On the day after Christmas in 1985, world-famous researcher Dian Fossey was found bludgeoned to death in her remote cabin high in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda. The room was ransacked, yet cash, traveler's checks, her passport, and her handguns were left untouched, pointing not to a robbery but to a targeted killing. This deep dive traces how a lonely, alienated child from San Francisco became the fierce, unrelenting protector of the mountain gorillas she considered her true family.

We follow Fossey from a rejecting childhood and a failed pre-veterinary path into occupational therapy, then to a life-changing 1963 safari, her meeting with Louis Leakey, and the founding of the Karisoke Research Center. Her empathetic methods revolutionized primatology, but grief over gorillas like Digit and Uncle Bert pushed her toward militant anti-poachin ...