Gorillas’ survival is Fossey legacy
Dian Fossey’s work with animals made her an icon – and a target. Thirty years after her murder, conspiracies still abound, Joe Shute discovers.
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.’’
In Rwanda they called her Nyiramacibili, ‘‘the woman who lives alone in the forest’’. In the West she was – and remains – a feminist icon. Prince Harry’s fiancee 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 December 26, 1985, Fossey was brutally 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 Fossey’s life and death. Narrated by Sigourney Weaver (who played Fossey in the fictionalised 1988 film Gorillas in the Mist) and featuring interviews with Sir David Attenborough and numerous former colleagues, including Ian Redmond, the threepart 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.
He admitted his university tutors feared he was not destined for a stellar degree. ‘‘She wrote back months later to say she didn’t care what other people say,’’ Redmond recalls. ‘‘But if I wanted to come I had to get myself out there.’’
Post-independence Rwanda was a deeply isolated place whose ethnic tensions would later explode in the 1994 genocide.
An only child whose parents had divorced when she was young, Fossey had always felt an affinity with animals.
There had been several boyfriends and one engagement but never a true love. She was working as an occupational therapist prior to moving to Africa, and when the opportunity for adventure came, she seized it. 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 6ft 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 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. ‘‘I was in such shock, I couldn’t even believe she was dead,’’ he says. ‘‘I couldn’t even cry.’’
The intruder had ripped open her cabin’s corrugated metal wall to gain entry. 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.
Karl Hoffman, 56, was then the US vice consul in Kigali. He recalls embassy staff retrieving Fossey’s corpse and having to store it in a brewery ice house as there was no morgue in the Rwandan capital. He attended her funeral, when she was buried in the same forest glade as her murdered gorillas.
Soon afterwards Ian Redmond travelled out to collect Fossey’s possessions and went up to the camp with Hoffman.
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.
In the months that followed, Hoffman recalls the US Embassy constantly pressuring the Rwandan government to properly investigate the murder. Eventually they were given the name of a suspect and told he would soon be arrested: Fossey’s student Wayne McGuire.
Convinced he had played no role in the killing, Hoffman travelled up to Karisoke to warn him of his impending arrest, and McGuire fled the country. He was convicted of her murder in absentia.
Hoffman 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 still insists that despite the animosity felt towards her by poachers, the killing was far too professional 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.
Since then, the gorillas she devoted her life to have managed to stave off extinction. For the gorillas to outlive her is something those who knew Dian Fossey say was all she ever wanted.
Sunday Telegraph
❚ Dian Fossey: Secrets in the Mist begins airing on Sky TV’s National Geographic channel at 8.30pm on Thursday, December 14.