There’s a scene in the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man where director Werner Herzog listens to a few moments of the haunting audio recording of Timothy Treadwell’s fatal attack by a grizzly bear — before becoming completely unnerved by what he’s hearing and pulling off his headphones.

“You must never listen to this,” the German filmmaker tells Treadwell’s longtime confidant and former girlfriend, Jewel Palovak, in a scene from the critically acclaimed film, urging her to destroy the tape.

Palovak, 62, indeed never dared listen to the haunting recording and tells PEOPLE now that she ended up locking the tape away in a safety deposit box before ultimately smashing it with a hammer, cutting it up with a knife and throwing it out a couple years ago.

“It felt very good to do that,” says Palovak. “It felt freeing, very freeing.”

While that recording of 46-year-old Treadwell’s final moments may be gone, his presence and complex legacy endure, says Palovak, who ran his advocacy group Grizzly People and was friends with his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, who was killed with him in the October 2003 attack.

A self-taught bear expert who was both admired for his conservation efforts and criticized for the risks he took, Treadwell spent 13 summers living in Alaska’s remote Katmai National Park, videotaping the world’s densest grizzly population and sharing his passion for bears with anyone would listen.

The former drug addict, who credited grizzlies with helping him get sober, often lectured to more than 10,000 school children a year about his efforts to protect the animals from hunters, poachers and the encroaching loss of their habitat.

“His goal,” Palovak says, “was to show people the secret life of grizzly bears, to open up people to a completely other world, to inspire them, especially the children, to be good stewards of the planet and to fight for things they think are right, no matter how big the challenge seems.”

More than two decades after Treadwell and Huguenard were killed, their deaths remain among the most infamous bear attacks on record and recently spawned yet another documentary, Diary Of The Grizzly Man.

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According to Alaskan state trooper reports, Treadwell and Huguenard, a 37-year-old physicians assistant, were killed and partially eaten by a male grizzly at their campsite in 2003.

Palovak believes that Treadwell was inside his tent, reviewing the video footage he’d shot earlier in the day, and went outside the tent to go to the bathroom when he encountered the bear.

“He probably spoke to it the way he always did and this time it didn’t work out for him on that night,” she says, adding that the couple had been camping in an unfamiliar spot, with scarce food for the grizzlies, and were surrounded by bears that weren’t accustomed to Treadwell’s presence.

A pilot who arrived the next day to pick them up spotted what appeared to be a bear standing over a body.

When three park rangers made it to the foggy, rain-soaked scene, the animal — a 28-year-old male estimated to weigh 1,000 lbs. — charged them and was killed.

Human remains were found in its gut and body parts from the couple, along with Treadwell’s video camera — which captured a six-minute audio-only clip of the attack — were later discovered by authorities.

“You can hear him screaming,” state trooper Chris Hill told PEOPLE in 2003. “She’s screaming, ‘Is the bear still there? Play dead.’ He tells her to hit the bear with a pan or can. He said something to the effect that he was dying or he was being killed. We really didn’t hear the bear at all.”

Palovak says now: “He knew the dangers and he knew he was [camping] in a compromising spot … I’m sure that in the last moments of his life, he couldn’t believe that this was happening to him and that the bear would probably end up being killed [after attacking him]. He would have seen that as the biggest tragedy.”

In the years since Treadwell’s death, the work of the organization he helped create with Palovak — to advocate for the protection bears and the wilderness they call home — has “totally tapered off,” she says.

“The star of the show was gone and our board members and donors have gone on to other things,” she adds.

Nevertheless, Treadwell story is far from forgotten, thanks in part to Herzog’s documentary, which The New York Times recently placed on its “100 Best Movies of the 21^st Century” list.

And every so often, Palovak is stopped by strangers who can’t figure out why she looks so familiar until she asks them if they’ve ever seen Grizzly Man.

“About a year ago, an older lady tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘He should have never been there. He didn’t know what he was doing,’ ” she recalls. “People either thought he was some kind of saint-like animal whisperer or that he was a complete idiot. He was obviously neither. … But he didn’t have a death wish. He wasn’t stupid.”

Treadwell, she says, would have loved Grizzly Man, which used video footage he shot during his years in Alaska to help tell Herzog’s story.

“He always told me, ‘If I die, make a kick-ass movie.’ I was like, ‘Oh sure, I’ll do that,’ ” says Palovak, laughing. “But that’s actually what ended up happening … I think it would have been the kick-ass movie that he wanted.”