Rwanda Case of the Gorilla Lady Murder

To the people of the tiny central African state of Rwanda she was known as Nyiramacibili, or “the Woman Who Lives Alone in the Forest.” Her real name was Dian Fossey, and she was a onetime occupational therapist from Louisville. For most of the past 18 years Fossey had lived at a remote camp on the slopes of a dormant volcano. There she studied and befriended the rare mountain gorillas, fiercely defending the huge, gentle creatures against the encroachment of poachers. Almost everyone, including her last research assistant, Wayne McGuire, 34, a doctoral candidate from the University of Oklahoma, felt she was more comfortable with the primates than with human beings, and Fossey apparently agreed. “I have no friends,” she once said. “The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people.”

Early on the morning of Dec. 27, 1985, Dian Fossey, 53, was found dead in the bedroom of her two-room corrugated-tin cabin. Her face had been slashed in two by the blows of a machete. Her shocked acquaintances and colleagues suspected she had been murdered by the Rwandan poachers against whom she had waged war for more than a decade. She had burned their huts, cut their trap lines and paid government guards to bring suspected poachers to her for interrogation. Some of her acquaintances believed the poachers had long ago begun to retaliate by slaughtering her favorite creatures, concentrating on the particular gorillas she had been studying among the 29 groups in the surrounding national park.

The Rwandan government, it turns out, had different ideas. Last week it announced it had issued an arrest warrant for McGuire, who stayed on to run the camp after Fossey’s death. He left Rwanda in late July, after hearing rumors of his impending arrest. A government official, Jean-Damasdene Nkezabo, disclosed that although McGuire was regarded as the “principal author of the murder,” five Rwandans who had worked at the camp were being charged as accomplices. The presumed motive was the theft of scientific research that Fossey had accumulated over the years.

The official statements were greeted by widespread skepticism. Declared Biologist Ian Redmond, who knew both Fossey and McGuire and spent two years at the camp: “The charge is nonsense. They’ve concentrated on trying to find someone who is not a Rwandan.” Others questioned whether, if he was really implicated, McGuire would have remained at the camp for seven months and whether he could have expected to gain very much by stealing scientific data to which he already had access. And besides, they argued, McGuire had been in Rwanda just five months at the time of Fossey’s death, knew only a few words of French and Swahili, and would have had to converse with his “co- conspirators” in sign language.

Nonetheless, the Rwandan government claimed to have “serious, corroborated evidence.” Though the U.S. does not have an extradition treaty with Rwanda, a friend of McGuire’s told the Washington Post that McGuire was looking for a lawyer and would probably make a statement soon.