As recounted in Goldberg’s New Yorker article, and related in a 1990 Sports Illustrated feature on Mark Owens, the couple soon supplemented the park scouts’ salaries with new equipment like sleeping bags, boots, and guns to aid in the park’s anti-poaching efforts. The gifts to the locals and their sponsorship of several area businesses garnered the Owens’ new positions within park management, roles that put Mark in command of sixty Zambian scouts as a kind of anti-poaching army. The scientific study of elephants took a backseat to their fight against poachers. 

In time, the Owens’ were nearly as popular as animal advocates like Gorillas in the Mist author Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall. However, ABC’s Turning Point news program aired “Deadly Game: The Mark and Delia Owens Story,” which revealed a darker side to the couple’s noble mission. Mark in particular admitted to using his private plane, weapons, and access to international donors to act outside of the law in his pursuit of preserving wildlife.

Mark also openly discussed the bounty hunting competitions he encouraged among his staff. He disputed claims that suspected poachers were often tied to trees, beaten, and left exposed to the sun. (In a letter to Goldberg from his lawyer, Owens maintains suspected poachers were only handcuffed to trees “for a few minutes and in the shade.”) Friends and professional colleagues also painted him and Delia as thinking little of Africans, comparing them to children in need of a guiding hand. (A claim that would later be leveled against Delia again with Crawdads’ depictions of Black men.) 

But what the show’s producers caught on film was even more concerning: an alleged and unarmed poacher (or “trespasser,” as reporter Meredith Viera is careful to stress) was chased down by Mark’s son, Christopher, and several of his paid scouts. The camera keeps rolling as the unnamed man is repeatedly shot as he lies on the ground. Glossed over in the TV special, it nonetheless sparked an international controversy after the murder was broadcast on primetime. 

Afterward, Mark and Delia Owens quietly left their home in Zambia and came to America. The Zambian government refutes Mark Owens’ assertions that the nation has an unwritten shoot-to-kill policy against trespassers and, besides, there was no body to provide evidence of a crime. But a body being possibly left to rot in a nature preserve teeming with predators and scavengers… well, that just conjures images of the circle of life, no?

While Delia Owens is not suspected of being directly involved in the filmed death of the unnamed man, she is still wanted for questioning by investigators in Zambia and, like the rest of her family, cannot return to Zambia to this day.

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