ALONE IN THE FOREST UNTIL THE BRUTAL END
THIRTY YEARS AFTER THE MURDER OF GORILLA ADVOCATE DIAN FOSSEY, SUSPICIONS REMAIN
Ian Redmond can still recall the first time he saw Dian Fossey among gorillas. It was a sunny day in the Virunga Mountains on the border between (what was then) Zaire and Rwanda. The mist that often shrouded the steep volcanic valleys had dissipated to reveal endless forests of hagenia and hypericum, draped with clouds of lichen.
When they emerged through a clearing into the centre of a family of gorillas, the first thing Redmond — Fossey’s young English research assistant, newly arrived in Rwanda — noticed was the incredible sense of proximity the animals displayed towards her. “The gorillas approached and looked very closely into her face,” he says. “The way they gathered around her it was clear she wasn’t just an observer.”
The year was 1976 and Fossey already a legend. The U.S. primatologist had first arrived in the Virungas in 1967, pitching camp at 10,000 feet and determined to live alone, studying the gorillas in their natural habitat.
In Rwanda they called her the Nyiramacibili, “the woman who lives alone in the forest.” In the West she was — and remains — a feminist icon. Prince Harry’s fiancée Meghan Markle counts Fossey as one of her greatest inspirations, and in 2015 made a special pilgrimage to see Rwanda’s mountain gorillas.
But at some point overnight on Dec. 26 1985, Fossey was murdered in her mountain research camp. The 53-year-old was found hacked to death with a machete and her room ransacked. Her killer has never been found.
This week, a major new National Geographic documentary re-examines the life and death of Dian Fossey. Narrated by Sigourney Weaver (who played Fossey in the fictionalized 1988 film Gorillas in the Mist) and featuring interviews with Sir David Attenborough and numerous former colleagues, including Ian Redmond, the three-part series explores the many conflicting theories about Fossey’s murder, which persist today.
I meet Redmond at London’s Royal Geographic Society during a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Primate Society of Great Britain, which formed the same year Fossey began working in Rwanda.
The 63-year-old, who lives in Gloucestershire and is a senior wildlife consultant with the wildlife charity Born Free, was an impressionable science undergraduate when he wrote to Fossey asking for work.
By the time of Redmond’s arrival in Rwanda, Fossey had already developed a reputation for the direct action she took against local poachers. Standing at 6 feet and possessing a “Herculean bellow,” she often captured and interrogated her victims, whipping them with nettle stems and donning Halloween skull masks to terrify them into thinking she was a witch.
“She had this reputation of a hard-drinking (Johnnie Walker whisky) chain-smoking (Sportsman cigarettes) vigilante in the mountains,” Redmond says. “There were times when that might seem apt but other times that just wasn’t her.”
The death of any gorilla at the hands of poachers struck Fossey deeply but in early 1978, the mutilated corpse of her favourite, Digit, was discovered by Redmond. “When I told her what happened, it was like a shutter going down behind her eyes,” he says.
Redmond had left the camp by the time of Fossey’s death. His place was taken by two young researchers, Wayne McGuire, a student at the University of Oklahoma, and a 20-year-old Rwandan zoology student called Joseph Munyaneza.
Munyaneza recalls the three of them sharing a Christmas supper of burritos and beer. The next day he travelled down the mountain to visit family. On the morning of December 27 he received a phone call saying Fossey had been murdered.
He arrived on the scene some six hours later and recalls finding Fossey lying in her pyjamas at the foot of the bed, machete wounds to her head and her cabin turned upside down.
The intruder had entered by ripping open the corrugated metal wall of her cabin. Despite the chaos, Fossey’s pistols had not been stolen, nor had the bundles of cash she kept. Bare footprints were found in the mud outside.
Ian Redmond travelled out to collect Fossey’s possessions. Among her reams of notes they found the carbon copy of a letter she had intended to send to Redmond detailing an interrogation of a poacher and the fact she had confiscated his magic pouch — prized by the local hunters — and a piece of paper with dates and names which she was convinced detailed rendezvous with gold smugglers.
Redmond believes Fossey’s confiscation of the letter may have prompted someone implicated to order her murder, and that her room was torn apart in order to find it.
Eventually Fossey’s student Wayne McGuire was implicated. McGuire fled the country and was convicted of her murder in absentia.
Karl Hoffman, then the U.S. vice-consul in Kigali, sat in on the trial and disputes the evidence presented. “It was a farce as far as I was concerned,” he says.
Munyaneza, who shared a room with McGuire, says the Rwandan prosecutors “did all they could;” he remains insistent the killing was carried out in a far too professional manner for it to be one of the locals. Unless the investigation is reopened as a cold case, he fears the answer will never be found.
IT’S VERY HARD TO BREED ANY SINGLE BEAN VARIETY WITH THE VERY BEST OF TRAITS ... THAT WOULD BE THE SUPER, SUPER BEAN. BUT THAT’S WHAT WE ARE WORKING TOWARD. DEBISI ARABA, CENTER FOR TROPICAL AGRICULTURE