from DenverPost.com:

Thompson had end all planned, wife says

By Troy Hooper
Special to The Denver Post

Aspen - Hunter S. Thompson not only planned his suicide, but he also provided instructions on how he wanted his legacy preserved, his wife, Anita, said Thursday in her first public interview since his death.

"At first I was very angry; he was my best friend, my lover, my partner and my teacher," Anita Thompson said. "But I know he is much more powerful and alive now than ever before. He is in all of our hearts. His death was a triumph of his own human spirit because this is what he wanted. He lived and died like a champion."

In recent months, he had repeatedly talked of killing himself, she said, and had been issuing directives, orally and in writing, on what he wanted done with his body, his unpublished work and his assets.

Speaking Thursday from their Woody Creek compound known as Owl Farm, Anita Thompson, 32, said that her 67-year-old husband's suicidal designs put an intense strain on their relationship but that his motives were not rooted in desperation or fear; he simply felt his time had come.

"I wish I could have been more supportive of his decision. It was a problem for us," said Thompson, who retreated to her parents' house in Fort Collins when the two quarreled. There, she said, he would fax her love letters.

The couple, who married in April 2003, had a profound affection for each other, and though they occasionally feuded over the author's death wish, friends say they always reconciled.

"Hunter loved Anita so much. They were a shining example of two people who couldn't keep their hands off of each other," said family friend Tim Mooney, a former manager for musician Jimmy Buffett who first met Hunter Thompson while working behind the bar at the Hotel Jerome in the 1970s.

On Sunday, Anita Thompson called her husband from the Aspen Club & Spa, and he told her: "Come home so I can work on my column," she said. Then, she said, he set the receiver down, and she heard a clicking noise that she thought might be computer keystrokes but now believes was the sound of a gun.

The father of "gonzo" journalism put a .45-caliber gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

"I'm going to miss him horribly. You can't even imagine," Anita Thompson said.

Juan Thompson, a Denver resident and the author's 40-year- old son; his wife, Jennifer Winkel Thompson; and their 6-year-old son, Will, were the only ones in the house when the shooting happened about 5:30 p.m. They told investigators the shot sounded like a book crashing to the floor. Juan Thompson found his father slumped in the chair in which he sat to write many of his classic works.

Anita Thompson said she took a van from the club back to their home northeast of Aspen, where she was met by sheriff's deputies and tragedy.

Inside, the phone receiver was resting on the kitchen counter next to the typewriter and a glass of the author's favorite whiskey, Chivas Regal, she said.

Thompson married twice - first to Sandra Dawn Thompson Tarlo, who is Juan Thompson's mother, and then to Anita.

The night before he killed himself, Thompson gave his son a medallion he once received from Oscar Zeta Acosta, a prominent Chicano lawyer, writer and speaker fictionalized in the 1972 classic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," as well as an emerald pendant Thompson had worn since 1976. Anita Thompson said her husband told Juan to give the pendant to her after he died.

She said that none of Thompson's family members knew when he planned on turning a gun on himself, la his idol, Ernest Hemingway, and that she would have intervened and "called in a SWAT team" if she had known the end was so near.

In an interview Thursday with The Associated Press, Juan Thompson said the only thing that surprised him about his father's death was the timing.

"One thing he said many times was that 'I'm a road man for the lords of karma.' It's cryptic, but there's an implication there that he may have decided that his work was done and that he didn't want to overstay his welcome; it was time to go," he said.

Juan Thompson said his father had been in pain from a hip replacement, a broken leg and back surgery, but "I really don't believe it was motivated by pain."

Anita Thompson said she plans to carry on her husband's legacy as he instructed.

"I have a lot of work to do, even more than before," she said, declining to reveal specifics of Thompson's final requests.

But she did confirm the family plans to blast her husband's ashes out of a cannon on Owl Farm in spectacular fashion, as he had wished.

"I think we should," she said. "The more explosions, the better."