Waylon Jennings once owned the bear from Elizabeth Banks’ movie ‘Cocaine Bear’
The plot of Elizabeth Banks’ new film Cocaine Bear sounds far too bizarre to be true. Starring Keri Russell, Margo Martindale, Ray Liotta and more, it tells the tale of a black bear who ingests $15million worth of Columbian cocaine and goes on a bloody rampage. It’s the kind of story low-budget monster flicks were made for, and I think that’s what a lot of people were expecting Cocaine Bear to be: a cheap thrill. It’s slowly becoming apparent that Banks’ directorial debut is far more than that. It’s based on a true story, for one thing.
Speaking to Variety, screenwriter Jimmy Warden explained how he came across the story of ‘Pablo Escobear: the cocaine bear’ while scrolling through Twitter. “I was like, ‘What the fuck is that?’” Warden recalled. “I went down a complete rabbit hole, just clicking and clicking and clicking.”
As he probed deeper, Warden learned about the death of a drug trafficker called Andrew Thronton II, who had died in a parachute accident in September 1985 during a drug drop over the Appalachian Mountains. When the authorities found his body in a driveway in Knoxville, they discovered nearly $15million worth of cocaine strapped to his jacket. When the remains of a black bear were discovered alongside 40 opened packages from that same drop four months later, it didn’t take much to put two and two together.
Thornton, a former lawyer, had died during a flight from Columbia to northern Georgia, where he was supposed to drop the packages of cocaine. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation later established that he had fallen to his death after he jumped from the plane, “hit his head on the tail of the aircraft” and subsequently failed to open his parachute before hitting the ground. He was found in Knoxville wearing a bulletproof vest, night vision goggles and a pair of Gucci loafers. The unoccupied aircraft eventually crashed into the mountains of North Carolina, where it was found near nine more duffel bags of cocaine. The tenth duffel bag was found three months later in the Chattahoochee National Forest next to the remains of a black bear that had clearly ripped open the packages and overdosed.
As the New York Times reported at the time: “A 175-pound black bear apparently died of an overdose of cocaine after discovering a batch of the drug, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said today. The cocaine was apparently dropped from a plane piloted by Andrew Thornton, a convicted drug smuggler who died Sept. 11 in Knoxville, Tenn., because he was carrying too heavy a load while parachuting. The bureau said the bear was found Friday in northern Georgia among 40 opened plastic containers with traces of cocaine.”
According to the retired medical examiner who performed the bear’s necropsy, “Its stomach was literally packed to the brim with cocaine. There isn’t a mammal on the planet that could survive that. Cerebral haemorrhaging, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, heart failure, stroke. You name it, that bear had it.” In the mid-1990s, the body of the bear – now stuffed – was saved from an encroaching wildfire and put in temporary storage in nearby Dalton town. A month later, it was gone.
It was later discovered to have fallen into the hands of country music icon and taxidermy enthusiast Waylon Jennings, who had purchased it from the pawn shop owner who had stolen it from its storage unit. When Jennings was told about the Thornton episode, he explained that he’d already heard the story from Las Vegas Hustler Richard Thompson, a close friend of Jennings and, potentially, one of Thornton’s clients.
