“Our bear had been on the ground for about three months when we found it,” said Fran Wiley. “It was decomposed.”
“Our bear was a female,” says Wiley, who was the assistant agent in charge of GBI’s drug enforcement office and tasked with the case. Additionally, “our bear did not have many claws because we took some of the claws to get the bear’s DNA so we could determine the age of the bear.”
Perhaps most saliently, “Our bear could not have been taxidermy,” she explains. “Our bear had been on the ground for about three months when we found it…so it was decomposed. In fact, the people at the crime lab were so mad that we brought this bear in because it stunk up the whole lab. They would’ve incinerated this after they did all their testing. They would not have kept this thing.”VanMeter confirmed that Kentucky for Kentucky’s Cocaine Bear claim is a tall tale.
Sometime in the early ’90s, the park and its facilities were evacuated ahead of an approaching wildfire. The employees took the artifacts with them and put them in temporary storage in a nearby town. Of course…they went missing. The Cocaine Bear surfaced next in, appropriately enough, Las Vegas. Country star Waylon Jennings had found it, bought it, and gifted it to his friend Ron Thompson as an inside joke. When Thompson died in 2009, his estate went to auction and the bear was sold.
When we got wind of this, we contacted Nellis Auction House on the off chance we’d be able to figure something out. And we did. We found out who the bear had been sold to…and we contacted him. Sadly, he had passed away, but we were able to speak to his wife, who told us we were free to take Cocaine Bear off her hands for the low, low price of zero dollars .
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