Voices from the Mist is about my husband, David, and my experiences with our friend Dian Fossey, who saved the mountain gorillas from extinction in Rwanda, Africa. We volunteered at her Karisoke Research Center in 1985, just four months before her murder. For the first time, you’ll hear firsthand accounts (including ours) from Rwandans who knew her best but were never interviewed. David and I traveled to Rwanda in 2017, and most recently in October of 2019, where I interviewed 12 of Dian’s former Rwandan employees and others who knew her well. My co-author is Joseph Munyaneza, one of Dian’s first Rwandan students and her first Ph.D. Joe was one of the last people to see Dian alive when she invited him to Christmas dinner, the night before she was murdered.

Backstory

David and I lived in Manhattan Beach California in the 1980’s and were only two of millions who’d read Dian’s groundbreaking and best-selling book, Gorillas in the Mist. She had touched us profoundly with her mission to save mountain gorillas from extinction. Her book had reignited my childhood passion for gorillas, which began at the Jewel Theater in East Los Angeles with the rerelease of the King Kong movie in 1957. I’d cried buckets when Kong fell from the Empire State Building.

Dian’s struggle to save the mountain gorillas was so incredibly attractive, I’d felt compelled to pour my heart out in a letter to her, in which I explained we were willing to do anything she asked, including dismantling poacher snares.

We had no qualifications. David ran a home-based consulting business and I worked in the marketing department of an international firm, so we were shocked when Dian responded to my letter with an invitation to her research center. Her first note was terse, but she warmed up in later letters. More than a year would pass before we would be able to take her up on her offer. This was the beginning of our friendship and our adventures with Dian.