By Tim Arango
Jan. 18, 2026
For decades, Owl Farm was Hunter S. Thompson’s lair, the place where he wrote, drank, and drugged, entertained celebrities, shot guns at all hours, commanded his quixotic campaign for sheriff in 1970, and, finally, on a snowy Sunday evening in February 2005, died in front of his IBM Selectric typewriter from a single gunshot to the head.
The next day, a doctor conducted an autopsy and reported, “the injuries were consistent with the reported self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
“Case status is Closed/noncriminal,” the chief investigator for the county sheriff’s department wrote to close out his report.
That’s where things seemed destined to remain, until quite recently.
Anita Thompson, Hunter’s widow, paid little mind for two decades to the particulars of the sheriff’s office report, she told people. But last year she looked back. Reading the report closely for the first time, questions emerged that hadn’t occurred to her in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death.
Around the same time last year, she also heard from someone close to Hunter’s son, Juan, who was at Owl Farm with his then-wife, Jennifer Winkel, the evening Hunter died. In a text message reviewed by The New York Times, Anita told the former sheriff that the ex-wife of Juan and Jennifer’s son was claiming that Jennifer had over the years said that Hunter’s death had to be made to “look like a suicide,” suggesting there’d been a cover-up.
Over the summer, Anita, who still lives at Owl Farm, brought her suspicions to the current sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo., Michael Buglione.
After several conversations, Mr. Buglione had heard enough to take the unusual step of asking the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to re-examine the case, and in late September he issued a statement: “By bringing in an outside agency for a fresh look, we hope to provide a definitive and transparent review that may offer peace of mind to his family and the public.”
Even in Aspen, where gossip about the famous flows easily on the ski resort gondolas and at the bars, the rumor set off by Anita’s suspicions was startling. Newly uneasy about the facts of the case, she came to doubt the official story that her husband, on his own, took his own life.
Was there a dark secret behind the death of Hunter S. Thompson? Was it something more than suicide?
Almost from the moment Hunter was laid to rest, his widow and his son began to feud, over everything from the future of Owl Farm to Juan’s belief that his father had been mistreated by Anita in his last days.
The estrangement deepened with time, and now, Anita’s suspicions have taken the feud to a more pointed place, revealing a long, bitter fight over the legacy of the man who pioneered the personal, participatory style of reporting known as gonzo journalism.
But they were all together the weekend Hunter died.
Juan wrote in his memoir that he was in another room and heard a thump that sounded like a book hitting the floor. Anita was at a health club in Aspen waiting for a yoga class to start. She later told the news media she was on speakerphone with her husband before he shot himself, and heard the “clicking” of the gun.
Looking back, there were signs from that last weekend that Hunter had planned to take his own life, Juan and Jennifer said in interviews.
He insisted on watching one of his favorite movies, “The Maltese Falcon,” with his 6-year-old grandson, Will. He gave away gifts — an old clock that had belonged to his mother and a signed copy of “Fire in the Nuts,” a short book with his frequent collaborator, the artist Ralph Steadman.
The next day, a doctor conducted an autopsy and reported, “the injuries were consistent with the reported self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
“Case status is Closed/noncriminal,” the chief investigator for the county sheriff’s department wrote to close out his report.
That’s where things seemed destined to remain, until quite recently.
Anita Thompson, Hunter’s widow, paid little mind for two decades to the particulars of the sheriff’s office report, she told people. But last year she looked back. Reading the report closely for the first time, questions emerged that hadn’t occurred to her in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death.
Around the same time last year, she also heard from someone close to Hunter’s son, Juan, who was at Owl Farm with his then-wife, Jennifer Winkel, the evening Hunter died. In a text message reviewed by The New York Times, Anita told the former sheriff that the ex-wife of Juan and Jennifer’s son was claiming that Jennifer had over the years said that Hunter’s death had to be made to “look like a suicide,” suggesting there’d been a cover-up.
Over the summer, Anita, who still lives at Owl Farm, brought her suspicions to the current sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo., Michael Buglione.
After several conversations, Mr. Buglione had heard enough to take the unusual step of asking the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to re-examine the case, and in late September he issued a statement: “By bringing in an outside agency for a fresh look, we hope to provide a definitive and transparent review that may offer peace of mind to his family and the public.”
Even in Aspen, where gossip about the famous flows easily on the ski resort gondolas and at the bars, the rumor set off by Anita’s suspicions was startling. Newly uneasy about the facts of the case, she came to doubt the official story that her husband, on his own, took his own life.
Was there a dark secret behind the death of Hunter S. Thompson? Was it something more than suicide?
Almost from the moment Hunter was laid to rest, his widow and his son began to feud, over everything from the future of Owl Farm to Juan’s belief that his father had been mistreated by Anita in his last days.
The estrangement deepened with time, and now, Anita’s suspicions have taken the feud to a more pointed place, revealing a long, bitter fight over the legacy of the man who pioneered the personal, participatory style of reporting known as gonzo journalism.
But they were all together the weekend Hunter died.
Juan wrote in his memoir that he was in another room and heard a thump that sounded like a book hitting the floor. Anita was at a health club in Aspen waiting for a yoga class to start. She later told the news media she was on speakerphone with her husband before he shot himself, and heard the “clicking” of the gun.
Looking back, there were signs from that last weekend that Hunter had planned to take his own life, Juan and Jennifer said in interviews.
He insisted on watching one of his favorite movies, “The Maltese Falcon,” with his 6-year-old grandson, Will. He gave away gifts — an old clock that had belonged to his mother and a signed copy of “Fire in the Nuts,” a short book with his frequent collaborator, the artist Ralph Steadman.
He's killed himself. Yeah. With a handgun.Yeah. Did that surprise you? No, because he told me he would do it one day. If life became so unbearable for him. A trap, which he was in, a physical trap. He couldn't walk. He had two hip replacements. He'd broken his ankle, and he was walking about like an old man on a stick. Is that the image of Hunter S Thompson you want to remember? It was a trap he was in. He had to get out of it. He tried. He married again and got a lovely young wife. And, he just felt I can't live in this. That beat him, actually. And I think he sat there and thought. This is it. Now's the moment, and he blew his brains out.Ralph Steadman spoke about Hunter’s suicidal ideations in an interview after his death in 2005. ITN, via Getty Images
“So there is nothing new to know about Hunter’s actual death,” said Juan, 61. “So I do not know why she raised this. And I can’t imagine that the C.B.I. would find anything to act on.”
He and Jennifer said they did not have any role in Hunter’s death. “This is really shocking,” Jennifer said. “It’s been disruptive to our family. It’s obviously been very traumatic to be revisiting this.” She said she believed Anita knew that her husband took his own life, and added, “we hope this brings her closure.”
Anita had been an assistant to Hunter, and was 35 years younger than him. At the time of his death, they had been married for less than two years — it was Hunter’s second marriage — and that last weekend they fought constantly. In his memoir, Juan wrote that Hunter shot a pellet gun at a gong in the living room the night before he killed himself, just missing Anita, prompting her to threaten to call the police and have him put in a nursing home.
Hunter was also in poor health. He had difficulty moving and suffered occasional seizures, the result of decades of heavy drinking.
“Hunter’s body was giving out,” said Debra Fuller, who worked as an assistant to Hunter and helped manage Owl Farm for almost 20 years before Hunter married Anita. “He was having more difficulty writing as well.”
Hunter had often talked of suicide. Like many of Hunter’s friends, Joe DiSalvo, who was undersheriff of Pitkin County at the time of his death, had conversations with him about how his life would end. He recalled that Hunter would demonstrate his intentions by pointing a loaded gun at his head.
“Hunter talked about suicide,” Mr. DiSalvo said. “He talked about the way he was going to kill himself.”
Michael Ochs Archives/GettyImages
More than two decades after his death, Hunter maintains a cult following among writers and journalists.
The political landscape has made Hunter seem fresh, prescient even, with the rise of strongman politics in the United States under Donald J. Trump and the decline of independent news media. Early in his career, he saw the seeds of American fascism in the violence of the Hell’s Angels; in the conservatism of Barry Goldwater and his followers; in the darkness of Richard Nixon; and in the police brutality on the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention, which Hunter covered and which radicalized him.
“When Trump was first elected and looking back on Hunter’s writings about Nixon, it was so relevant,” Juan said. “His idealism in what he wanted the country to be and his disillusionment and disappointment in what it was becoming was so, so applicable then, and even more so now.”
His books remain brisk sellers and his writing is still taught in journalism schools. A musical based on his life was staged last year, and there is a 2023 movie, “Gonzo Girl,” which stars Willem Dafoe and is adapted from a novel based on Hunter’s life.
As Hunter’s heirs fight over the circumstances of his death, they have also been at odds over how best to secure his legacy. Anita has announced plans to sell “authentic Gonzo strains” of marijuana, cloned from Hunter’s stash. She has put Owl Farm on Airbnb for $550 a night.
Many who were close to Hunter cringe at what they see as crass schemes by Anita to cash in on his name that they believe have the effect of elevating Hunter’s madcap, drug-fueled personality and lifestyle over his political and literary legacy.
Shaping that legacy is complicated by the fact that many of Hunter’s important papers are unavailable to scholars. Joe Yasinski, a New York-based collector, has begun donating materials to the Lilly Library at Indiana University. The actor Johnny Depp, who played Hunter’s alter-ego in the movie “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” purchased much of his archive to help pay off estate taxes, and the materials remain locked in a warehouse in Los Angeles.
Will, Hunter’s grandson, said the two aspects of his grandfather’s legacy — the lifestyle and the literature — are inseparable.
“I think that’s the weird tension, where part of what makes Hunter important is not that he was just writing about bikers doing Benzedrine,” he said. “He was doing Benzedrine with bikers. You can’t take that apart, right? You can’t look at him purely as an observer or journalist right? He writes a lot about doing drugs and a lot about crazy stuff. But also he’s writing about Nixon in the ’70s.”
Aspen has had many lives: its silver mining days in the late 19th century; its transformation into a ski town beginning in the 1930s; the era Hunter personified when refugees of the counterculture flocked from Haight-Ashbury; and its status today as a glittering alpine cultural capital for the ultrawealthy.
“Now you have something like 80 billionaires who either live here or own property here,” said Mick Ireland, who is a lawyer, journalist and former mayor of Aspen.
Aspen is a two-newspaper town, and Mr. Ireland is a columnist for The Aspen Daily News, where he recently wrote sympathetically of Anita, saying grief takes time. He has also advised Anita on legal matters related to Owl Farm.
“The question of whether there was assisted suicide is a legitimate question,” he said in an interview. “I don’t have an opinion on it.”
Hunter’s memory still figures prominently in the shape-shifting culture of Aspen.
The Fat City Gallery, owned by D.J. Watkins, features examples of Hunter’s so-called shotgun art — like a “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” movie poster, shot through with birdshot — hanging from the walls of Mr. Watkins’s office, where he has recreated Hunter’s kitchen.
Hunter is also remembered for his activism against development and gentrification. His successful opposition to an expansion of the runway at the local airport in 1995, to allow for bigger jets, lasted until 2024, when voters allowed the county to move forward.
Mr. DiSalvo reflected on his friend’s legacy in Aspen, saying that while Hunter lost his campaign for sheriff, the ideas he had to change policing — by wearing jeans, rather than uniforms, and ending heavy-handed crackdowns on drug possession — eventually took hold in Aspen and influenced him while he was sheriff.
And Hunter is recalled — fondly and not — for the hard partying and rampant cocaine use that defined Aspen in the 1970s and ’80s.
For some, like the local columnist Lorenzo Semple, unwelcome memories of that “trail of smoldering wreckage,” as he put it, have been resurrected by the new chatter about how Hunter died.
The speculation, Mr. Semple wrote in The Aspen Times in October, is all just “gossip mongering.”
It took Anita almost three years to remove her husband’s toothbrush from their bathroom after his death. Otherwise, Owl Farm has been mostly untouched.
“Living in a shrine psychologically is probably not great,” she said in an interview in 2024 with a local television station. (Anita declined to be interviewed for this article.)
When Sheriff Buglione announced in late September that the Colorado Bureau of Investigation was re-examining the case, officials suggested that the inquiry could be wrapped up quickly, perhaps in a matter of a few weeks.
It has been more than three months.
State investigators have been interviewing people in Hunter’s orbit and law enforcement officials who conducted the original investigation. They’ve also been trying to recover evidence, like photos of the scene, that the sheriff’s department had purged, in accordance with state law, all while fielding calls from the public about conspiracy theories, like C.I.A. involvement.
Investigators returned to Owl Farm to conduct an analysis of the bullet trajectory in the kitchen, which was not done 20 years ago.
Mr. DiSalvo, who later moved from undersheriff to sheriff, was among the first to arrive at Owl Farm after his friend’s death.
“I get there, he’s dead at the typewriter,” Mr. DiSalvo said. He continued, “never once did I consider this a homicide. It never crossed my mind.”
He noted that investigators never thought to swab anyone’s hands for gunshot residue.
Juan, though, had fired a gun, a fact that has come under fresh scrutiny.
The first sheriff’s deputy to arrive at Owl Farm heard three gunshots as he drove onto the driveway. “Juan told me that he had shot a shotgun into the air to mark the passing of his father,” the deputy wrote in his report.
As the work of Colorado’s investigators has stretched on, the diaspora of associates and friends and lawyers who knew Hunter has been aflame with speculation.
“The whole Hunter world is buzzing, with different characters and different points of view,” said George Tobia, a lawyer for the estate who oversees Hunter’s copyrights.
Mr. DiSalvo, who later moved from undersheriff to sheriff, was among the first to arrive at Owl Farm after his friend’s death.
“I get there, he’s dead at the typewriter,” Mr. DiSalvo said. He continued, “never once did I consider this a homicide. It never crossed my mind.”
He noted that investigators never thought to swab anyone’s hands for gunshot residue.
Juan, though, had fired a gun, a fact that has come under fresh scrutiny.
The first sheriff’s deputy to arrive at Owl Farm heard three gunshots as he drove onto the driveway. “Juan told me that he had shot a shotgun into the air to mark the passing of his father,” the deputy wrote in his report.
As the work of Colorado’s investigators has stretched on, the diaspora of associates and friends and lawyers who knew Hunter has been aflame with speculation.
“The whole Hunter world is buzzing, with different characters and different points of view,” said George Tobia, a lawyer for the estate who oversees Hunter’s copyrights.
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