Britain’s cruellest couple?
It was appalling: hundreds of animals dying from neglect at a Lakeland zoo and a young Scots keeper mauled to death by a tiger. Now read the story of its millionaire owner and his beauty queen wife — and decide who YOU think should be caged...
Seven healthy lion cubs were killed for lack of space The list of animal tragedies is as long as it is shocking
EVEN by the flamboyant standards of the fashion industry, it was an audacious entrance. The model — resplendent in a strapless wedding gown and floor-sweeping chiffon train — emerged onto the catwalk not with customary high-heeled swagger, but astride a beautiful white horse.
The stunt drew gasps of awe at the prestigious bridal fashion show, until the horse’s hoof tripped on the model’s train and any traces of admiration turned to horror.
Its rider jumped off in an apparent bid to save herself as the animal fell off the catwalk, collapsing into tables several feet below.
Surrounded by bright lights, loud music and screams from stunned onlookers, it bucked and rolled in fear. It later transpired the horse was scratched.
Watching the unedifying scene, which occurred at a fashion show in Peru in 2005 and was captured on video, viewers were aghast at what appeared to be a flagrant display of animal cruelty.
The woman on horseback that day was the svelte blonde Frieda Rivera-Schreiber. Today, she is the wife of David Gill, millionaire owner of South Lakes Safari Zoo in Cumbria, which this week was ordered to close following one of the most shocking animal welfare scandals of recent years.
The zoo, which attracts 250,000 visitors a year, was issued with a closure order after an inspection found 486 animals died there between December 2013 and September 2016.
The distressing tally includes two leopards partially eaten by other animals, a monkey found behind a radiator and seven healthy lion clubs destroyed due to lack of space.
Barrow Council lambasted its ‘deplorable’ standards of welfare and lack of veterinary care. Frieda Rivera-Schreiber, 43, a former Peruvian beauty queen who retrained as a vet, was on the team responsible for providing that veterinary care.
According to council records, she was made the zoo’s director of veterinary services shortly after marrying Gill, 56, in an elaborate beachside setting in Peru in 2014 and moving to Britain that year. Alarmingly, she is not registered as a vet in this country, meaning that she is not supposed to carry out veterinary surgery.
It transpires she carried out post-mortem examinations on 150 of the zoo’s dead animals.
A Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons spokesman says: ‘A post-mortem examination implies a diagnosis is being made and opinion provided regarding a disease or injury.
‘As a diagnosis is something only a vet can undertake, it would not be appropriate under the Veterinary Surgeons Act 1966 for a non-vet to undertake a post-mortem examination.’
Though Rivera-Schreiber has been registered as a vet since 2008 in Peru, the register shows she is ‘inactive’. And according to a spokesman from the Veterinary College of Peru, she has not been licensed to work as a vet in the country for ‘many years’.
So, who are this couple so mired in controversy? They share personal lives every bit as controversial as their careers.
Gill — who set up his zoo in 1994 — is a thrice-married father of six for whom drama is as omnipresent as his trademark cowboy hat.
Having cheated on his first wife with a 17-year-old zoo keeper, he was nearly killed by the jealous husband of a married conquest, and was taken to tribunal after allegedly telling another zoo employee to terminate her pregnancy.
The glamorous Rivera-Schreiber has, on the surface at least, a more genteel background.
The granddaughter of a Peruvian ambassador to Tokyo, her socialite mother is also called Frieda and is a fellow former beauty queen.
Rivera-Schreiber’s first husband was plastic surgeon Jesus Ferreyros, 57, with whom she has a daughter Isabella, now 20.
By the time she and Ferreyros divorced in February 2009, they had been separated for five years.
When the Mail spoke to Ferreyros this week he said that he and RiveraSchreiber only talk when ‘necessary’ but admitted Isabella had spoken to her mother this week and claimed, bizarrely, that Rivera-Schreiber and Gill ‘split up some time ago’.
When we asked if he was aware of Rivera-Schreiber’s training and career as a vet, he said: ‘She didn’t work much at all with this in Peru.’
Not exactly a glowing endorsement of her professionalism.
Rivera-Schreiber, too, moved on with her romantic life long before the dust settled on their divorce.
According to Peruvian media reports, her next lover Fernando Garrigue, a kite surfing champion to whom she became engaged, was reportedly found with gunshot wounds in October 2012 in a suspected suicide.
A childhood friend told the Mail that Fernando moved at RiveraSchreiber’s suggestion from Lima to a home on the Illescas peninsula, an isolated coastal spot in north-west Peru, which Fernando converted into an ecological reserve.
After Fernando’s death, she and Gill transformed his eco lodge into luxury four-star accommodation — though the Facebook advert for the tourist attraction appears to have been deleted this week.
‘After Fernando died, the place passed to Frieda because the laws in Peru say that even without having married, if a couple live together for more than five years the other person has a right to keep their property,’ says the source. Yet if RiveraSchreiber is hoping that marriage to Gill will afford her any security, she might be sorely disappointed. For this, it seems, is a man for whom monogamy is an unnatural concept.
In 1997, three years after South Lakes Safari Zoo opened, Gill, who was married for 12 years to his first wife Alison, with whom he has two children, had an affair with his 17-year-old kangaroo keeper, Shelley Goodwin.
‘It doesn’t matter that I’m having a relationship with a young girl,’ he was quoted at the time. ‘That’s what I want to do. My relationship with Alison broke down before I employed Shelley. I know it’s not conventional, but I’ve never lived life by the rules.’
In 2000, Gill married Shelley, but the nuptials appear short-lived — by 2003 he was living with a woman called Caroline, with whom he had two more children. They seem to have split in 2004.
Then, in 2007, he embarked on an affair with Alison Creary — a married brunette he met in the playground of their children’s primary school.
It was an infidelity that nearly cost him his life after Alison’s husband Richard, a burly rugby player, found out about the affair in 2008.
Creary slashed the tyres on Gill’s Bentley before breaking into his home and finding the zoo owner halfnaked in bed with his wife.
‘This figure appeared, banged me against the wall and tried to strangle me,’ says Gill. ‘He stuck a knife in my neck. There was blood spurting all over the floor. I later found the knife narrowly missed two arteries — it’s a miracle I’m still alive.’
Richard Creary was arrested for suspected attempted murder, but later admitted the lesser charge of aggravated burglary with intent to cause actual bodily harm. He was jailed for five years at Preston Crown Court while Gill struggled to continue his relationship with Alison in the wake of such drama.
This might seem no more than a tawdry soap opera were it not conducted amid a backdrop of such colossal animal cruelty.
For the list of tragedies at the zoo is as long as it is shocking.
In 1997, a three-ton white rhino went on the rampage at the park and had to be shot dead. Three giraffes that died between September 2000 and September 2001 were found to have suffered tetanus, heart failure and vitamin deficiencies.
In 2006, a South American coati — a type of racoon — escaped and had to be captured using a tranquiliser dart after it wandered into a garden, with a government inspector saying escapes at the park were ‘a matter for concern’ that same year. In 2008,
a faulty electric heater was blamed for starting a fire in which 30 lemurs died and in 2010 a missing monkey was recaptured in a church, five days after escaping.
Yet it is not just the animals that suffered. David Gill’s employees were left traumatised, too. Lara Grant, 39, from Barrow-in-Furness, won a claim for sexual discrimination against the zoo in 2001.
The former Lara Kitson, then 23 and pregnant, was awarded £30,000 by a tribunal in Carlisle after Gill was found to have ordered her to climb a 16ft pole to feed the lions. When Lara said it would put her unborn baby at risk, she says Gill told her to think about whether to proceed with the pregnancy.
‘He shouted at me to the effect that I would be no use to him if I couldn’t climb ladders or jump fences,’ said Lara, who resigned and was diagnosed with stress.
Fifteen years on, she is scarred from her ordeal and too ‘heartbroken’ to return to the zoo.
‘David Gill has caused me so many problems,’ she told the Mail this week. ‘He devastated me. Zoology was all I ever wanted to do. He ruled out zoo-keeping completely for me for life. I am devastated with (the recent) findings. His actions and sexist views seem to be the same.
‘He tends to rub people up the wrong way. Someone should have stood up to him for the animals’ sake and maybe it wouldn’t have grown so bad.’
Sadly, after Lara left, the situation only grew worse. In May 2013, Scots zookeeper Sarah McClay, 24, described by her family as ‘lively and kind with a great sense of humour’, was mauled to death by a Sumatran tiger that escaped through an unlocked gate.
An inquest found the tiger had reached Sarah by entering two open internal sliding gates within the tiger house and then an open door that led on to the corridor.
The zoo accepted it had not addressed risks arising from a defective bolt on the door that was open immediately before the attack, and was fined £297,500.
Gill — who faced individual charges — was formally acquitted and, though he and RiveraSchreiber have previously resigned after concerns were raised over events at the zoo, it’s claimed that as recently as December he was still overseeing decisions.
Sarah’s grief-stricken mother, Fiona, from Linlithgow, West Lothian, says he should not be absolved of responsibility.
‘It doesn’t matter that the charges were dropped against David Gill,’ Fiona has said. ‘Most people think of him when they think of the zoo. He is the zoo.’
It is a preconception that Cumbria Zoo Company Ltd, a new company which took over management of the zoo in January, is keen to shatter. Having applied for an operating licence for the zoo — which remains open until Gill’s 28 days to appeal the closure order — it hopes to run the attraction independently of its owner.
A spokesman for Cumbria Zoo Ltd said the business is now under control of their company and, among other measures, they have commissioned a complete animal welfare audit and a review of veterinary services:
‘We are passionate about our animals (and) thoroughly committed to delivering high standards of animal welfare.
‘We have developed and mitigated many of the welfare concerns that were inherited when we took over.
‘We acknowledge we have a long way to go and we never accept we cannot improve our animal welfare provision.
‘We believe in action rather than looking to blame individuals or groups that may have led to the recent historical situation.’
Neither Gill nor Rivera-Schreiber have responded to our requests for comment this week.
As Gill once said, when asked what’s the worst thing about being a boss: ‘The buck stops with me.’
And this time, it seems, his luck has finally run out.