DENVER — On the last day of his life, Hunter S. Thompson woke with his usual breakfast of fresh fruit inside a thin layer of jello with gin and Grand Marnier drizzled on top.
His wife, Anita, carefully put a lemon on the side and hovered near his chair. It was 5 p.m., the time the writer normally began his day.
"Suddenly he began talking about something weird, I can't remember exactly what," she recalled in an interview Friday. "He began to get angry with me. He had a strange look on his face. He told me to get out of the room. I was like: 'What do you mean?' He had never kicked me out of a room before."
The final countdown had begun.
Angry and hurt, Anita grabbed her bag and stomped out.
"When I got to the gym in Aspen, I called because I felt bad," said the 32-year-old, who lived with Thompson for five years before marrying him in 2003. "He was so sweet. I asked if he wanted me to come back, and he said he did. He said we could work on a column. We usually made up when he wrote."
Then Thompson did something strange. He took her off speakerphone -- his preferred method of talking to people -- and picked up his headset and continued talking.
"Then I heard a lot of clicking noises, it seemed to me to be a typewriter clicking," Anita Thompson said. "I listened for 45 seconds and heard other noises. I figured he was not going to pick up the headset again, so I hung up."
About the same time on Sunday -- 5:40 p.m. -- Thompson's son, Juan, his daughter-in-law and his 6-year-old grandson were in another room of the Owl Ranch compound in Woody Creek, a few miles northwest of Aspen. Juan heard a bang, a noise he figured was a book falling.
Anita Thompson had just finished a yoga class when a friend heard that something bad had occurred at Owl Ranch.
"I called my cellphone and there was a message from Juan saying 'Anita, you have to come home; he's dead.' I started to panic. I knew this day would come, but not like this."
Thompson, the hard-drinking writer who coined the term "gonzo journalism" and wrote drug-fueled best-sellers such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," had finally done it.
Cursed with increasingly bad health and never expecting to see 40 -- let alone 67 -- Thompson had decided to go out, as his widow said, "like a champion."
He had put a .45-caliber pistol in his mouth while sitting in his favorite chair at the kitchen table and pulled the trigger.
