Gorilla Expert’s Accused Killer to Be Tried in Absentia

The government of Rwanda will try in absentia an American accused of the machete murder of gorilla expert Dian Fossey, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman said Thursday.

Kathleen Tormey said the trial of Wayne Richard McGuire will begin Dec. 11 in Ruhengeri, 40 miles northwest of Kigali, the capital.

“The embassy is observing the trial, but we have nothing to do with the defense,” she said in a telephone interview from Kigali.

Fossey, 53, an American, was found hacked to death Dec. 27 in her remote camp on the slopes of Rwanda’s 12,175-foot Mt. Visoke, a dormant volcano.

McGuire, 35, of Hazlett, N.J., was Fossey’s research assistant. He left Rwanda just days before a warrant was issued for his arrest. He later turned up in Los Angeles, where he denied any involvement in Fossey’s death and called the murder charge “outrageous.”

McGuire’s work in Rwanda was intended to contribute to his doctoral studies at the University of Oklahoma at Norman.

A University of Oklahoma spokeswoman said Thursday that McGuire is enrolled as a doctoral student in the anthropology department, but she said he does not attend classes.

The Rwanda government in July issued an international warrant for McGuire’s arrest. But sources in East Africa said Rwanda has made no attempt to have the suspect arrested in the United States or extradited.

The United States and Rwanda do not have an extradition treaty.

Jean Damscene Nkezabo, Rwanda’s director general for the administration of justice, said in an August interview that the motive for the murder appeared to be the theft of the manuscript of a book Fossey was writing. The book was a sequel to her 1983 work “Gorillas in the Mist,” which brought her world renown as an expert on mountain gorillas.

“It was the only thing missing from Miss Fossey’s home,” Nkezabo explained. “Everything else--the clothes, money, cameras--was left. Only the document cannot be found.”

Officials questioned several of the Rwandans who worked for Fossey but released them. They had also suspected for a time that poachers might have killed the animal researcher.

Her contempt for poachers, who sell skins, skulls and paws of the gorillas as novelty items, at times prompted her to take dramatic action. There were reports that she had shot at the illegal hunters, and in 1980 she was summoned by the magistrate in Ruhengeri for allegedly taking hostage the daughter of a Rwandan, whom she accused of abducting a baby gorilla. Fossey reportedly offered the suspected poacher an exchange. She was released with a reprimand.

Took Over Work

After her death, McGuire took over Fossey’s work at Karisoke Research Center and continued developing his thesis on male gorilla parental behavior.

Before coming to Africa in 1967 at the suggestion of the late paleontologist Louis Leakey, Fossey was a physical therapist in California and earned a doctorate at Cambridge University in Britain for animal research.