Dian Fossey

Fossey spent eighteen years among mountain gorillas in the Virunga volcanoes from 1967, at a camp she built at nine thousand feet, and established that the animals were shy and social rather than the monsters of the popular literature. She also fought poachers by methods that alarmed her own colleagues: cutting snares, burning camps, seizing cattle, and by her own account frightening suspects badly enough that the local authorities objected. Gorillas in the Mist is the account of the work and was filmed with Sigourney Weaver. She was found killed in her cabin in December 1985, struck with a machete. Her research assistant was charged and her tracker convicted in his absence, and almost nobody who has looked at the case regards it as solved.