Catch me if you can

Five years on the lam with two full-grown elephants.

A COUPLE OF weeks ago I wrote about connecting with an animal trainer, Murray Hill, and finally meeting him in person in Shreveport, Louisiana. Murray was on the run with his two elephants, Tory and Dutchess—“the girls” he called them—and his tractor-trailer. He’d repossessed them from Dick Drake and his son, who’d bought them from Murray a few months earlier but fallen behind on their payments. While Murray and the girls were still at large, he agreed to let me write a nonfiction book about his odyssey.

The night he took off with the girls, his life became uniquely challenging. First problem: along with the elephants, the trailer contained a camel and a chimp belonging to the Drakes. Second problem: the elephants needed hundreds of pounds of food each day, and many gallons of water. Disposing of their waste was likewise a serious undertaking. Third problem: Murray had only a quarter tank of gas and no money.

Bunny Brooke was an old friend of Murray’s who lived in New Jersey and kept a crazy menagerie of animals she rented out for various purposes. Her Meadow Gate Farm was Murray’s first stop. Goats and donkeys and chickens overran the place, including the house, pissing on the carpets and sleeping on the furniture.

The Drakes tracked Murray down there, and so began a two-year standoff, during which legal proceedings were launched. When the case finally came before a judge, Murray refused all settlement offers. He was belligerent and disdainful in court. He was so poorly represented, and he so irritated the judge, that what started as a trial over rightful ownership of the rig turned into a rout for the Drakes. Sensing that the judge was about to award the rig and the girls back to the Drakes, Murray fled with the elephants off the night before the judgement was announced.

To research the book At Large, I more or less retraced his route across the States as he kept one step ahead of the Drakes and the law. Like circuses and racetracks, the exotic-animal world attracts a crazy mix of outcasts and misfits (as I was reminded watching Tiger King on Netflix). To follow in Murray’s path, and speak to people who knew him, was also to witness a dying way of life—the quasi-legal trade in exotic animals, the underground circus network, rigs full of animals put to work by rawboned guys who drank and slept on hay bales and settled disputes with the fists.

IN THE HUDSON Valley north of New York, I interviewed a Vietnam vet battling addiction who had allowed Murray and the girls to stay on his property until his patience finally ran out. An old Barnum and Bailey bear trainer in Middletown, New York, showed me the dozen bears he kept in cages in a building on his rural property. His dream was to restock the European countries that had had bear populations before people killed them for food during and after World War II. His daughter, having grown up among the bears, slept in their cages each night.

In Connecticut, Murray hid the girls on a majestic property owned by wealthy animals-rights acitivists in Manhattan. Part of the land was forested, so the girls had abundant vegetation for food and cover. Murray let them out of the trailer each day. Over time, the girls reconfigured the landscape. They uprooted bushes and shrubs, and stripped and killed trees, allowing other species to thrive. When they found their hoofprints filling with water, they gradually stamped out their own water hole.

The property was near a tony Connecticut town, not far from a place owned by Henry Kissinger and next door to one of Oscar de la Renta’s homes. Now and then, while the girls were browsing or frolicking in the water, a military helicopter thwacked overhead, presumably taking government officials to or from Kissinger’s. In summer, de la Renta held a big outdoor soiree, where celebrities and supermodels partied long into the night. Murray, in the rig’s fifth wheel, couldn’t sleep because of the revelry.

Murray kept an eye on the property when the owners were in New York. One evening he went up to check the house, forgetting to shut the opening between the trailer and the fifth wheel. Tory reached through and snagged his clothing. By the time he got back, she had eaten it all. His wallet was in his jeans. Without it he had no identification. For a few days he carefully deconstructed the girls’ manure. He did retrieve a belt buckle, and he fished a half-digested strip of denim out of Tory’s butt, but his wallet and ID were gone.

Murray figured there had to be a way to monetize the dung. He talked to the owners of a garden centre about marketing it as premium fertilizer, but the manure was so “hot” that it fried any plants it touched. Not a bad idea—he was just ahead of his time. The Dallas Zoo now diverts elephant dung from landfill sites by composting it for a year before and marketing it as “Zoo Poo” fertilizer. Murray also fashioned walking sticks out of downed branches, and made jewellery items—necklaces, earrings, bracelets—that have a folk-art quality.

Murray gifted me this cane he made while hiding the girls in Connecticut.

FOR THE BOOK to be half-decent, I knew, I had to interview the Drakes. My attempts to reach them at their property in Tehachapi, California, proved futile. In desperation I flew to Los Angeles, rented a car, and drove from LAX up through Lancaster and Palmdale to Tehachapi. For two days I popped into every gas station, post office, and cafe I could find, asking after the Drakes. Either nobody had heard of them or people were being wary and protective.

Without the Drakes’ side of the story, I was hooped. There wasn’t enough on the record to reconstruct what had happened, and I couldn’t rely on Murray’s inevitably self-serving account. I worried that I might have to pay back the advances I’d got from Canadian and U.S. publishers and throw in the towel. I was getting desperate.

On my last afternoon in Tehachapi I sent a mental missive into the universe, asking for help finding Dick Drake, whom I knew only from photos. Eating dinner in a cafe, I saw a fellow walk in whose appearance made my heart leap. As he got closer, however, my heart sank. Disconsolate, heading back to my motel at dusk, I passed a car wash where a middle-aged guy with blond hair was cleaning horse manure out of the back of his pickup truck.

I pulled up beside him and said, “How are you, Dick?”

“I’m good,” he said in that friendly American way. “Do I know you?”

The next day I was up at the Drakes’ desert property outside town, meeting Dick’s wife, Doy, and a couple of their kids. They were friendly and accommodating and eager to learn what I knew about Murray. Only then was I confident that I had the makings of a book-worthy story.

WHEN I FIRST laid eyes on Murray, answering my door at the Richmond Suites in Shreveport, the girls were hidden away just across the Texas border, near Jefferson, on a property owned by a gruff trainer named Bucky Steele. Murray’s plan was to smuggle the elephants into Mexico, though exactly why that seemed to him a promising idea he never made clear. Perhaps he thought they’d be out of reach of the Drakes and U.S. law. Border security in those pre-9/11 days was fairly lax; still, exactly how Murray hoped to accomplish such an improbable feat he wouldn’t tell me, I suspect because he had no idea himself.

In any event, he never got the chance to try. Someone tipped off the FBI—possibly Bucky himself who, like many people who’d harboured Murray along the way, had grown weary of his presence, his lack of funds, and his incessant griping—and Murray was arrested on a dirt road not far from Bucky’s farm. He ended up in jail for a bit, and the girls ultimately ended up back with the Drakes in California.

Not the ending to the story I had hoped for, but when the book came out it attracted Hollywood attention nonetheless. A couple of dozen TV networks, production companies, and studios inquired about film rights, and the story began its unlikely journey to the screen. I got a rude but fascinating education in the ways of La-La Land, which I’ll recount next week.

P.S. I’ve written in earlier posts about why short sentences are generally more effective than long ones, and why plain language is preferable to specialized jargon. Safe to say that Hart House ,at the University of Toronto, does not subscribe to The Ross Rules. This is a descsription of an art exhibition. (Thank you for posting this on FB, Martin Levin.)

As my daughter’s mother used to say when encountering incomprehensible bafflegab: “What was the middle part again?”