Informant: You’re crazy.
Thompson: That’s what they all say. You know, I’m crazy, but I live in the big house on the hill with the biggest horse and the fastest boat, fastest bike. 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
In 1977, Thompson went to an auction for exotic animals and bought his wife a baby tiger cub called Simba for her birthday. That was how it started. As time passed, people got used to the way he might turn up at the local airfield, say, with a baby bear or lion. Friends talk of driving to Columbus, a baby bear with them in the front cab, or having naps at his house with baby lions asleep on them. I also hear about how Thompson would tell people he had slept together with his big white tiger—the same one, presumably, that was with him at the end. And of the time when he and Marian—she seems to have been a full and enthusiastic participant in many of these adventures—turned up with a baby bear at a friend’s fiftieth birthday party, held in their friend’s newly decorated basement where everything—carpet, walls, furniture—was white, and seemed quite unperturbed by the upset caused when the bear did what bears tend to do on the nearest white rug.
He seems to have lived as though there weren’t a rule invented that didn’t deserve a little bending. Without a USDA license, he wasn’t allowed to supply animals for photo shoots and commercial events, though he sometimes got around it by using fellow owner Cindy Huntsman’s animals and accreditation. After his death, footage emerged showing Thompson handing one of his lion cubs to Heidi Klum on a fashion shoot, and in 2008 he appeared on the Rachael Ray show as an animal handler. His friends refer to other such outings—a shoot with Newt Gingrich, for instance—and say that he took animals on two different occasions to a Bloomberg corporate summer picnic in New York. Thompson also used to insist that he never sold exotic animals, but many in the animal world are scornful at this suggestion. “I was at an auction and he had a tiger that had ringworm and he had a baby monkey,” says Nancy Wider, another owner. “He sold the monkey outside of the auction, because it wasn’t legal to sell inside, for $3,500.”
The first big public warning sign that, when it came to Thompson’s animals, all might not be as it should came in 2005. He was charged with animal cruelty relating to some livestock he kept on his parents’ old property on the other side of town after three cows and a buffalo were said to have died of starvation and was sentenced to six months’ house arrest. In this era there were also numerous complaints of loose animals. His neighbor Fred Polk relates how two of Thompson’s Rottweilers got out and killed a couple of Polk’s calves. Thompson apologized and told Polk that he’d never see those dogs again, but three days later they were back and killed two more calves. “So we shot them,” says Polk. He remembers Thompson picking up the bodies. “Oh, he didn’t like it at all,” Polk remembers.
This is a [Mannlicher-Schoenauer]—see the twists in the barrel.
I do see that.
Okay, hand built in Austria. Okay, this is a .308, so I could have killed you when you came in the front gate. But of course I’ve never killed anyone in civilian life.
I understand.
I don’t even kill flies.
—Terry Thompson and a government informant in conversation at his home, secretly recorded in April 2008
It’s hard to tell whether Thompson pushed his luck more as he got older, or whether he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) adapt as the looser times of his youth tightened up, or whether his luck just ran out.
Friends say that Thompson loved having something that nobody else had, and he industriously accumulated objects that might fit the bill. “He always bragged,” says Marshall, “that when he sold his business he had 138 motorcycles, 138 cars, and 138 guns.” It was the guns that eventually landed him in real trouble. When the ATF raided his home in 2008, they took away 133 firearms and 36 rounds of ammunition. In the end, as his friends point out, Thompson was only convicted for ownership of a gun without a serial number (he said it was too old to have one) and the possession of a single machine gun. “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.” 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.
It was this ATF raid that also forced real scrutiny for the first time on his exotic animals. Thompson would speak of his grand plans for what he liked to call T’s Wild Kingdom: a large octagonal building, a pond for the bears. 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 road-kill deer. If there is a line that divides the avid collector from the hoarder, at some point Thompson seems to have crossed it.
“He would never sell anything,” says Marshall. “If he liked it, he kept it. And none of it was taken care of. It just broke my heart. He’d have a beautiful ’57 or ’55 Chevrolet and they’d be sitting there with half an inch of dust and chicken manure all over the top of it.” 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. It broke my heart.”
“He had an ego that you wouldn’t believe,” says Stilwell. “You couldn’t buy nothing off of him. He would rather say he owned it. Sitting up there, rusting away, is a brand-new ’34 Ford steel body.”
Toward the end, according to Cindy Huntsman, he seemed to treat his collection of animals in the same way. “He was tops in everything he did. You know, Terry always had to be number one—that was Terry,” she says. “For Terry, it started out as a love. In the later years it became very overwhelming because Terry went a little off the deep end. He really became a hoarder of the animals. He would have no sense of ‘Okay, this is too many.’ It was all about Terry after that. I asked, ‘Why, Terry? Why do you need so many?’ ‘Because I can. Because I can.’ Terry was Terry. He had a heart of gold. He just couldn’t keep his brain on the right track.”
Thompson went to the Federal Correctional Institution in Morgantown, West Virginia, on November 17, 2010. “I asked him what he was going to do when they turned the key on him,” says Spires. “He hesitated. Usually he never hesitated. And he said, ‘Well, I got through Vietnam …’”
When John Moore told the police about a letter accusing Marian Thompson of adultery that Thompson had received on the day before his death, the implication seemed to be that he had received some fresh, devastating news about his marriage. Whatever the exact truth, it wasn’t that simple, though different people suggest different time frames. “They had split before he actually went to prison,” says Huntsman. “He had accused her of turning him in for the guns. How could you blame a woman you have spent forty years of your life with for that, if you were sane? He was just going off the deep end. Terry became so verbally abusive to Marian. He didn’t trust anybody after that. He didn’t even trust his own wife.”
A bond that tied two people for so long can take time to break completely. Spires mentions that one morning he found a note from Marian in his mailbox, with a stamped addressed envelope, asking if he would write to Terry in prison. And sometime in this period, Marian told Sam Kopchak that Terry was giving guitar lessons behind bars. But if afterward Thompson would try to present his year of incarceration with the same old bravado, telling people that he was voted “Most Interesting Person in prison,” the events in his marriage clearly had taken a toll. “He said, you stand in line for two hours to get to the phone,” remembers Stilwell, “and then you call home and there’s no answer. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. You finally just stop.”
In August, Thompson was moved to a halfway hous
e in Columbus. He was released, forty pounds lighter than a year before, on the day of September 30. Perhaps it was the first of many telltale signs that Thompson, man of so many friends, didn’t call anyone. 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.
[Talking about the property on which he lived and died] It’s the high ground. It’s what the Indians wanted.
—Terry Thompson, secretly recorded in his home by a government informant, May 2008
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. She wasn’t, but Terry was. “He was pretty dejected. He was pretty distraught.” A lot of things seemed to be missing from the property and it was a mess: “The weeds were up over the cages—he couldn’t even get in his house when he got home.” Thompson seemed to need help, so Stilwell took up his Echo Weed Eater, and his lopper for the thicker growths, and his portable air compressor to pump up the flat tires of Thompson’s Dually truck.
Thompson did speak to other friends in those days. “He was a broken individual,” says Phil Cress. “Very depressed. It took his heart. The government stole his heart. How he was treated. What did he ever do to his country?” 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.
Three days before Thompson died, Chuck Spires, the guitar instructor, spoke with him for about twenty minutes. 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. When Thompson said that as soon as he had some in his pocket he’d be back for more guitar lessons, Spires told him not to worry about that.
On one of his last visits, Stilwell walked around the animal cages with Thompson. The cats looked healthy enough, apart from one who had ribs showing, and they were rubbing their heads against the fences. “That means they’re happy,” Stilwell says. But Thompson explained how upset he was that he used to be able to go around his own private zoo and call his animals by name but could no longer do so. “When he came back, they had been changed around in the cages. He didn’t know who was who.”
As they passed by the lion cages Thompson talked about the split. “He threw up his arms,” says Stilwell, “and said, ‘She can just have it all.’ And that’s when he then said, ‘I’m gonna die.’”
“Terry, are you sick?” asked Stilwell. “You got cancer or something?”
“No,” he replied. “But you’ll know when I go.”
[From a court deposition Thompson gave while incarcerated on March 28, 2011] Okay. Where do you plan to live when you are released … ?
At my house.
Okay. And you’ve not spoken to your wife since her deposition [five weeks earlier]?
No. Now, I may have talked to her a couple times on the phone. We didn’t talk about the deposition.
Okay. So, she hasn’t told you that during her deposition, she told me that you weren’t going to be living with her, you two were not going to be living together when you got out?
No. I don’t know that.
Okay. You’ve had no conversation with her about that at all?
No.
Naturally, they try to make sense of it.
“He felt betrayed by the government, by the army, by society in general,” claims Marshall. “Betrayed by his family. And the straw that broke the camel’s back was, when he went to jail, he came back and his wife had abandoned him. This was his high school sweetheart. And it just broke his heart—this is what I think. I think it was the only way he felt that he could really punish Marian was to take something that she loved, too. Because she loved the animals as much as he did. They’d never had kids. So these animals were like her children. In the bottom of my heart, I think Terry was thumbing his nose at everybody, and he wanted to destroy that which Marian loved the most. I don’t know how else to explain it.” “I actually think that he expected this when he got home and kind of planned it,” says Stilwell. “That’s what happens when they send a guy to prison that don’t deserve to go there.”
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.’”
“I think he knew when he did what he did that he was going to put himself and Zanesville, Ohio, on the map,” Stilwell says. “And he did it. I think he would say, ‘That’s just what I expect.’”
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. Their assumption was that he had been thinking about the animals, and they couldn’t work out his train of thought. Maybe there’s a letter or a note that explains it all. Maybe Marian understands. But I lean toward another theory—that in the end the animals were just what they’ve usually been in human history: incidental collateral damage. 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. “My father didn’t like animals,” she told me. “And he always used to say, ‘I don’t like animals but I would never hurt one. The animal lovers are the ones that hurt them.’”
But for those who’d prefer a Rosebud moment, here’s one more story from forty years earlier, from the time when an Ohio youth with beautiful blue eyes found himself forsaken and lost, deep in the kind of darkness and damage that some never completely escape. There are all kinds of ways that tragedy and fate can reach across decades to taunt us and trap us.
“When he was in Vietnam,” says Mike Marshall, “he told me that he was befriended by a little monkey. He lived in a hardback tent—you know, a wood frame and a wood floor—and apparently a monkey kinda befriended him. And it planted the seed of caring for wild animals for the rest of his life. He took care of that monkey most of the time he was over there. It kept him sane while he was there. I don’t know what happened to it when he left.”
New York Times Magazine
FINALIST—REPORTING
A staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, Robert F. Worth has been reporting on the Middle East since 2003. In the spring of 2012, Worth traveled to Libya with what his editors described as “the broadest mandate: to try to understand the country now that Muammar Qaddafi was gone.” What happened next sounds like a Hollywood thriller. Worth talked his way into a makeshift prison run by one of the dozens of militias that now controlled the country. There he found eleven supporters of the old regime—men who had once tortured those who now held them captive. In the days that followed, Worth watched and listened then brought back a story that the National Magazine Award judges described as “bravely reported and brilliantly written.”
Robert F. Worth
Did You Think About the Six People You Executed?
One night last September, a prisoner named Naji Najjar was brought, blindfolded and handcuffed, to an abandoned military base on the outskirts of Tripoli. A group of young men in camouflage pushed him into a dimly lit interrogation room and forced him to his knees. The commander of the militia, a big man with disheveled hair and sleepy eyes, stood behind Najjar. “What do you want?” the commander said, clutching a length of industrial pipe.
“What do you mean?” the prisoner said.
“What do you want?” the commander repeated. He paused. “Don’t you remember?”
Of course Najjar remembered. Until a few weeks earlier, he was a notorious guard at one of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s prisons. Then Tripoli fell, and the same men he’d beaten for so long tracked him down at his sister’s house and dragged him to their base. Now they were mimicking his own sadistic ritual. Every day, Najjar greeted the prisoners with the words What do you want? forcing the
m to beg for the pipe—known in the prison by its industrial term, PPR—or be beaten twice as badly. The militia commander now standing behind him, Jalal Ragai, had been one of his favorite victims.
“What do you want?” Jalal said for the last time. He held the very same pipe that had so often been used on him.
“PPR!” Najjar howled, and his former victim brought the rod down on his back.
I heard this story in early April from Naji Najjar himself. He was still being held captive by the militia, living with eleven other men who had killed and tortured for Qaddafi in a large room with a single barred window and mattresses piled on the floor. The rebels had attached a white metal plate onto the door and a couple of big bolts, to make it look more like a prison. Najjar’s old PPR pipe and falga, a wooden stick used to raise prisoners’ legs in order to beat them on the soles of the feet, rested on a table upstairs. They had gotten some use in the first months of his confinement, when former victims and their relatives came to the base to deliver revenge beatings. One rebel laughed as he told me about a woman whose brother had his finger cut off in prison: when she found the man who did it, she beat him with a broom until it broke. Now, though, the instruments of torture were mostly museum pieces. After six months in captivity, Najjar—Naji to everyone here—had come to seem more clown than villain, and the militiamen had appointed him their cook. Slouching in an armchair among a group of rebels who smoked and chatted casually, Najjar recounted his strange journey from guard to prisoner. “One of the visitors once broke the PPR on me,” he told me.
Best American Magazine Writing 2013 Page 19