Kingston, WA – Washington’s famous “Slug King”, Jimbo Quixotic, has been arrested for attempting to hire a hitwoman to murder his arch rival, Cheryl Maskin.
“Yesterday at around 3pm, deputies arrested Quixotic at his slug compound south of Kingston,” said Sergeant Bill Helper of the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office. “What they found there left our deputies extremely disturbed and extremely slimy. We are all in shock and also very slippery.”
Quixotic, who owns “Slug Factory Zoo and Petting Farm”, is a well-known and eccentric character in the area. He often wears cowboy style handguns that have been retrofitted to shoot salt pellets instead of real bullets.
He opened the farm in 1997 and collected dozens of different species of slugs from around the Pacific Northwest and the world. “Of course, Ariolimax Columbianus is my favorite slug. Everyone knows it by the common name of Banana Slug,” said Quixotic in a 1998 interview. “When I first saw that beautiful slug gliding across my dad’s barbecue when I was 9 years old, I fell in love immediately. I couldn’t stop staring and knew one day I would be the ‘Slug King.’”
The zoo offers fun for the whole family, where people can hold and pet slugs. Kids especially love petting the baby slugs. “Who can resist such special creatures? God was having a great day when he made the precious slug,” said Quixotic.
The park also offers slug-themed rides. One favorite is called the “Slug Slide of Scariness” where riders go down a 400 foot slide and splash into a pool of goo. “It’s just like slug slime. The kids love it. The parents, not so much,” Quixotic explained.
Cheryl Maskin also loves slugs, but not ones kept in captivity. So she opened “Super Slug Safety and Rescue” in 2000 near Port Angeles. “We love slugs and we don’t feel they should be held captive for profit and greed,” said Maskin. “That is why we opened up our refuge to visitors so they can see slugs in their beautiful and natural habitat. They’re not captive like at Jimbo’s place. Slugs can come and go as they please. Nobody is stopping them unless they get in my vegetable garden. Then the ol’ salt shaker comes on out.”
Maskin alleges there is a dark side to Quixotic’s operation. “We had undercover investigators go in to discover the truth. We found out that people could pay a special fee and be escorted to secret rooms in the back of the zoo where they could, I can barely say what they did to those poor slugs,” explained Maskin, sobbing. “Where they could lick slugs. Why, just why? Sick!”
Maskin also uncovered what Quixotic did when baby slugs weren’t cute enough anymore to be petted. “We found a mass grave with hundreds and hundreds of baby slugs dumped there,” said Maskin. “He threw them in there and dumped truckloads of salt on them just because they weren’t useful to him any longer and he couldn’t profit off of them.”
Once Quixotic found out what Maskin knew, he allegedly hired hitwoman Ellen Plover to kill Maskin by suffocating her in a pile of slugs. “I was to make it look like an accident at her place. But I just couldn’t go through with it when I found out Jimbo was only going to pay me $15 per hour. I mean, it would probably only take a couple hours to do the job. That’s just not enough for a hitwoman like me to make it in today’s world with men in power. I was deeply offended, especially when I learned Jimbo would pay men $30 per hour to kill someone,” said Plover.
Plover went to the police and confessed everything, which led to Quixotic’s arrest. As Quixotic was being perp-walked into jail, he yelled that Maskin had her missing husband murdered. “She dumped his body in a pool of slugs and suffocated him. And now she’s accusing me of doing the same to baby slugs? Don’t you see what’s going on here, you fools? Arrest her! She’s the real killer, not me! Help!”
When asked about Quixotic’s accusations, Maskin said that he is just crazy. “I would never do something like that. I swear on a stack of slugs. Slug’s honor.”
Riding on the success of the hit film “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness”, Netflix plans to release a documentary later this year that follows the investigation of Quixotic called “Slug King: Slayings, Slime and Sadness.”
