Monkey Business
All lights were out as the Wyoming licensed plate blue Lexus ES 300 left the parking lot Tuesday night behind the Tin Palace on Main Street in Durham, NH with a curious Susan Smythe lurking behind in her police cruiser.
Smythe, a Durham police officer was on her nightly watch when the event came about. Her first judgment of the person behind the wheel was a drunk driver, because the car was not only swerving back and forth along the yellow median line on Madbury Road, but the lights were out too.
After she pulled the car over, she got out her flashlight and began pacing towards the drivers side door expecting to see a person.
“I looked in the window expecting to see a low life drunk driver slumped over the wheel, but I saw a chimpanzee look over at me and grin,” Smythe said.
This mysterious event has hit national headlines with investigators trying to puzzle the pieces to how a chimpanzee ended up behind the wheel of this vehicle.
Police were able to track the vehicle to an unknown owner in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The car was reportedly stolen late Saturday night early Sunday morning, and wasn’t seen until Tuesday night almost 1,900 miles later on the other side of the country in Durham.
Durham Police Chief Bo Diddley followed up by identifying the chimpanzee as a 3 year- old named Oliver Twist. The chimpanzee started his journey by escaping the Lander Zoo in Lander, WY Saturday morning, finding his way to Cheyenne, WY later that night, which left the roughly remaining 48 hours for Twist to arrive in Durham.
“We’re not sure what he was doing in a Lexus from Wyoming, but we’re looking into it,” Diddley said.
Removing the chimp from the vehicle went smoothly as a Durham Zoo official fled to the scene in his pick-up truck, where he carefully transferred him to the zoo with no incidents.
Oliver Twist remains in the Durham Zoo as of today, with many investigators still trying to make sense of this mystery.
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