It’s impossible to talk about one Zanesville narrative without examining all three, so stay tuned for the full line-by-line autopsy + Q&As with all three of these fellas:

18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars,
2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque,
 and 1 Man Dead in Ohio
By Chris Heath
GQ
March 2012

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 84-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.

Animals
By Chris Jones
Esquire
February 6, 2012

The horses knew first. Terry Thompson kept dozens of them on his farm just west of Zanesville, Ohio, a suffering river town and the seat of Muskingum County. Most of the living things in Zanesville had been born in Zanesville, or in the county at least; Thompson was one of the few importers. He had a particular eye for the unwanted. His horses weren’t pretty animals except that they were horses: worn-out chestnuts, muddy grays, a semihandsome paint named Joe. There was even a donkey and a fat little pit pony in the mix, and now they were together in the pasture, more tightly packed than usual, running in a wide circle. They were rolling almost, the bunch of them moving slowly at first and now finding their old legs, picking up speed like starlings, like the bands of a hurricane.

Man or Beast?
By Jonah Ogles
Cincinnati magazine
March 2012

Terry Thompson knows all 56 of his animals by name. There is Solomon, the white tiger. There is Jocelyn, the pregnant tiger. Elsa, the lioness cub that puts her paws on the counter to snatch a piece of meat. Simba, the very first lion Terry ever owned, the one he bought as a sickly cub 14 years ago.