. Because he wouldn’t take any clothes with him.” For a while there was a plane on the shop’s roof. Inside the shop, along with the bikes and guns, were the kind of animals he favored in those early days. “He raised Dobermans back then,” says Stilwell. “There would be dog shit all over the showroom. You had to watch where you stepped.” One time Thompson offered Dr. Smith a boat for half price. Smith asked why it was only half price. “It’s only half a boat,” Thompson explained.

  Thompson did things his own way even when it led him into trouble. 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. “On the third night,” says Spires, “this guy showed up, started beating windows out. And [Terry] just really beat him up so bad. He kicked into the mode of what they taught him in Vietnam—beat people up, kill people. He said he didn’t have any control over it. 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.” The charge didn’t stick.

  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. 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. “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. And there were always planes. “Everything he had was fast,” says Marshall. “Fast motorcycles. Fast boats. Fast airplanes. He liked speed.” (Nearly everything. He and his wife liked to drive a decommissioned fireman’s truck around town until one night he wrecked it.)

  Thompson flew regularly for a local millionaire, including a vintage World War II–era Stearman biplane, and also kept some of his own planes on the Kopchak Road property—he had the electric company move the power lines so that he could take off and land there. There are plenty of colorful stories about his exploits. “Some of them were true,” says Marshall. “Some of them were untrue. And he never differentiated between them—he kind of liked the notoriety.” One was that he had gone under the interstate bridge where it crosses the Muskingum River in the middle of Zanesville. There is little doubt at all that he once landed an ultralight on the county fairgrounds. Bo Keck, an officer who was there, told him he couldn’t pull such a stunt. “Well,” Thompson retorted, “find someone to file a complaint on me.” Thompson clearly meant this as a testament to his popularity, though Keck wonders. “I think people were afraid of Terry. I mean, he was a gun man. He had these wild animals. He was the type of person, you weren’t real sure what he would do. I think that was a lot of it. Some people just said, ‘Oh, that’s T.’”

  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. 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 fastened—I’ve got to ticket you
for that.

  THOMPSON: Well, where were you when I was in Vietnam in a foxhole, people shooting at me, if you’re trying to protect me? Where were you then?

  PATROLMAN: Well, sir, this is not personal.

  THOMPSON: It’d better not be—I’d be out of the truck by now. How many tickets do you have in that book?

  PATROLMAN: I don’t know—probably seventy-five.

  THOMPSON: You might as well keep writing, because when I leave here I’m not fastening my seat belt.

  “See,” says Spires, “that’s the way he was.” (And continued to be—county records show at least seven citations for failing to wear a seat belt.)

  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. “He loved blues more than anything,” says Spires. “His favorite song was ‘House of the Rising Sun.’ It had a special meaning.” In the song, the house in question is a New Orleans brothel, and the name was borrowed for similar establishments in Vietnam. Thompson told Spires of a visit on the day a friend of his had been killed. “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 friend got killed and I guess they’re thinking, ‘That could be me tomorrow.’”