--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noelle King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: There's a story that has preoccupied me for more than 10 years. In 1995, in Zambia, in Africa, a man was shot and killed. We don't know for sure who shot him.
--:-- Noelle King: This man was alleged to be an animal poacher, but no one ever proved that he was. An ABC News crew in Zambia was doing a story about a pair of American conservationists and filmed the killing.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: And afterward, someone disposed of this man's body in a lagoon. No one was ever charged with the killing.
--:-- Noelle King: What bothers me is the idea that somebody was murdered in a remote part of Zambia, a remote part of Africa, and no one cares. It doesn't seem right, is my point.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: It just doesn't seem right that this happened. And also, I think I know who did it.
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--:-- Noelle King: We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair. Oh, yikes. Or forgetting sunscreen so now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. Learn more at schwab.com.
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--:-- Noelle King: Today Explained, we're back. The book Where the Crawdads Sing has sold more than 15 million copies, just became a must-see, at least on an airplane, movie.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: And all of this is interesting to me because the author of that book is Delia Owens, one half of the conservationist duo that ABC News was profiling during the 1995 killing.
--:-- Noelle King: Jeff, your reporting found that Delia's husband, Mark, and his son, Chris, were present the night of the killing.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: Tell me about how this American couple ended up in Zambia. They had, early in life, decided that they were going to go save the animals in Africa. They were naturalists.
--:-- Noelle King: They moved first to Botswana. It was very young conservationists. And they wrote a book out of their experience there, Cry of the Kalahari, which became quite popular.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: They ran into trouble with the Botswanan government. They were protesting the fencing of various plains that were stopping animal migrations and had alienated the government there.
--:-- Noelle King: I have no way of judging whether they were right or wrong. Chances are they were partially right, maybe partially wrong. I don't know.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: But they were kicked out of Botswana, and then they looked for another country to go to to continue their work. They really did feel, and you get this in their writing, that they were on a mission to save the animals, which is a very great mission.
--:-- Noelle King: They went to Zambia. They found this park, north Luangwa, very remote. Zambia, first of all, is not on the main track of eastern in southern Africa, sort of a tertiary country in terms of safaris and all the rest.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: But it has great wildlife and these very, very remote parks. And in this particular park, North Owangwa, there was a poaching problem, huge problem for elephants and rhino also.
--:-- Noelle King: And they set themselves up there. And eventually, over time, Mark Owens in particular kind of became the ruler of this vast swath of Zambia.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: I mean, this park is about 2,400 square miles, and the outskirts of it are also, you know, wilderness. So it's quite remote.
--:-- Noelle King: And Mark Owens and Delia became kind of the king and queen of this region.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: Over time, Mark got more and more militant in his efforts to fight poaching and would fly nighttime missions.
--:-- Noelle King: He kept talking about Vietnam. He had never served in Vietnam, but he kept in books and other talks talking about it as if it were Vietnam.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: They're throwing cherry bombs and other things out of planes at night, burning the tents of poaching groups.
--:-- Noelle King: And as things got darker and darker, started claiming to other people in the region that they were killing poachers, that the scouts under Mark Owens' command were killing poachers.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: Delia refers to this in a couple of their books, and she expresses ambivalence about it, but she was part of this operation.
--:-- Noelle King: And eventually, I think what happened, to put it bluntly, is they became so enamored of it that they thought, you know what, we need a lot of publicity for this.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: So that's when they invite ABC News in, and that is the beginning of the end of their operation there, because what they didn't realize, I guess you can sort of get, I mean, this happens often, I guess, in life.
--:-- Noelle King: You become convinced of your own rightness, your own righteousness even, and you don't understand how this might be perceived by outsiders.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: But what outsiders could see was a white American couple establishing themselves as the leaders or rulers of this vast tract of Zambia, ordering government employees to do their bidding, operating without any oversight and going further and further in.
--:-- Noelle King: The Zambian government was not effective in dealing with it. And at the end of the day, the Owens' walked into something that was akin to a vacuum.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: They took advantage of that vacuum to build their program in, let's just say, a non-democratic way.
--:-- Noelle King: How did the Africans that you spoke to feel about the Owens?
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: You know, it depends. There are Game Scouts who are very loyal to them. I spoke to some of them.
--:-- Noelle King: There are Game Scouts who felt that, and I have testimony in the original piece about this from Game Scouts, who said that in the course of their training, quote-unquote, under the leadership of Mark Owens and his son Christopher Owens, they were beaten, as a matter of course.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: And so they had resentments. In the villages and areas surrounding the park, the Owens' had a very negative, or developed over time, a very negative reputation for brutality.
--:-- Noelle King: One of the white Zambians who I spoke to who is an enormous critic of the Owens' said, in essence, that their attitude was, Africa's a wonderful place. It's pity about all the people.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: Their mentality was that what made Africa special was the large mammals, and that the people of Africa were the people in the way.
--:-- Noelle King: Zambians have mixed feelings about the Owens, but in the United States, they are getting a lot of attention.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: And that's how we get to the night when someone kills an alleged poacher while an ABC News camera is running.
--:-- Noelle King: Tell me about that night.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: On the night in question, Mark Owens flew an ABC cameraman, producer, and his son, Chris Owens, who was then helping him in this operation, out to an unknown location.
--:-- Noelle King: We don't know where it was exactly in the park, on the outskirts of the park, to what they said was an abandoned poacher camp.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: At a certain point in the night, an unidentified person, never learned the identity of this person, came into the camp and was shot.
--:-- Noelle King: Early in the morning, a scout discovers an abandoned campsite. Lying on the ground are shotgun shells.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: This person who is shot, we can't really tell. It's a black person, but we don't know anything about this man's identity other than that he's allegedly a poacher.
--:-- Noelle King: Coming into this camp is on the ground, is still moving. We can visibly see that he's moving, so he's wounded, he's not dead.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: Then there are three more shots from off-camera. Our cameras begin rolling again after a shot is fired at the returning trespasser.
--:-- Noelle King: The camera doesn't pivot to show us who, at least in what we saw on ABC, we don't see who is firing, but the bullets are fired into this body, this live body on the ground, helpless person, and then the body stops moving.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: The person is obviously dead.
--:-- Noelle King: The ABC narrator, Meredith Vieira, implies that the person is dead and makes a broad sweeping statement about this.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: The bodies of the poachers are often left where they fall for the animals to eat. Conservation. Morality. Africa.
--:-- Noelle King: And that's the last we see of this.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: My investigation 13, 14 years ago learned that the shots from off-camera were fired by Chris Owens.
--:-- Noelle King: The person who told me that was the ABC cameraman, Chris Everson.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: He's a South African cameraman, very prominent journalist.
--:-- Noelle King: It was never reported by ABC that a white American visitor to Zambia, I mean, he was on a tourist visa, the son of Mark Owens and the stepson of Delia Owens, fired these shots.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: Chris Owens disappeared from the camp, witnesses told me, after that, and was sent out to America.
--:-- Noelle King: He's never been back to Zambia.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: But Chris Everson said that it was Chris Owens who fired the original shots and the fatal shots.
--:-- Noelle King: And since then, the Zambian government, you know, and the Zambian government, by the way, the authorities conducted an initial investigation.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: They came to the same conclusion. They did not talk to Chris Everson, but they talked to other game scouts who said that, yes, indeed, it was this Chris Owens who fired the fatal shots.
--:-- Noelle King: And they have been, ever since then, seeking to interview not only Chris Owens, but Mark Owens and Delia Owens.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: Delia Owens was back in the camp at the time.
--:-- Noelle King: One more baroque but relevant point about all of this is that afterward, in the cleanup and cover-up of this killing, Mark Owens flew his helicopter back to the site where he had dropped his crew off.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: And according to witnesses, put the body of this alleged poacher, and again, of course, we don't know that this person was a poacher or not. We have no proof.
--:-- Noelle King: We have no sense of his identity. Put the body in a cargo net attached it to the helicopter flew away and dropped the body off in a lagoon.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: Just dropped it into the water and no body has ever been found.
--:-- Noelle King: Nobody knows where this happened.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: I can't stress enough how remote these locations are, how far away from cities or towns or even law enforcement.
--:-- Noelle King: So a lot of this happened in circumstances that make it very easy to both kill someone and then cover up the killing, and then make the body disappear.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: Coming up, the body disappears, and so does Delia Owens. How she got from the Zambian wilderness into Reese Witherspoon's book club.
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--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that.
--:-- Noelle King: Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown, or one we never wanted in the first place.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: But still, we stick it out, and we give reasons like, what if the next move is even worse?
--:-- Noelle King: I've already put years into this place, and maybe the most common one, isn't everyone kind of miserable at work?
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--:-- Noelle King: Today Explained, we're back with Jeff Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: How did you find out about this very complicated story in the first place?
--:-- Noelle King: Somebody I know who is involved in this in the universe of African conservation mentioned to me, you know, a couple of years after this was actually aired on ABC nationally.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: So have you ever seen the Turning Point documentary on Mark and Delia Owens?
--:-- Noelle King: And I said, no.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: And I got a hold of it. This is in the videocassette era. This is before the internet.
--:-- Noelle King: And I watched the videocassette and I couldn't believe it.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: I mean, the person who informed me about it gave me the right moral framing for it.
--:-- Noelle King: So I was primed to understand this as a morally dubious exercise as opposed to, oh, look, the cameraman got a great shot of a guy getting killed.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: So I watched it and I just started going down the road in traditional reporting methodology of trying to find people who knew things.
--:-- Noelle King: After a certain point, you run out of people to talk to in the United States or a couple of professional hunters I talked to who shared with me some information.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: There were ex-U.S. officials who had some information, people in the State Department, but general information, nothing confidential.
--:-- Noelle King: And then eventually you just realize you have to go to Zambia.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: So I probably made my first trip there 15 years ago.
--:-- Noelle King: The good thing about getting to Zambia was that the Owens' were well-known and quite controversial.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: So even though they're not charged, the Owens all leave the African continent.
--:-- Noelle King: Tell me what happens. Who helps and how do they get out and where do they go?
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: You know, what happens is the Turning Point documentary is broadcast.
--:-- Noelle King: Somebody, the State Department, someone, is alert or alive to the fact that this is controversial.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: And that, again, by the way, if this was the age of Twitter, they probably would have been arrested the next day.
--:-- Noelle King: You think so, huh?
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: I do. I do because the Zambian authorities would have found out right away about the broadcast, but they did not find out about it right away.
--:-- Noelle King: The U.S. Embassy, I believe, helped encourage them to leave and say, you know what, guys, this is going to get hot and weird and you should get out of here.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: I quote a former American ambassador, the American ambassador at the time, saying that in the article, saying that, you know, he feared that Mark Owens was going to get arrested and thrown into Zambian jail and then raped and be given AIDS.
--:-- Noelle King: So it was his responsibility as an American official to get the guy out of Zambia.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: So the whole system there was geared to believing that the Owenses were righteous victims of some kind of either media malfeasance or Zambian corrupt government malfeasance.
--:-- Noelle King: And so they got out. They left all their equipment there, and the Frank Geological Society took possession of it and I think uses some of it to this day to good ends from what I can tell.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: But the Owens' got out, went to Idaho, and were leading a fairly quiet life up in Idaho when I finally got up there, I don't know, 13 years ago.
--:-- Noelle King: They wouldn't talk to me, but I finally had to drive up there and try to look for them.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: And I did find Delia Owens, and we did have a brief interview conversation.
--:-- Noelle King: By the way, I should say it wasn't completely benign and quiet situation for them in Idaho.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: They came into Idaho in sort of the same way that they came into Zambia, which is to say they immediately positioned themselves as experts in bear conservation and started making demands of the community.
--:-- Noelle King: And there's a quote in the stories. One of the neighbors who said that Mark Owens came in here thinking that it was Africa and he could just tell us what to do.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: But this isn't Africa. It's Idaho.
--:-- Noelle King: Right you know the the long and short of it is is that they have this fairly quiet life up in Idaho
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: They know they can return to Zambia because as I shown the Zambian authorities would very much like to interview them interrogate them based on the videotape the ABC videotape
--:-- Noelle King: So they're not going back.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: And then Delia, over time, develops this. There's always second chances in American life, right?
--:-- Noelle King: And so she starts as a novelist in her 60s and writes this book, Where the Crawdads Sing, that interestingly, amazingly, however you want to describe it, becomes the biggest novel of 2018, 2019.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. It has sold 1.8 million copies and is currently number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
--:-- Noelle King: Reese Witherspoon buys it. I'm so excited to announce the September book club pick, which I just love this book. It is called Where the Crawdads Sing.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: It becomes this big movie. Sometimes I feel so invisible. I wonder if I'm here at all.
--:-- Noelle King: And so she has her new career. All the numbers, all the weeks on the bestseller list, it is exciting.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: But the most important part is to write a story that means something.
--:-- Noelle King: Can I ask you about the moment you, I don't know if it was a two and two equals four moment, But the moment you realize this woman, on whose trail you've been for many years, has written a book that is in Reese Witherspoon's book club, what the hell was that like?
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: It started with one or two emails from people who remember my New Yorker piece from 2010, who said, hey, I don't know if you know this, but Delia Owens is on the New York Times bestseller list.
--:-- Noelle King: And so, you know, piqued my curiosity, I went out and got the book.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: And this is the strange part. is the book is kind of Edgar Allan Poe-ish in a certain way.
--:-- Noelle King: There are all these hints and allusions to earlier dark events in Zambia.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: I mean, spoiler alert to the extent that there's anybody in America who doesn't know what this book is about.
--:-- Noelle King: But the book is about a strange, awkward, loner, naturalist, southern girl who commits a righteous, described as righteous, murder in what would, in the African context, is known as the bush and what in the American context would be known as the wilderness or the swamps or whatever.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: And I'm reading it and I'm going, oh my goodness.
--:-- Noelle King: And by the way, makes references to people that they knew in Zambia.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: I mean, the name of the jailhouse cat is Sunday Justice, which is the name of their cook and aide in their camp in North Luangua, guy I met.
--:-- Noelle King: And I come across that and I'm like, oh my goodness.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: I almost felt like at that point, I almost, not to make this self-referential, but I thought she was trolling me from a distance in a kind of way.
--:-- Noelle King: It was like, why are you planting all these clues? Why are you doing this?
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: Maybe some of it happened at the level of the unconscious. I don't know.
--:-- Noelle King: But the story has very many echoes of their experience in Zambia.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: But when I was in Zambia last month, two months ago, I guess, you know, I spoke to various law enforcement officials there and they consider her a material witness.
--:-- Noelle King: And, you know, they want to understand whether she's an accessory after the fact, what her role was in the camp, what her role, if anything, was involved in helping Mark allegedly cover up the crime.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: Delia and obviously Mark have shown no interest whatsoever in helping the Zambian authorities, and the Zambian authorities have a hard time getting to them.
--:-- Noelle King: I mean, I met some very, very creative, ambitious detectives associated with this case in Zambia, but they were incredibly frustrated because they can't do the investigation the way they want to do the investigation.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: At the end of the day, Jeff, what would you like to happen here? What do you think justice would look like?
--:-- Noelle King: Is justice what you want? Or do you just want to keep chasing the Owens' around the world?
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: No, I don't.
--:-- Noelle King: And by the way, I mean, I had done my thing 12 years ago, wrote my piece, put it out in the world. Thank you very much. On to the next thing.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: You know, I'll tell you what bothers me. What bothers me is the idea that somebody was murdered in a remote part of Zambia, a remote part of Africa, and no one cares.
--:-- Noelle King: It doesn't seem right, is my point.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: It just doesn't seem right that this happened.
--:-- Noelle King: And I include ABC News in the category of people who have done wrong things here because they were just out looking for some violence.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. And they know what happened and Chris Everson the ABC news cameraman his conscience obviously was bothering him when I called him in South Africa he told me what happened he didn't say no comment he didn't say I have no idea what you're talking we didn't lie he told me the truth he said this is a terrible thing that happened and I saw it almost like he was waiting for years for somebody to call him just think it's wrong.
--:-- Noelle King: And I know that some combination of Mark, Chris, and Delia Owens know exactly what happened to this person.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: And they know where the body was taken.
--:-- Noelle King: And that just doesn't seem right.
--:-- Noelle King: Today's episode was produced by Tori Dominguez.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: It was edited by Matthew Collect.
--:-- Noelle King: It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey.
--:-- Jeffrey Goldberg: I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Noelle King: It's Today Explained. Thank you.
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--:-- Noelle King: Shop in-store or online at nacy's.com.
