Best-Selling Book Reopens Chapter On Royal's Zoo Nebraska

The story begins in Neligh on Sept. 10, 2005.

Seated at a table in the center of the former Daddy’s Cafe, the waitress served two hot plates of food. Just then, the sheriff’s pager lit up, “Animals loose at Royal Zoo.”

Nebraska State Trooper Brian Detlefsen and then-Antelope County Sheriff Darrell Hamilton were forced to cut their lunches short. Hamilton put on his hat and left. A few minutes later, Detlefsen got a call from his dispatcher and drove to the zoo as well.

A Neligh native, Detlefsen had been to the nearby zoo many times during his childhood. But nothing prepared the young trooper for what he saw when he arrived at the scene.

Chimpanzees had escaped from their enclosure and were running free as a man chased them in a white golf cart, firing a revolver.

“They hadn’t covered this at the academy,” author Carson Vaughan wrote, relaying Detlefsen’s thoughts.

It is the story of “Zoo Nebraska: The Dismantling of an American Dream,” the first book ever written by the 31-year-old, Chicago-based author.

Vaughan’s idea for the book came from a car conversation with his girlfriend 10 years ago.

Melissa Dohmen—a Plainview native who is now his wife—pointed out the window as they drove down Highway 20 and said nonchalantly, “That’s where Reuben got shot.” He was instantly intrigued.

“At that point I was still mostly unfamiliar with northeast Nebraska and Antelope County, and I knew absolutely nothing about Royal,” the Broken Bow native said. “So of course, when she said that, I had a few questions.”

Vaughan said his first question was, “Who’s Reuben?”


“When the answer was that Reuben was the star chimpanzee of Antelope County, all those words made no sense to me,” he said.

Vaughan wasn’t familiar with the roadside zoo or the chimpanzee escape in 2005, which ultimately led to the demise of Zoo Nebraska. On that fateful September day, a padlock was not completely closed after the cage was cleaned and four chimps escaped from their enclosure, running amok in Royal. After attempts to tranquilize the animals failed, Reuben, Jimmy Joe and Tyler were shot and killed. Only Ripley returned to his cage. The zoo’s operators eventually lost their license and the zoo closed.

Although many may remember stories of the escape, Vaughan said that wasn’t the only story he wanted to tell about the zoo.

“If I were merely interested in the novelty of a chimpanzee escape in rural Nebraska, I would have perhaps limited the scope of my reporting to a magazine piece,” he said. “But from day one, I was always more interested in how the town itself helped give rise to the zoo, and also with how the town and county reacted to its ultimate demise.”

Vaughan’s newfound interest in the story led him to attend the zoo’s final auction in 2009.

“The more folks I talked to from Royal and Antelope County, the more interested in both the zoo and the community I became,” he said. “I spent the next decade off and on digging further into the origins of the town, and the community of Royal, and trying my very best to piece together the whole saga of Zoo Nebraska.”

After conducting “well over 100 interviews,” one of those key pieces fell into place. After nearly 8 years of refusals, the zoo’s founder, Dick Haskin, finally agreed to talk. Vaughan said Haskin became his biggest resource.

“He was incredibly generous with his time, and very candid about his entire experience founding and running the zoo,” he said. “It’s really been an honor for me to get to know him.”

Not wanting to speculate, Vaughan said he wasn’t sure what changed Haskin’s mind about the interview.

“When I finally went to him that very last time, I told him I had sold the book to a publisher and I really wanted to include his perspective,” he said. “I think maybe something clicked a little bit for him, ‘Either I get to represent myself or I leave it to chance.’ Like most people, he didn’t want to leave it to chance.”

Throughout their “day-long, marathon interviews,” Vaughan said it became clear that Haskin would become the central character of his book.

“Obviously it was great that he ended up saying I could talk with him, but I immediately knew, ‘Well, now I have to rewrite more than half the book,’” Vaughan said. “I rewrote 50 to 60 percent of it. I was very happy though that nothing that I had already written was incorrect, it was just that Dick gave me so much more to work with. I did a lot of rewriting, but I felt like the bones of the narrative were still in place.”

His “long-form journalism or narrative non-fiction” book features a true life cast of characters in which everyone’s name remains unchanged. Since the book’s release and its official publication on April 1, he said the reviews from general readers and book critics “have been overwhelmingly positive.”

“Which is of course a great relief, given how much of my life I spent putting it all together,” Vaughan said. “Though it was exhilarating to get early blurbs from writers I’ve long admired like Susan Orlean and Buzz Bissinger, I think the most rewarding review came from Dick Haskin himself, who—though admitting it was painful for him to read—ultimately called the book, ‘A fantastic piece of American literature that in my opinion rivals such noted Nebraska authors like Sandoz and Neihardt.’”

Fighting through moments of frustration and later celebrating his success, the author said the “whole journey has been a roller coaster.”

After graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a journalism degree, Vaughan decided to write the zoo’s story as his master’s thesis at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.

“As soon as I graduated with my master’s degree, I took the whole book and whittled it down into a proposal that was about 50 pages long and then I took that and shopped around for an agent,” he said.

Once he secured an agent, Vaughan struggled to get interested publishing houses to commit. He went on with his life as a freelance writer, until his agent called a couple years later. An editor had seen Vaughan’s proposal at a New York publishing house, but couldn’t get others in the company on board. When she took the job at Little A, she remembered the story and it was the first acquisition she looked into.

“That’s good because your editor is someone you end up having a pretty close relationship with, and it was nice to know that she remembered my book and was ready to champion it,” Vaughan said.

He said the cover photo is actually one he took himself during one of his first trips to Royal about 10 years ago. A designer at the publishing house did the rest.

“We went back and forth for a long time, kicking around ideas,” Vaughan said. “I sent them a bunch of old photos, whatever I could scrounge up. and they ended up liking one of the photos I had given them.”

Inside the cover, after the title page, is his simple dedication, “For Mel.”  

“I thought there may be a few brownie points,” he said with a chuckle.

Vaughan said dedicating the book to his wife “made sense for a lot of reasons.”

“I had never really explored Northeast Nebraska at all prior to starting to date Mel,” he said. “The whole book, in a strange way, is all wrapped up in the origin with my relationship with Mel. She also reads all of my work, and she’s kind of my first reader all of the time. It just felt right.”

When the first copies of his book were delivered, Vaughan said it was almost surreal.

“My whole writing career I had hoped and dreamed that one day I would have a book, so when it actually showed up on my doorstep and I could touch it and know that it was for real, I felt relief and excitement. On the heels of that, you go, ‘Oh my God, it’s real. Now people are going to read it.’ So it was both exciting and terrifying.”

He said the entire process has taught him lessons in patience and empathy.

“When I first started writing it, I thought, ‘Well, this is a book that I should be able to write in a year or two,’” Vaughan said. “I was a young, naive reporter. Maybe I got a little angry and got a little annoyed, but I learned over 10 years sometimes you can’t rush things like that. You have to give your sources time. I think I’ve become more patient and more empathetic along the way.”

In retrospect, the delays he faced may have helped with the timing of his book.

“I do think maybe the timing is better now than it would’ve been had I been able to sell it years ago,” Vaughan said. “It gave everybody in town just a little bit more time to come to grips with everything.”

“Zoo Nebraska” is now available in area bookstores and through Amazon. Currently, the author said he has several book events lined up—Lincoln (April 13), Omaha (April 14), Broken Bow (April 16), and Kearney (April 25)—and “would love to” set up some in Northeast Nebraska.

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