![]() I learned on this first visit, and subsequent visits, that Mark Owens had gradually come to command a corps of game scouts in North Luangwa, outside of Zambian-government oversight, by buying their loyalty through the provision of weapons, boots, and money that they had militarized the 2,400-square-mile park (Delia wrote in one of their books that Mark created a special unit of scouts who would earn new guns, jungle knives, binoculars, and compasses for standout performance) that Mark Owens had led airborne raids against suspected poaching camps that Mark’s adult son from his first marriage, Christopher Owens, had been placed in charge of training the game scouts in hand-to-hand combat and that Christopher Owens frequently beat the game scouts as a form of discipline. The Owenses had left the country after the broadcast sparked a Zambian police investigation of their activities. Shortly after I saw the ABC documentary, I visited North Luangwa for the first time. It was their second book, The Eye of the Elephant, about their battles against poachers in Zambia’s North Luangwa National Park, that drew the interest of ABC producers. But Delia and Mark Owens have been famous for decades, since the publication of their first book, the best-selling Cry of the Kalahari, an account of their time as lion conservationists in Botswana. Today, Delia Owens is best known as the author of the immensely popular 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing, which has sold more than 12 million copies to date and has been turned into a feature film, produced by Reese Witherspoon and premiering later this week. These were people who believed that the on-air execution of a supposed poacher represented just a small part of a larger story, one that more closely resembled Heart of Darkness than Born Free. ![]() I missed this episode when it was first aired, but received a videotape copy several years later, from conservationists interested in African wildlife protection. There is little in the video to suggest that the person killed was a poacher, and indeed, the ABC script refers to the victim as a “trespasser,” though it is also unclear where this trespassing might have taken place. Nor is the identity of the person or persons who fired the fatal shots off-camera disclosed. ![]() The victim is not identified by the story’s narrator, the journalist Meredith Vieira. What is most notable about the documentary, though, is that it is also-and I write this without exaggeration-a snuff film.ĪBC producers included in this documentary the filmed murder of an alleged poacher, executed while lying collapsed on the ground after having already been shot. The “strange place” was the south-central African nation of Zambia, a former British colony once known as Northern Rhodesia, and the documentary is in many ways a typical white-savior story, an emotion-saturated tale of two telegenic Americans on a mission to save elephants from poachers and corrupt African officials. But a strange place and time would test that love.” An idealistic American couple-young, in love. On March 30, 1996, the ABC news-magazine show Turning Point featured a documentary about a pair of American conservationists titled “Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story.” The show’s co-anchor Diane Sawyer introduced the broadcast this way: “They went halfway around the world to follow a dream. Thank you for your patience and understanding.Updated on Monday, July 18, 2022, at 6:18 p.m. If your order is time sensitive we recommend you select warehouse collection at the checkout. Warehouse collection will not be impacted.
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