A “No Trespassing” sign on a decorative iron gate at the front of a long wooded driveway stops the florist from delivering flowers to Sandra Herold’s door. But the sign doesn’t stop the knocking of news reporters who leave business cards and cardboard trays of Starbucks coffee for the 70-year-old Herold.
Deer walk up to the door of the two-story, brown-shingled house in a wooded yard filled with old horse trailers, vehicles, sheds and a Dumpster that sits next to a section of the home that’s being renovated.
Herold is sitting at her kitchen table. She hangs up the telephone but it rings again, the third time in a matter of minutes. Her thin hand shakes as she flips reading glasses off her head to the tip of her nose so she can check the handset’s caller ID.
This time, it’s not the Los Angeles Times, Paramount Pictures, the BBC, a local television news station or her lawyer all wanting to know about Travis the chimpanzee.
“Out of area,” she says, letting the call go to an answering machine in a neighboring room. The machine’s speaker blasts a male’s voice launching a mostly inaudible tirade about how people shouldn’t have chimpanzees as pets.
“People don’t have a clue, they just want to condemn me,” Herold says while wiping away tears. “My friends told me anyone who wants to look into whether I have a history of abusing animals will come up empty. Travis was my son and if they want to say I’m crazy or nuts for calling him that, go ahead.”
As the owner of Travis – a clothes-wearing, lobster-eating chimpanzee who starred years ago in TV shows and commercials – Herold is used to attention from the media and the locals who, for years, carried cameras so they could snap photos of Travis sitting on the back of Herold’s towing company’s trucks.
But now that the story of the domestic, lovable-chimp-turned- savage-beast has Hollywood knocking and TV news cameras from all over the world peering through the windows of her home, Herold said she isn’t sure how much more publicity she can bear in the face of what she says is the latest heartbreak in her life.
Herold’s daughter died in a car crash in 2000. Cancer took her husband in 2004. Now, Travis is dead and her best friend, Charla Nash – who rode with Herold in country music legend Loretta Lynn’s traveling rodeo show in the 1970s – lies critically wounded in an Ohio hospital.
“There’s nothing left for me,” Herold says while sitting at the table in her cluttered kitchen decorated with reminders of Travis – stuffed- animal primates, toy chimpanzees hanging from ropes and a chimp mug and glassware. Unopened boxes and bags of Travis’ treats – Butter- fingers, Fig Newtons, marshmallow Peeps and coffee cakes – are piled on the floor and counters.
A container of rice pudding Nash made from scratch for Travis still sits in the refrigerator where scribbled drawings by the 14-year-old chimp are displayed on the door with magnets.
When a friend calls to tell her that television news trucks are parked outside the pet crematory where she planned to cremate the chimp in his favorite tie-dyed T-shirt, Herold starts to sob.
“I just hope I go a little quicker now,” she says.
BUSINESS PARTNERS
Two days before Nash, 55, was attacked by Travis, she and Herold went to the Mohegan Sun casino for Valentine’s Day. While there, Herold told dinner companions about her “son.” And then she showed them a photo of Travis.
“I said, ‘Tell the truth. Does he look more like his aunt or me?’ ” Herold says.
When they weren’t discussing Travis, the two women were planning a future together as business partners. They were planning to open a deli in Stamford next month that Nash would run.
“Everything was ready to go,” Herold says, pulling from an envelope a certificate with Nash’s name on it showing she had passed a food safety class. “All we had to do was stock it.”
The friendship between Herold and Nash goes back more than three decades to the days when both women were competitive barrel racers in area rodeos.
In those days, they had just enough money for gas to get to the races and a couple of tuna fish sandwiches to eat. The $5 they earned for riding horses for the grand entry of Loretta Lynn’s traveling rodeo show made them feel rich.
A photo Herold keeps shows Nash and Herold’s daughter, Suzan, with feathered Farrah Fawcett hairstyles playing cards on the back of a pickup during a rodeo in Wappingers Falls, N.Y.
“Sandy and Charlie were always close,” said John Constantinople, a semiretired professional bull rider from Prospect who often saw Herold and Nash at rodeos at the Crotta & Sons ranch in Bethany. “Sandy always rode good horses. Charlie was a good hand, a real horse person.”
Their friendship continued through moves, jobs, the birth of Nash’s daughter, Brianna, and the deaths of Herold’s daughter and husband. When Nash fell on hard times, Herold says she let her stay at her Stamford home and rent-free at other properties Herold owns.
In return, Nash worked for Herold, who owns towing and sheet metal fabrication businesses and helped Herold at home, where caring for her spacious yard became too much after the death of Herold’s husband.
“I truly care for her and love her,” Herold says, pausing for a minute to stress that they were never lovers. “If I say I love her, they’ll turn that around, too.” Herold lashed out at the media last week, saying she was distraught about published reports insinuating that she and Travis were intimate. Herold says she also was angered by news stories that gave the perception that she valued Travis’ life more than Nash’s.
“People think I only care about what happened to Travis. But they forget that I stabbed my own son to save her,” Herold says.
THE BACKLASH
The Feb. 16 attack on Nash ignited a backlash against Herold, who was criticized for keeping Travis as a pet.
World-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall weighed in, saying the attack on Nash shows that chimps – no matter how human they may seem – should not be kept as pets. The U.S. House of Representatives last week approved legislation that would ban private ownership of primates as pets.
Other animal experts questioned why Herold – who adopted Travis when he was just weeks old – kept Travis into adulthood, when chimpanzees, they said, tend to become more aggressive.
Herold says a published report that Travis bit a woman years ago is false because at the time, Travis had no teeth. The attack on Nash was “freak” behavior for Travis, Herold insists. “He was with people all the time,” she says. She has given conflicting statements about whether she gave Travis the anti-anxiety drug Xanax just before the attack.
Nash suffered such serious injuries to her face, neck and hands that she remains in a medically induced coma. Nash is at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, which recently performed the nation’s first successful face transplant.
Herold said she called Nash to her home so she could help lure Travis back into her house. Herold said it’s possible the chimp was trying to protect Herold when he attacked Nash because Travis may not have recognized Nash, who had a different hairstyle that day and was driving a different car.
The violence of the 12-minute attack constantly replays in Herold’s mind, she says while looking out a window into her wooded yard – once a playground for Travis and now the scene of the bloody attack.
Police aren’t saying whether Herold will face criminal charges. By law, Herold was supposed to have a permit to own Travis, but because she adopted him in 1995, several years before permits were required, the state Department of Environmental Protection allowed Herold to keep him.
Herold’s voice on emergency 911 tapes documents the horror of the Feb. 16 mauling. Her chilling screams of, “Bring the guns! Ya gotta kill my chimp,” were played in television broadcasts, on the radio and on Internet sites. Police eventually fatally shot Travis during the attack.
Herold says she’s still struggling with her own actions that day – Herold stabbed Travis with a knife and struck him with a shovel – and how those acts failed to stop him.
“I had to put a knife into my son to try and save my best friend,” Herold says.
And what’s making it worse, Herold says, is not being able to talk to Nash. Herold says Nash loved Travis. She made the chimp treats and brought him discarded toys she found on local curbsides.
“It’s hard not to be able to get on the phone with her,” Herold says.
A probate judge granted temporary conservatorship of Nash and Nash’s daughter, Brianna, now 17, last week to Nash’s twin brother, Michael Nash, a systems analyst for IBM Corp. from Pleasant Valley, N.Y. Michael Nash says the conservator status is needed to protect his sister’s ability to recover damages in future litigation. And though his filing does not say who would be sued, Herold says she expects to be at least one of the defendants.
“Truthfully, I don’t think Charlie would do this,” she says.
In probate court in Stamford last week, Michael Nash and his attorney, Matthew Newman, declined to comment on the filing.
In the meantime, Herold says she hopes to respond to the dozens of strangers from California to New York who have supported her since the attack.
There’s the Cromwell man who sent a bouquet of flowers, and the animal lovers who mailed sympathy cards. One letter from a state prison inmate includes a poem of encouragement.
“These are people I don’t even know. It means so much to me that there are people out there who really do understand what I’m going through,” Herold says while flipping through the pile of cards and letters she keeps in a basket on her kitchen table.
Next to the basket, Herold searches through stacks of overstuffed 4-by-6-inch photo albums, looking for her favorite moments with Travis and Nash.
There’s a photo of a young Travis on Nash’s back, one of an even younger Travis in blue corduroy overalls playing with children, kissing people, standing next to a pregnant woman and being held by a Stamford police officer.
“Does that look like an aggressive chimp?” Herold says through tears. “Does that look like a killer? I don’t want him to go down as a killer.”
