I was just 7 years old when Terry Thompson released 56 exotic animals into the hills outside Zanesville before allegedly killing himself.
It was 2011, and I wasn’t old enough to know the national scale of the story, but I remember the murmurs from family members.
I cast those murmurs aside pretty quickly. My family had rarely, if ever, talked about Terry in front of me. I knew we had Thompsons in the family tree, but I also had classmates with the same last name. It was common enough to my second-grade brain to ignore it.
Then, some years later, I was riding through Zanesville in the backseat of my grandmother’s car with my younger sister. I remember the fog in the afternoon sky, clouds covering the sun, and the general eerie atmosphere of the scene.
“Up that hill,” my grandmother, Paula Thompson, said, “that’s where cousin Terry released all those animals.”
I needed a reminder of the incident she was talking about. I’d never really cared to hear the details before then. I hadn’t yet learned basic multiplication when the tigers, lions, bears, wolves and other extremely dangerous wild creatures were set free.
I learned on that drive who he was.
He was a Vietnam War veteran, the world record drag-boat racer, and an animal handler on Wild Kingdom who handed supermodel Heidi Klum a lion club for a photoshoot in 2008.
I learned about the guy whose neighbors loved him, and family despised him. A person of two sides rarely anybody got to see. The man who first collected guns, then exotic cars, before animals came into the picture.
He was also the crazy man estranged from my grandmother and her family, who lived tucked inside his house — on a 73-acre plot just outside Zanesville — collecting zoo animals while I collected Pokémon cards.
“When I talked to the people in Zanesville who knew him, they would say, ‘Oh no, it wasn’t his fault.’ They were sure the police had set him up,” my grandmother said. “They’d say Terry was the most wonderful person, and I thought, ‘Boy, he got to you, didn’t he?'”
To say the least Terry was troubled. He had spent time in prison on federal firearm charges, a few people close to him had died, and his wife had left him. His neighbors complained about some of the animals periodically escaping from his property.
It all came to a head on Oct. 18, 2011, when authorities say Thompson unlocked the enclosures for his 56 creatures and then shot himself. The large predators immediately escaped into the nearby hills, drawing an almost immediate statewide police presence.
Jack Hannah of the Columbus Zoo was dispatched to the scene to help advise officers tracking, finding and eliminating the impending threats to the community. It was a bizarre, stunning story that drew headlines across the nation even as it was unfolding live on CNN and other media outlets of the time.
Terry Thompson was my first cousin, twice removed. I felt silly for dismissing the murmurs in the kitchen and living room those years ago.
The most interesting part for me as a kid was bringing it up every once in a while. It was my fun fact for middle school icebreakers, which I’d then have to explain to other kids.
I didn’t really understand the gravity of the story until my senior year of college. I was in a class called narrative journalism at Ohio University, taught by Prof. Kelly Ferguson – to this day, one of the most influential classes for me as a writer.
The class was discussion-based. Each week, we’d read two or three feature stories, taking notes on characterization, storytelling, and everything else that turns a real-life event into a page-turning story.
One Monday afternoon, as I was scrambling to catch up before Tuesday’s discussion, I clicked on one of our articles for that week. It was a feature by GQ titled “18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars, 2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque, and 1 Man Dead in Ohio,” published in February, 2012.
The article was incredible, and I learned much more from it than I had from the quick interactions with family members on the matter. I sent it to my grandmother, who said she didn’t know some of the details nestled in that story.
It told of Thompson’s neighbor finding a black bear, then a lion in his backyard, before his mother called 911.
It talked about the officers on the scene lining up the bodies of the bengal tigers they had to kill to protect the public, and the harrowing photo of the scene that set the 2011 internet aflame.
It talked about the PTSD Thompson suffered from, and how it made him quick to anger. One neighbor theorized he’d seen too much of Agent Orange during his time in Vietnam.
When it came time for my class to discuss the story, I eventually made note of my relationship to Thompson. The distinction I had to make clear was that it was purely blood. I never had a relationship with him, nor had I met him. Even his closest family growing up hadn’t seen or heard much of him in the years before this incident.
When I brought this up to my editor at The Source for the first time, I made the same distinction. I knew Terry through stories and was far too young to feel the weight of the events that surrounded him as they occurred.
The way my family understood him, Terry yearned to be known for something. When he broke records, he moved on to the next thing, attempting to be the local spectacle that papers wrote about.
When he set those animals free, my grandmother believes it was out of love for his animals.
“As much as Terry could love anything, he loved animals,” she said. “I’m sure he thought at the end that that was his last way of showing those animals he loved them. He’s going to set them free, but I don’t think he was in his right mind when he did it.”
It’s been 15 years since Terry Thompson released those ill-fated 56 animals into the southern Ohio countryside. Forty-eight were shot dead, six were captured and two were presumed eaten by their fellow creatures.
To me, that’s all my cousin will ever be known by, and I don’t see that changing. Maybe that’s what he wanted.
“If he couldn’t be famous, I think he wanted to be infamous,” my grandmother said.
