The Wauchula Woods Accord by Charles Siebert

Author:Charles Siebert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

I decided to drive due east that day, straight to the other side of Missouri. Not to meet Ripley’s family, but to visit yet another facility along the lines of Savanahland that I’d read about in the course of tracking down Ripley. A place called the Missouri Primate Foundation, outside the town of Festus, forty-five miles south of St. Louis. Nothing like a couple of near misses to steel one’s resolve.

Originally known as “Chimp Party,” the Missouri Primate Foundation presents itself as a sanctuary for captive chimpanzees—outcasts of zoos, research labs, and the entertainment industry. It is therefore able to gain tax-exempt status, all the while breeding and selling baby chimps as either pets or future entertainers, as well as renting out its own chimpanzees for such things as kids’ birthday parties, television commercials, and promotional videos. At the time of my visit, the Missouri Primate Foundation’s website still featured a photo of chimps dressed up in diapers and Santa’s caps against a quilted backdrop of waving stars and stripes.

Chimp Party, I also learned, had a calamitous breakout incident of its own in 2001. It seems to come with the territory. According to local newspaper accounts, the facility’s co-owner, Connie Casey, whose husband, Mike, was on the road that day with some of their chimps making a TV commercial, had failed to adequately secure one of the cages, and three of their chimps soon found themselves roaming the back roads of Festus, a rural, woodsy enclave of small clapboard houses with fenced-in yards.

The chimps ended up in the yard of a neighbor whose seventeen-year-old son was just arriving home in a pickup truck with two friends as Connie Casey was madly trying to rein the animals in. The seventeen-year-old claimed the chimps were threatening him and his friends, surrounding the truck, preventing them from getting out. According to neighbors, many of whom knew these very chimps, having had them over to their houses for their children’s birthday parties, the chimps were merely out walking around, not threatening anyone.

The boys eventually made their way into the house. Connie Casey, meanwhile, had managed to get one tranquilizer dart into the oldest of the chimps, the twenty-eight-year-old Suzy. It was then—according to a number of neighbors and some local contractors who’d been working at the Caseys’ compound when the breakout occurred and were helping to recapture the chimps—that the seventeen-year-old emerged from his house with a shotgun.

With two of the chimps a safe distance away, the youth set his sights on Suzy, nearly unconscious by then, druggily picking flowers at the end of the driveway. Against the pleas of Casey and her helpers, he shot Suzy. When the other chimps gathered beside their mortally wounded companion, he threatened to kill them as well, but Casey and the contractors gathered around the chimps and managed to shield them with their bodies.

I made it from Savanahland to Festus in just over three and a half hours, pulling up at about three o’clock that afternoon before

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