

They began questioning former employees - Ms.

Adamson’s wounds were too sharp and bloodless to have been caused by an animal, and they decided the 69-year-old naturalist had been murdered with a sharp instrument. Later, however, police concluded that Ms. Adamson and her husband George raised as a cub and then returned to the wild.) ( Born Free, to refresh your memory, tells the story of one Elsa, a lion that Ms. Morson/Mawson jumped to the conclusion that she’d been mauled by a lion, and that’s how the death was first reported in the American media, always suckers for the cheap ironic twist. This seems to be a chronic problem with animal researchers - you may recall the unhappy case of gorilla researcher Dian Fossey, whose relations with others were often hostile and who in 1985 was also murdered.Īdamson’s body was discovered by her assistant, Peter Morson (or maybe it was Pieter Mawson - there is a distressing amount of confusion in the press on this point), on the evening of January 3, 1980, on a road near her camp in a remote part of Kenya. Adamson, it seems, got along better with four-legged animals than she did with two-legged ones. The official word is that she was stabbed to death by a disgruntled former employee.
