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Earl Turner's fabrication and slander
Let’s talk about the real reason for Earl Turner’s fabrication about Dean Ripa. In the mid 1990s, Earl Turner began interviewing Dean Ripa for an article he proposed to write on reproducing bushmasters. Earl phone-interviewed Dean Ripa for about two months, pumping him for information about how he bred bushmasters, on the pretext of writing an article in which Dean would be credited as a personal communication. When the article finally appeared in Reptiles Magazine, there was no mention of Dean at all!
And yet Dean was the primary source of the information!
Earl signed the article as his own, stealing the information Dean had freely given him as though he had generated it himself.
The rightly angered Dean Ripa wrote Reptiles editor, Phillip Samuelson, accusing Earl Turner of plagiarism. Randal Berry also wrote Samuelson letters to protest Earl’s plagiarism. Samuelson, having a strong sense of right, published Dean Ripa’s page-long letter in Reptiles refuting Turner’s claim for the whole world to see. Now Turner was caught with his pants down. He got very mad indeed – and, in fact, went mad, ravenous for revenge against Dean Ripa.
To get this revenge, Turner began a smear campaign against Dean Ripa. Significantly, he began attacking Randal Berry as well in much the same fashion, generating as many false stories as his furtive (I will not say fertile) imagination could come up with.
Probably Earl thought that by smearing these people it would get his “good name” back. Unfortunately, it was too late for the name “Earl Turner.” Earl had already destroyed his name from having offended so many other people (e.g., Gladys Porter Zoo director Pat Burchfield, curator Colette Adams, to name a few) and cheated so many collectors in spurious reptile deals (his isolated residence in South Texas gave him a certain immunity from his victim’s reprisals) that even to mention the name “Earl Turner” was to provoke gasps or sniggers among serious professionals. Only novices in the reptile game would now take Earl Turner seriously – that is, young people he could influence with his big stories and then later take to the cleaners. A pathological liar and inventor of tales, the truth was simply not in Earl Turner. This fact was complicated by his drinking problem where he was prone to get on the telephone (or Internet) and invent wild stories about himself and his reptile collection. Some of these stories, by the way, are quite memorable. Earl’s legendary “bushmaster bite” in the mountains of Costa Rica while he was hunting snakes with Pat Burchfield. (Note: Pat Burchfield has never been to Costa Rica with Earl Turner; Pat Burchfield, pers. comm.). Earl’s breedings of rare tortoises which he publicized in newspapers, despite the fact that the tortoises were really bred at Gladys Porter Zoo, to which Earl had merely loaned the specimens and then claimed his share of the progeny (pers. comm. Collete Adams, Curator). Earl passes himself off as a breeder of rare wildlife in order to get in the spotlight – even if it means stealing somebody else’s spotlight. The list of Earl’s fabrications are enormous and do not bear recounting here. Indeed, Earl generates new fabrications with each new drink he takes.
Now let’s look at Earl’s bizarre accusation about Dean Ripa. Does anybody seriously believe that our paranoid airlines companies would accept even harmless snakes packed in a flimsy banana crate? Does anybody seriously believe that a breeder would send an animal costing roughly $2000 dollars, that he has lovingly cared for right out of the egg, raised to adulthood with state-of-the-art technology, and then turn around and ship that expensive animal in a carton so fragile that it would be crushed to death during shipping, and subject to every draft of cold, with the animal arriving with pneumonia as a result? Earl is right about one thing, the snake Dean sent was inside a banana crate – packed inside a heavy outer plywood container that was also lined with Styrofoam! In short, the banana box was one of three inner containers, including the bag, exactly to Delta’s requirements. Earl’s not too clever sophistry was to leave that part out so as to win sympathy for one of his typically insane stories. Nobody loves attention so much as a man who cannot tell the truth.
Next, let’s mention the purported length of the snake that Turner says was in the banana box. He says this snake was 7 ft long. While things are bigger in Texas as we all know, this specimen was only 5 ft long when it left by Delta Dash from North Carolina. That is the length of the animal as recorded on the feeding cards as of that date, which, as Dean’s assistant and bookkeeper, I have right in front of me as I write. For a snake to have increased by a length of 24 inches on a four hour air-flight seems odd, but then again, it was to Texas. But Turner’s memory is also hazy on other matters, for there were two snakes, not one, on that shipment – I have the receipts on file. They were both siblings and of approximately the same size. The banana crate, which had a divider, was to keep the snakes from piling up on each other, segregating the main outer plywood box.
Further, when Earl resold these animals he told the buyers they were pure blooded Lachesis melanocephala. They were in fact hybridized L. stenophrys x melanocephala which at that time Dean was selling for $1850. Dean’s price for the pure L. melanocephala was $2500, and Earl did not want to pay that much – so he bought the cheaper hybrids. Earl lied to his customers in order to resell these hybrids at a higher price, and/or to encourage their quick sale through making the buyer feel he was “getting a deal.” To sell them, Earl Turner ran an ad in kingsnake.com classified. The photos he posted, which I saw and saved to disk, speak for themselves. They were the very hybrids Dean sold him. As Dean’s bookkeeper, I have the receipts here to prove it, and Earl Turner’s own handwriting on his order, which accompanied his check. Earl’s handwritten order explicitly requests the less expensive, crossbred snakes, L. stenophrys x melanocephala. Earl, knowing these specimens had a blackish head color, schemed to fool his buyers into paying more for them, which meant a bigger profit.
Earl’s desire for revenge for Dean’s letter to Reptiles Magazine does not stop there. Now he adds a list of names of people you are supposed to be able to contact that will verify his story. He knows that no one will bother to do this, but that it will give his story more credence to have “back-ups.” In fact, the pathologically unsound Turner has made a mistake, for if actually contacted these people have nothing particularly good or bad to say about Dean personally. The majority of them have never even met him or dealt with him! Only one, Nate Gale, has had any business dealings with Dean and they remain quite good friends. Even the Panamanian address Earl gives for Nate Gale is spurious, Dr. Gale having lived in Florida since before 1999 – a fact Earl might want to recognize if he knows so much about Dr. Gale’s opinions! Earl Turner would do better to let these people speak for themselves before he self-elects himself as their personal slander monger. They might not like being brought into such nonsense. The question remains: If all these people so seriously dislike Dean Ripa as Earl Turner proclaims, it has not stopped them from citing him extensively in their books and papers (e.g., Bill Lamar, Venomous Reptiles of the Western Hemisphere; Alejandro Solorzano, Snakes of Costa Rica, etc).
Such is the mask of Earl Turner. Dean Ripa has let Earl’s ridiculous accusation stand all these years, knowing full well that by dent of Earl’s having said it, it was already garbage to serious professionals, and was not worth responding to. Unfortunately, there are many new kids in this business since Dean’s heyday, and some, not yet having had “the Earl Turner experience,” might be tempted to believe the psychologically “bent” things that bitter Earl Turner says when he is up late at night bragging and scandal mucking on his computer after having had ten drinks too many.
Moral – be careful whom you offend! You just might become the victim of an alcoholic egotist who will do or say anything to appease his shattered self-esteem. – Regina Ripa, wife of Dean Ripa.
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