Former Bannock County sheriff recalls one of ‘the most difficult service calls in law enforcement history’

Editor’s note: This is the seventh in a series of stories about former sheriffs in eastern Idaho.

IDAHO FALLS — When William Lynn retired as Bannock County Sheriff, he was coming off a case that’s regarded by some state officials as one of the “most difficult calls for service in law enforcement history.”

It was 1996 and the 53-year-old Inkom man had been in office for seven years. The owners of Ligertown, a lion-tiger breeding compound in Lava Hot Springs, had been charged with more than 100 misdemeanors. Dozens of the animals had escaped the year before, which resulted in a weeklong effort by multiple law enforcement agencies, Idaho Fish and Game and a wildlife sanctuary to recapture them.

Law enforcement officials shot and killed 17 ligers in the first 24 hours of the investigation. It’s an incident that garnered national attention, and something Lynn remembers as “an absolute nightmare.”

Lynn considers it the highlight of his 25-year career in law enforcement, and he’s pleased with how most of it turned out. Months after the court case concluded, Lynn was forced to retire and that’s one thing he wishes would’ve turned out differently.

“They had implemented term limits and I had to get a job before I lost my job,” Lynn tells EastIdahoNews.com. “Two years later, both the state courts and the U.S. Supreme Court said that term limits were not lawful.”

Lynn recalls that Idahoans at the time had voted for term limits for U.S. representatives and senators, but the way the law was written said ‘all elected officials,’ which included county and state officials. Rather than fight it, Lynn peacefully stepped down.

After two years of debate, the measure was overturned, and term limits for elected officials were rescinded.

“If I would’ve stuck it out, I could’ve run (for sheriff again), and I think, gotten elected several more times,” says Lynn. “I loved my deputies, I loved the county, I loved the work … and damn, I miss being sheriff.”

Lynn went on to work as the executive director of the Idaho Sheriffs Association and jail standards coordinator until 2005 and operated his own criminal justice consulting firm until 2018. He started writing poetry many years ago while serving in the Air Force during Vietnam, and is publishing a book of poetry next spring.

Nearly 30 years after he left office, Lynn shares his memories of what happened in Ligertown.

Ligertown

The evening of September 20, 1995 started out like any other for those that lived in and around Lava Hot Springs. Dotti Martin and Robert Fieber housed numerous lions and tigers at the Ligertown compound near Fish Creek mountain.

“Robert and Dotti were sovereign citizens and anti-government. They wanted to charge people to see their ligers (a lion-tiger mix). They started with just a few animals and bred them,” Lynn remembers. “(The facility) was terrible. It was made out of chicken wire, snow fence and borrowed timber.”

And the animals were reportedly not being taken care of very well.

“The poor animals, their health and teeth,” Lorin Nielsen, who was serving as Lynn’s chief deputy at the time, told KPVI in a 2020 interview. “They had not been eating a real good diet. They did not have a veterinarian come in there and check to see how they were doing. They were never meant to be somebody’s pet.”

One woman who toured the compound in the 1990s with a scout troop remembers being concerned by the shredded upholstery in the owner’s vehicles, the foul stench that permeated the property and the abundance of animal carcasses. She explained the crew seemed to know it was a shady operation because they were nervous about their group’s presence. The scout uniforms made them look like officials.

Over time, the number of lions and tigers at the compound got bigger and the breeding process “got out of hand.” Late on Sept. 20, a lion escaped. A neighbor who owned a ranch nearby found it stalking his cattle, says Lynn.

When a deputy arrived, Fieber was trapped underneath a lion on the roof of the compound.

“The deputy asked, ‘What do you want me to do, Bob?’ Robert said, ‘Shoot it!’ And the deputy did,” says Lynn. “That was not the lion that the neighbor saw so we knew we had two lions out.”

The sheriff’s office used every resource at its disposal and the hunt for the missing lions was officially underway.

Lynn says Fieber was flippant with him when he questioned him.

“How many lions do you have?” Lynn asked Fieber.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Fieber replied, according to Lynn.

“Bob, we’re trying to contain this situation. We know we have lions out. You’re two miles from Lava Hot Springs. It’s the dead of night, and we’ve got to do something,” Lynn said to Fieber.

“Kiss my a**,” Fieber responded, and left.

Martin ended up getting scratched by one of the animals and Lynn says the couple went to the hospital for “very superficial injuries.”

A SWAT team later determined 42 lions had escaped. At that time, night vision equipment was not available, which made the situation even more risky.

“After about 12 hours, we had to put down 17 lions that were outside the compound,” says Lynn. “We also had 44 wolf hybrids (Fieber and Martin) owned that were caged at the time, but we had to do something with them (so we had a place to put the lions). We had a mess on our hands.”

The next day, authorities warned anyone living within 40 square miles of the compound to be on the lookout. While they were searching for the missing lions, Lynn says the biggest challenge was figuring out what to do with them if they found them. It wasn’t a situation any of them had trained for, and Lynn says they were making it up as they went along.

But the community was cooperative and supportive of their efforts, he says. Businesses donated cat food so authorities could feed the captured lions. A chicken farm provided chickens to feed them as well, and Lynn says the owners of the Lava Hot Springs condos made their facilities available to law enforcement during the investigation.

“This community really came together for Ligertown,” he says.

That week, the sheriff’s office was inundated with calls from people all over the world. Some of them were from people with concerns and others were simply “obnoxious,” Lynn says. One of the callers was Hollywood actress Tippi Hedren, who’s most famous for her role in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” She apparently owns a wildlife refuge and asked if she could have one of the lion cubs.

At one point, a lady named Martine Colette from southern California called and asked if she could help. She owned a 160-acre wildlife sanctuary and offered her services.

“I’d had so many interesting people call … and I really didn’t take her seriously,” Lynn recalls, saying he hung up on her.

“About the third day in, nobody had gotten any sleep. We were frustrated. We were starting to build fences at the county fairgrounds to contain the lions,” says Lynn. “All of a sudden, we looked down the road and there were five semi trucks with flatbeds and cages.”

A woman wearing an Australian pith helmet, khaki shorts and khaki pants approached Lynn.

“I’m Martine Colette, the woman you hung up on,” she said, according to Lynn. “Do you want my help or not?”

“Miss Colette, I gotta tell you — we don’t know what we’re doing. We’re doing the best we can, but we don’t have any money to hire you to help us,” Lynn responded.

“Not once in talking to you have I talked about money,” Colette said, pointing her finger at Lynn’s face. “I’m here for the animals. Do you want my help or not? Make a decision.”

Seeing that Colette was prepared and knew what she was doing, Lynn gratefully accepted her help.

Up to this point, Lynn says Fish and Game officials had struggled to tranquilize the lions. The darts they were using weren’t very effective and the hide on the animals was so thick. Colette had a veterinarian on her team that took care of it with a blow gun. Lynn says the vet knew exactly what to put in the dart and he would sneak through the bushes, and shoot it. Twenty minutes later, the lion was unconscious.

“(Colette and her team) were a Godsend and she was amazing,” says Lynn.

After several days, the Sheriff’s Office borrowed an infrared helicopter to make sure all the lions had been captured. They felt certain all the lions were accounted for until a man in the Dempsey Creek area called about a week later to report he’d shot a low-crouching lion in the weeds near Lava Hot Springs Elementary.

“He knew it had to be the shot of his life and he nailed it,” says Lynn. “That was the last lion.”

The outcome

In 2020, Nielsen told KPVI they felt the animals posed a “clear and present danger” to the public and no officer took pride in killing any of the cats.

“I don’t think anybody that shot a lion thought they had just taken a trophy. They felt this was something that this animal had no say in the matter,” Nielsen said.

Colette ended up taking the remaining lions back to California, and the court ultimately awarded them to her. The lions at Colette’s facility were a major attraction for many years after the incident, Lynn recalls. Colette passed away last year, according to a Facebook post by the sanctuary she owned. Her sanctuary is no longer in operation.

In the wake of the debacle, Colette wrote a letter to Lynn expressing thanks for the “tremendous job” the Bannock County Sheriff’s Office displayed in the rescue effort.

“The dedication, skill and efficiency demonstrated by you and your fellow officers will long be remembered and appreciated by my rescue team,” Colette wrote.

Several months later in a letter to Governor Phil Batt, she praised Lynn for his “tireless effort” in “doing everything humanly possible to assist us in the safe capture of these unfortunate animals.”

Only one person was injured during the ordeal. A fish and game officer was bitten by one of the wolf hybrids after getting ensnared by it. Lynn says the injuries were minor. The wolf hybrids were sent to a facility in Colorado, where they were ultimately put down due to excessive inbreeding and “nasty temperament.”

Many of Fieber and Martin’s charges were dropped and neither of them ended up serving any jail time for the misdemeanors, according to Nielsen. Idaho apparently did not have felony animal abuse charges at the time. Lynn says a judge banned the couple from ever owning wild animals again.

After the trial, the couple ended up getting divorced. They’ve gotten back together in recent years, according to Lynn.

Today, the land where Ligertown once sat is now occupied by a modern home. Nielsen remembered a “horrendous” smell on the property because there were “six feet of (animal) feces” in the soil. It was a public health concern, and Lynn says 14 inches of soil were hauled away and replaced with fresh soil.

“They also hauled away a condemned trailer and all makeshift buildings and enclosures, finally leaving bare land,” says Lynn. “The county foreclosed on the condemned property and eventually sold the land.”

‘I’d probably do it again’

Twenty-seven years after leaving office, Lynn recalls his time in law enforcement with fondness, and he’s proud of the team’s efforts in Ligertown.

“It was a big deal back then. It was certainly my most involved case and some amazing human beings pulled it off,” Lynn says.

He reflects on how much things have changed for law enforcement officers, noting that he was first hired as a deputy in 1968 on the spot without any training or background check. Such a thing would not happen today, he says. Still, he’s seen a decrease in the quality of law enforcement personnel nationwide because many police agencies have lowered their standards.

“Nobody wants to do it anymore, and so you make tough (hiring) decisions … and I think that’s why we’re seeing so many failures by law enforcement personnel,” he says.

Lynn is proud of the high standards employed by the Bannock County Sheriff’s Office over the years, and if given the opportunity, Lynn says he’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

“It’s only ’cause I’m a junkie,” says Lynn.

An excerpt from a poem he wrote expresses his thoughts about his former colleague, Lorin Nielsen, current Sheriff Tony Manu and the other uniformed men and women serving Bannock County today.

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