Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  The process of reconnecting with Eric was less straightforward. Michael tried to be patient as days and then weeks went by with no further word from him. It would take until shortly before Thanksgiving for Eric to agree to meet, and he did so without telling Marylee, who was still coming to grips with the revelations of the previous few months. John and Kelly Raley had offered their home in West Houston as a neutral location for the meeting. So one Saturday afternoon in November 2011, Eric and Michael set out to meet again.

  Michael paced the floor as he waited for Eric, who was running late. After a while, Kelly began to worry that Eric might not come after all, and so she was relieved when she finally saw a car pull up outside. Eric and Maggie got out and approached the house, where Michael waited in the foyer with Raley. “This grown man was standing there,” Michael told me of his surprise when Eric appeared at the door. “That was him, that was my little boy. I would have walked right past him if I had seen him on the street.”

  They shook hands. Then Michael reached out for Eric, and they embraced for a long time. “He was emotional, more than I was,” Eric remembered. “I didn’t know how to react, because I didn’t know him. I kept thinking, ‘Should I be crying? What should I be feeling?’ I was just kind of stunned.”

  Eric was quiet for most of the evening as he took everything in. But his father, who had yearned in the solitude of his cell for this moment, could not hide his eagerness for them to be close again. “Michael was so excited that he was almost manic,” Raley told me. “It was the fastest I’d ever seen him talk. I think he wanted to cram everything they had missed into that first hour together. Eric was respectful and courteous, but he did not engage.” Raley and his wife watched with growing concern through dinner as Eric said little, and when the conversation stalled, Kelly talked to Maggie about the baby that she and Eric were expecting. Finally, Raley steered Michael and Eric outside to the back patio with mugs of coffee, where they could talk by themselves. It was the first time they had been alone together in twenty-five years.

  They sat in the darkness, in a white garden swing that overlooked the yard, and it was only then that Eric opened up. “I told him that I was extremely freaked out,” Eric recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not mad. I don’t hate you. I just feel weird, and I don’t know how to act around you. Part of me feels like I’m betraying the Kirkpatricks right now. I know you’re excited to be out, but this is hard.’” Michael relaxed and listened as his son explained his mixed emotions. Slowly, the conversation eased into subjects that Eric had always wondered about: his mother, whose adult life he knew little about, and the three years they had all spent together as a family. “There was an organic, natural cadence we fell into,” Michael told me. “It just started going so well. We were alone, and it was good.”

  Michael would see his son twice more that winter. In January he visited Houston shortly after the birth of Eric and Maggie’s daughter, and in February Eric came to East Texas to visit the extended Morton family. By then Eric had told Marylee about meeting his father, and he had been both surprised and relieved to discover that she was supportive of his desire to reconnect with Michael. But the Kirkpatricks themselves—having been conditioned for more than two decades to trust the sadistic portrayal presented of Michael at his trial—were more hesitant. (The conversation between three-year-old Eric and his grandmother, in which he described the murderer as a “monster,” had ultimately not persuaded the Kirkpatricks that Michael was above suspicion; encouraged by the sheriff’s office, they had always believed that Eric had simply made up the story after overhearing family members discussing details of the case.) When the entire family convened in April for the christening of Eric and Maggie’s baby girl, Michael received what he felt was a lukewarm reception—first at a dinner with Marylee and in particular at the baptism itself. “We greeted each other, but there were few words spoken,” Michael said. Even John Kirkpatrick, who was responsible for finding the bloody bandana that helped to free Michael, was cordial but distant. “I sensed that none of them had accepted or internalized my innocence,” Michael told me. “But I also know that they were lied to, manipulated, and kept in the dark about the most important aspects of the investigation, so in the end, I have to forgive them.”

  By then Michael had received compensation for the time he served; in accordance with state law, which requires that exonerees be paid $80,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment, he received just short of $2 million. He contributed some of the funds to a prison ministry that had buoyed him during his time behind bars and bought a piece of lakefront property, where he plans to build a house. He will remain close enough to his elderly parents that he can help them, having already shepherded them through several health crises since his release; not long after he returned home, his father had a stroke and his mother broke her arm. “I feel like I got home right in time,” he told me.

  He has toyed with the idea of moving out West someday, but too many ties bind him to East Texas. One is his relationship with a divorcée and mother of three grown children who attends the same church as Michael’s parents. “We’re like an old married couple because we’re in our fifties,” Michael said. “We have our reading night, when we lie around her living room and read our respective books. Another night is movie night, and we’ll watch something I missed while I was away.” Christine will never be far from his mind, he added. “I think of her, but she is not the overriding influence she used to be,” he said. “It’s a bittersweet thing to realize that. But maybe, in the end, healthy.”

  Michael tries not to overwhelm Eric by going to Houston too often, though he told me there were few things that made him happier than seeing his son holding his granddaughter. When he does visit, he usually stays with the Raleys and stops by Eric and Maggie’s home to say hello. On a recent visit, he and Eric went to an Astros game. It was the first time they had ever gone to a ball game together. “We haven’t had much one-on-one time, so I figured the game was the easiest way to do that,” Eric told me. “It was nice. Of course, it was weird too.”

  It was on the heels of this visit, the night after the ball game, that I met Eric and Maggie for the first time. As we talked in the living room of their small, ranch-style house on the western edge of Houston, Maggie explained that Eric had become much more receptive to welcoming Michael back into his life since the birth of their daughter. She looked at her husband. “When you were turned off to the whole thing and you didn’t want to meet Mike, I just said, ‘You’re going to understand his feelings as soon as this little girl’s born,’” she reminded him. “I knew you were going to understand what a father’s love was and that it doesn’t just go away.”

  Eric nodded. “That little girl has been my saving grace,” he told me. “The whole family has come a long way this year, and I think she’s helped with that.” I asked him about Marylee and how she was coping with the situation. He thought for a moment. “I think it’s difficult for her to share how much confusion she’s felt in the process of forgiving my father,” he said. “She’s come a long way from where she was when she seemed so resistant and angry. Now her anger and frustration is focused on the system and on Ken Anderson. She doesn’t believe my father is to blame anymore.” He was hopeful, he said, that there would be greater reconciliation when they all attended the Norwood trial together. Eric told me that he had less interest in the outcome of the court of inquiry than in seeing justice served in the Norwood case. “If he’s convicted, then life can go on with my father and the Kirkpatricks and we can be normal,” he said.

  We heard the baby cry in the next room, and Maggie went to get her. A few minutes later she returned, holding the seven-month-old. The baby was tiny and alert, her expression placid as she stared at us. Her blue eyes were as bright as her late grandmother’s, who would be fifty-seven were she still alive. We all stared back at the baby as she studied us, watchful and serene, unaware of all the pain and suffering that had come before her. Her name, of course, is Christine.
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br />   GQ

  WINNER—REPORTING

  Chris Heath began his career writing about music for British magazines like Smash Hits and The Face and later wrote for Details and Rolling Stone in the United States before joining GQ. He has also long been associated with Pet Shop Boys—accompanying them on tour, writing liner notes for their albums, editing their fan club magazine. Which is all by way of saying that his winning the National Magazine Award for Reporting may come as a surprise—but only to those unlucky readers encountering his work for the first time. As the National Magazine Award judges explained: “Heath has the courage to think deeply, and this sharply written story—a faithful re-creation of the carnage that left fifty animals and their owner dead—is simply unforgettable.”

  Chris Heath

  18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars, 2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque, and 1 Man Dead in Ohio

  Part 1: Fifty-One Deaths

  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 eighty-four-year-old mother and headed into the paddock behind their house to attend to the horse he’d bought nine days earlier. Red, a half-Arabian pinto, was acting skittish and had moved toward the far corner of the field. 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. They were circling, and in the center of their troubled orbit there was some kind of dark shape. Only when the shape broke out of the circle could Kopchak see that it was a black bear.

  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. He knew what he’d do: put Red in the barn, go back to the house, report what he’d seen. This plan soon had to be revised. 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. Just sitting there on the ground, facing their way. A fully grown male African lion.

  Kopchak had lived around here all of his life. The road his and Thompson’s properties abutted was named Kopchak Road after his great-uncle. Before he retired four years ago, he used to teach seventh-grade science. He didn’t know too much about lions, but he had heard that it was unwise to challenge them by looking them in the eye, and that if you ran away they had a tendency to chase you. So he settled on what he considered a brisk walking pace for himself and Red. He only looked back once, when they were about a third of the way to the barn. 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.

  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. There was, he told her, “a major problem.” They’d long known that there were strange and unusual animals kept out of sight over the brow of the hill around Thompson’s house—often they could hear lions bellow and roar. “We didn’t have any idea how many there were,” Mrs. Kopchak would later reflect. 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.

  No answer.

  Only then did she call 911 and alert the world. 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. But maybe she was a little rattled. 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.”

  Her son remained trapped in the barn. From there, looking through a north-facing window, he watched the menagerie grow. Along came a wolf. And a second bear, this one much larger than the first. And there was the lion he had seen before, now pacing back and forth. And also a lioness, anxiously scuttering around. “And then,” he says, “I saw a tiger. I’m telling you, the lion is bad enough, and the lioness is bad enough, and the wolf is bad, and the bear, but … don’t be around the tiger. The tigers are actually bigger than the lions if they’re fully grown. He started snarling, and went after the horses.”

  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. When he arrived, he could see, just inside Thompson’s fence, a tiger, a black bear, and two lionesses. While he was waiting for Mrs. Kopchak to answer the door, he saw a large gray wolf running southward along the road behind him. 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. When it turned up toward a house, Merry got his rifle from the trunk and followed on foot. By now the order had come over the radio: Put the animal down. It was about eighty yards away from him, but it fell at the first shot.

  After the wolf went down, Merry fired a few more times to make sure. He was inspecting the body when word came over the radio that some colleagues had a lion cornered near the Thompson residence. He hurried back. He knew that his colleagues would only have the two standard-issue weapons—the .40 caliber Glock 22 they wear at their side and the shotgun that is locked above their heads in the patrol cars—and that he was the only one with a rifle.

  Merry drove back up the hill, until he came across a deputy running back and forth near Thompson’s driveway. Merry didn’t know what was going on, so he stopped. 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. That was when he saw the black bear, at first facing him and then running straight toward him. Now he only had his Glock. Not the weapon you’d want when you’re facing down 350 pounds of charging bear. He got off one shot.

  The black bear fell about seven feet in front of Merry. He wouldn’t ever know where the bullet went, though he assumed he must have hit the brain. 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.

  After that, Merry went back for his rifle. An African lioness crawled under the livestock fence and ran south down the road then headed toward someone’s home, so he shot her before she could go farther. 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. He shot the lion while some other deputies shot the cougar. 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, and—later on, after its hiding place was revealed by a fireman’s thermal-imaging camera—a grizzly bear. That’s what it was like.

  Sheriff Matt Lutz was settling into an evening in front of the TV. His son and wife were off to a literacy night so he was on his own. He’d already hung up his uniform and finished his dinner when, at around five-twenty p.m., he got the call reporting that Terry Thompson had an animal out. It didn’t seem that big a deal—they all knew Thompson had animals and they’d been called out there again and again, mostly for loose horses. Occasionally there were reports of more unusual creatures running free but nothing too bad had ever happened. Still, Lutz said he wasn’t busy and would drive over. 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. Lutz instructed that if there were animals outside Thompson’s property they needed to be shot. Never had to think twice about it. There was an apartment building just on the other side of the interstate that bordered Thompson’s land. Maybe a mile away was a school soccer game—kids yelling and screaming in the open air. What if some of the cats were drawn toward them? By the
time he got there, the culling had begun.

  Nobody yet knew where Thompson was, and so there was concern for his safety. Maybe the animals had somehow busted out, and he was injured, in need of help. 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. As he neared the farm buildings he saw more animals. Their cages had either been cut through or left open. Blake sounded his horn outside Thompson’s house, but there was no response, so he drove back, and at the foot of the drive he met John Moore, the caretaker who regularly fed the animals and had been alerted by a phone call from someone in the neighborhood. Together, they returned to the house, finding nothing but two monkeys and a dog in cages. But on their way back to the road, Moore spotted a body near the barn. A white tiger appeared to be eating it, and they couldn’t get closer.