Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Forty miles away, at the Columbus Zoo, an event was being held for the International Rhino Foundation. Rhino experts from around the world had gathered, and the zoo was throwing a cocktail party on the grounds of the polar-bear exhibit. “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. She said, ‘We have to go—Terry Thompson’s animals are out.’” Stalf, who had moved to Columbus only eighteen months earlier, didn’t know who Thompson was, but others did. 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. 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.

  That evening, the zoo assembled its capture-and-recovery team, armed with both tranquilizer-dart guns and regular weapons, and set out for Zanesville. Meanwhile, at the gateway of Thompson’s property, the police were wondering how many animals might be loose. John Moore mentally ran through the rows of cages he would feed. At first the number of animals he came up with was forty-eight, but then his fiancée arrived. She also helped with the feeding, and reminded him of some recent arrivals. The final total was fifty-six.

  That’s when Moore told Deputy Jeff LeCocq something that would later appear in the official police report and came to be taken as a kind of explanation for what had happened, albeit one that prompted many further questions. Moore said that he had last spoken with Thompson at nine o’clock the previous evening, and that Thompson, who was sixty-two, had told him about a letter he’d received from an unnamed author saying that his wife, Marian, had been unfaithful. Thompson had only returned from his prison sentence three weeks before. “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. “And his answer, to the way I recall, was he didn’t know whether she did or she didn’t. And then Terry makes this statement back to him: ‘Well, I have a plan to find out, and you will know it when it happens.’”

  When Deputy Todd Kanavel, who normally heads up the drug squad, arrived at the scene, Sergeant Blake told him about the body that they had spotted. “I think it’s Terry,” he said. “I don’t know.” They needed to find out for sure, and to see whether the person might still be alive. 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. 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. Deputy Tony Angelo, a sniper on their SWAT team, had a bolt-action rifle, Deputy Ryan Paisley had a nine-millimeter H&K MP5 submachine gun, Deputy Jay Lawhorne and Kanavel had assault rifles. As they pulled up between the barn and a row of cages, two tigers started out of the barn toward them. The animals were only about ten or twelve feet away. “It kind of took us by surprise,” says Kanavel. “So those animals were put down.” From where they were, they could see the man’s body, flat on its back. The white tiger was atop him. “It stood up,” says Kanavel, “and was standing there.” He reported back to the sheriff that, whether the body was Thompson’s or someone else’s, it was deceased. (At 6:04 p.m., Lutz shared this information on the police radio: “Okay, we have located the owner. Code 16 [dead on arrival], possible 58 [suicide]. Unknown for sure on that. Here in the field.”)

  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. First they had to deal with a male African lion that managed to run between some junk cars after the first shot—there were dozens and dozens of old cars and RVs and tractors parked in clumps of rusted metal around the hillside, weeds growing around them. As they moved toward other escapees spread over the hillside, they used the truck to give themselves elevation, trying to engage the animals from seventy to a hundred yards away, firing on them two at a time until they went down. Kanavel’s tactic was to shoot for the head a couple of times, and then move on to the body and keep putting rounds into it. “I was sick, shooting these animals, because they didn’t ask to be there,” he says. “And, you know, I’m a cat person.”

  After a while the four shooters ran low on ammo and called for more, and eventually they headed back toward where the body was. The white tiger had gone. Nearby, they found bolt cutters and a stainless-steel Ruger .357 magnum revolver. The cause of death seemed to be a gunshot to the head.

  One detail Sheriff Lutz chose to release to the press at the time was that there was a sizable laceration on Thompson’s head that was consistent with a big cat’s bite. Deliberately or not, he seemed to imply that Thompson’s body was, aside from the gunshot wound suggesting a barrel placed in the mouth, otherwise fairly untouched. It wasn’t quite that straightforward. “He had been dragged,” says Kanavel. “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.”

  There were also pieces of raw chicken scattered around near the body. “Apparently,” Tom Stalf theorizes, “he wanted the animals to eat him.”

  “No other law-enforcement agency in the world has faced this—it’s not like there was a manual,” says Deputy LeCocq. “Other things will happen, but this is never going to happen again.”

  All evening it went on, the slaughter. Encounters with animals that would normally have been remembered for a lifetime were forgotten moments later as the next came along. Somehow, no one was hurt. (Even Mr. Kopchak, forgotten in his barn, safely managed to make his way unescorted back to his house at nightfall.) Given the situation—fifty animals, mostly large and potentially aggressive carnivores set loose toward the day’s end—things could have gone so much worse.

  Up near the house, where no media could see them, the officers laid the dead animals out in rows, by species, to ease the counting. That’s where the famous, heartbreaking photo was taken—it remains unclear who took it—of all the bodies together in the early-morning light, the one that went round the world. Whatever people knew of the real situation, and of the hard decisions that had to be made, when you saw that image all you could think was: This is a photo of a place where dozens of big beautiful animals were massacred.

  By the time the Columbus Zoo team had arrived at the holding area, it was dark. They were told that it wasn’t safe for them to try to tranquilize anything because so many animals were circulating and others were scattering outward. 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 so—impossible with so many animals running around.

  When the zoo people returned to the site at five-thirty the next morning, they had been joined by Jack Hanna. Hanna—famous for his TV shows and his appearances on shows like Letterman—established his career at the Columbus Zoo and remains its director emeritus. (If you visit the Columbus Zoo, his face is everywhere—even on the Pepsi machines.) 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.” Zanesville held a special significance for him—he went to school near here, enlisted in the army here, spent his honeymoon night here.

  After the sheriff spoke with Hanna and talked him through what happened, he gave interview after interview. It probably made all the difference. 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 narrative—that a thoug
htless 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. “It’s like Noah’s Ark wrecking,” he proclaimed, “right here in Zanesville, Ohio.”

  Forty-nine animals would be confirmed dead. There was now only one unaccounted for—a macaque. 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.

  Six of Terry Thompson’s animals survived. Three were leopards, still in their cages. Two more were the macaques kept in the living room of the house in two small birdcages. And finally, out back near the empty swimming pool, was a small grizzly bear, also in a birdcage. The house itself was disgusting. “It was the most horrific smells,” says Stalf. “Garbage, and feces. Garbage bags filled with garbage that were knocked over, and the filth. I saw a pair of pants on the ground and the belt was twine. It was very sad to see—how someone clearly had lost their mind. There are no sane people that would live in those conditions.”

  Thompson’s wife, Marian, arrived around lunchtime. She had to be convinced that the survivors should be taken to the zoo for safekeeping. “She was saying, ‘Please, Mr. Hanna, don’t take my children,’” says Hanna. Marian insisted on removing the macaques from their cages herself, waving off the zoo personnel’s advice about the risk she was taking. She would explain that she had spent $30,000 buying them, and that she used to sleep with the young female. Her bond with them certainly seemed real. 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.

  It was decided that the dead animals be buried, there and then, on the property. Mrs. Thompson chose the spot. A big digger was brought in and a hole was dug maybe thirty feet deep. The animals were scooped by the bucketload, placed in the hole, and earth backhoed over them. “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 mud … it was just a bad day, you know.”

  Thompson’s body was taken from the scene for an autopsy at the Licking County Coroner’s, where it revealed a few of its secrets. At death Terry William Thompson was five feet five inches tall and weighed 174 pounds. He had been wearing a black T-shirt, blue jeans, and white briefs. His gallbladder had been removed earlier in life, and he was suffering from severe atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The only notable substance in his blood was Benadryl. There was gray powder residue on his left hand that appeared to be from a gun being fired. The wounds mentioned in the autopsy report, aside from the gunshot wound, begin with “a 2 ¼ inch vertical laceration on the right lower forehead and along the spine of the nose.” Twenty-one other injuries, or clusters of injuries, were detailed just on the head and neck, the site of the most widespread damage. Others were noted on his torso and his legs.

  And then there was what the coroner described like this: “a 5 ¾ 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.” Or, to spell it out: By the time the body was recovered, no part of his external genitalia remained. Where they should have been, there was nothing but a raw gap. That was Terry Thompson’s final grotesque parting gift—a 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.

  Part 2: The Animals Among Us

  For the majority of Americans who know little about the world of exotic animals, the astonishing events in Zanesville raised some obvious questions. How could a private citizen have amassed a collection of so many unusual and potentially dangerous animals in the first place? Surely he must have broken every law that prevents your next-door neighbor from secretly housing an ambush of tigers?

  The answer to that first question: It’s surprisingly easy. The answer to the second question is: What laws?

  Though Ohio legislators are now scrambling to rectify this, the state where Terry Thompson lived is one of a handful where the regulations on exotic-animal ownership have historically been very light. 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. To breed or exhibit or commercially transport animals across state lines he would need a USDA license, requiring that his facilities be inspected periodically to check that they met some basic standards—but other than that there are no special checks or controls.

  I will hear confident estimates of the number of big cats—tigers, lions, and so on—in Ohio that vary from the low hundreds to the low thousands. The strange truth is: Nobody knows. No one is sure how many there are, or where they are.

  I set out to find some of them. 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. But I find a few. Partly, I think, they talk because they’re proud of what they do and the way they do it, but it’s also because their way of life is under attack. They need people to know that not everybody who has a tiger or three tucked away behind their house is a Terry Thompson.

  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 cougar—or, in some cases, many of each. (“Ever been this close to a tiger?” one owner nonchalantly inquires, as it nestles up against the fencing inches away from me in his garage.) 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.

  Most seem to have stumbled into it, impulsively buying a bear or lion cub without thinking through how, as one puts it, “a year from now, it’s not going to be so cuddly.” One of the surprising facts about owning animals like these in America right now is that while keeping them may not be cheap, buying them frequently is. Tom Stalf at the Columbus Zoo suggests to me that you can buy a lion for $300—cheaper than many pedigree dogs. Even that statistic slightly obscures the situation. 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. They are effectively worthless, because there are usually more people trying to unload them than wanting to purchase them, which is also why across America there are a surprising number of sizable big-cat sanctuaries, several with over a hundred animals.

  At the second-largest of these, the Exotic Feline Rescue Center in rural Indiana east of Terre Haute, where most of the 230 cats seem to come with their own tale of horror, the center’s founder, Joe Taft, tells me an incidental story that won’t leave my mind, because it seems to encapsulate, this time in a rather beautiful way, what people will do in the elusive pursuit of accord and communion between man and animal.

  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. Ten years ago, after a heart attack, Taft had a quintuple-bypass operation. 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. Nonetheless it was clearly impossible to allow a boisterous feline to clamber freely over someone who has just had major heart surgery. The solution was elegant, if unusual. 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.

  The common assumption after the catastrophe at Zanesville was that when it came to Terry Thompson and his animals, he must have been a terrible man doing a terrible thing. 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. Just as “good” private owners explain why they should exist and why “bad” private owners should not, sanctuaries may suggest that they should endure while private owners are phased out, and zoos can loftily assume there are clear reasons that they should be cherished while most kinds of non-zoo ownership should be frowned upon. 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. 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. (Everyone knows somewhere else worse.)

  Likewise, there is wide disagreement about what kind of human intervention or interaction can be beneficial or justified. 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? But what about declawing cats, something considered quite acceptable in parts of the exotic owners’ world? (Thompson was not unusual in routinely taking his cats to the vet for declawing.) What about giving primates TV to watch? Or taking them to the McDonald’s drive-thru? What about neutering, which is now considered not merely acceptable but responsible behavior when it comes to many nonexotic pets? What, then, about the way that male tigers are usually neutered in sanctuaries, but male lions are not, because when neutered they lose their manes? (Whose feelings, exactly, are being taken into account there?) What, too, of this practice of removing cubs from their big-cat mothers soon after birth and hand-rearing them by humans?