The Best American Magazine Writing 2013

Sid Holt, The American Society of Magazine Editors, Sid Holt, The American Society of Magazine Editors

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780231537063
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Literature

Chosen by the American Society of Magazine Editors, the stories in this anthology include National Magazine Award–winning works of public interest, reporting, feature writing, and fiction. This year's selections include Pamela Colloff (Texas Monthly) on the agonizing, decades-long struggle by a convicted murderer to prove his innocence; Dexter Filkins (The New Yorker) on the emotional effort by an Iraq War veteran to make amends for the role he played in the deaths of innocent Iraqis; Chris Jones (Esquire) on Robert A. Caro's epic, ongoing investigation into the life and work of Lyndon Johnson; Charles C. Mann (Orion) on the odds of human beings' survival as a species; and Roger Angell (The New Yorker) on aging, dying, and loss. The former infantryman Brian Mockenhaupt (Byliner) describes modern combat in Afghanistan and its ability both to forge and challenge friendships; Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic) reflects on the complex racial terrain traversed by Barack Obama; Frank Rich (New York) assesses Mitt Romney's ambiguous candidacy; and Dahlia Lithwick (Slate) looks at the current and future implications of an eventful year in Supreme Court history. The volume also includes an interview on the art of screenwriting with Terry Southern from The Paris Review and an award-winning short story by Stephen King published in Harper's magazine.

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.

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 d...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Fear of a Black President
• Who in God’s Name Is Mitt Romney?
• It’s Not About the Law, Stupid and The Supreme Court’s Dark Vision of Freedom and Where Is the Liberal Outrage?
• The Innocent Man
• 18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars, 2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque, and 1 Man Dead in Ohio
• Did You Think About the Six People You Executed?
• A Life Worth Ending
• Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives
• School of Hate
• Atonement
• The Big Book
• Terry Southern: The Art of Screenwriting
• Mega: Ten Days Inside the Mansion—and the Mind—of Kim Dotcom, the Most Wanted Man on the Internet
• Portrait of a Lady and Social Animal and We’re All Helmut Newton Now
• Over the Wall
• Batman and Robin Have an Altercation
• The Living and the Dead
• State of the Species
• Permissions
• List of Contributors