Sergeant Blake sounded his horn in front of the house a few more times, then slowly steered his cruiser back through the tensile thicket of surrounding animal stares. Moments later, John Moore, the Thompsons’ animal caretaker, arrived to do a nightly feeding. When Moore insisted that Thompson must be somewhere on the premises, Blake had him get in his cruiser, and the two drove back up the hill to search the house.

The disparity between John Moore’s perspective on the scene unfolding that evening and Sergeant Blake’s could not have been more stark. Moore, a longtime friend of Terry Thompson’s and full-time caretaker for the past eight years, had helped the Thompsons raise all the beasts in their menagerie. An exotic-animal owner himself who is currently working toward a degree in wildlife zoology at Ohio University, Moore felt surrounded by outsize loving pets whose dispositions, both physical and behavioral, were utterly familiar to him. As for Sergeant Blake, he felt, well, only surrounded.

“He was scared to death,” recalled Moore, who until our conversation, nearly a year later, had refused to speak with anyone in the media on record about the events of that night. “It was kind of funny. At one point I needed to get the officer into the house so we could look for Terry. I had to raise the garage door, and the officer follows right behind me, and there are two male lions I had to move out of the way to get to the side door. The officer handed me his shotgun, and I told him, ‘What do I need that for?’ I just went up and grabbed the lions by their manes and moved them out of the way. I had bottle-fed those cats in the house. If I’m standing there telling you that these lions will not hurt you, do whatever you have to do, then I’m telling you from experience. I said, ‘I’m not going to endanger your life.’ I would never, ever put anyone’s life in danger.”

It wasn’t until Blake and Moore had started back down the entrance road that they happened to spot the lifeless body of Terry Thompson. He was lying flat on his back off to the side of a dirt drive between the rear of his house and an adjacent barn, the top of his head blown open, his pants pulled down below his knees, his underwear completely shredded, his inner thighs and genitals gone. One of the eighteen adult tigers that he and Marian had raised from cubs stood by his fallen master, alternately guarding over and feeding upon him. Chicken parts were scattered across the drive. Alongside the body lay the pair of blue bolt cutters Thompson had used to open some of his animals’ cages, as well as the stainless-steel Ruger .357 Magnum revolver with which he had shot himself through the roof of his mouth, thus setting in motion a widening gyre of pending disaster: The fully grown versions of those once-cuddly fairground cubs were now wandering loose around the collapsed core of the only world they had ever known.