The extraordinary story of the woman who was kidnapped as a child, left to fend for herself in the Colombian rainforest - and later married a church organist in Yorkshire.
Tree woman: Marina Chapman was
kidnapped as a child in Colombia and left to fend for herself alongside monkeys
in the rainforest
Nancy Forero Eusse’s first memory of the little girl was seeing her perched
on top of a mango tree near the canal that ran past their homes in the Colombian
border city of Cúcuta. “It was such a curious thing,” recalls Miss Forero Eusse,
who was about five at the time. “She would hang out in that tree. Not just in
the branches, but high up, right at the top.”
The new arrival was as nervous as she was agile, slow to speak, and with a
sadness in her eyes. She was a street child, she said, who had been taken in by
a local family, only to be forced to work all day and sleep under the stove on
the kitchen floor. Only after she was rescued from her abusers and adopted by the Eusse family
did the girl – who thought she was about 10 years old, and asked to be called
Luz Marina – begin recounting remarkable snippets about her life.
“She started to talk about what had happened before,” says Miss Forero Eusse,
57. “It was incredible.”
An extraordinary story slowly emerged: Marina had been abducted as a small
child, then abandoned in the jungle where she lived alongside colonies of
monkeys, foraging for food and sheltering in trees. Even after she was found by hunters and brought into Cúcuta, her ordeal
continued. She initially lived rough in a park with other homeless children. She
was then taken in by an abusive family who treated her like a slave.
But her odyssey did not end with her adoption by Nancy’s family. For the
little girl up the mango tree is now Marina Chapman, a Yorkshire housewife,
married to a church organist, mother and grandmother, volunteer and enthusiastic
cook of South American cuisine.
It is an inspiring life-story but one that Mrs Chapman has long been reluctant to share beyond her closest family. She is now, however, going public with a memoir, to be published next year to raise funds for a street-children’s charity, and which has already been sold to seven countries after a scramble by publishers to obtain the rights.
The Sunday Telegraph tracked down her relatives there, visited her childhood homes in Cúcuta and Bogotá, and travelled to the Catatumbo jungle, a rebel stronghold where her family believe she probably spent her time in the wild.
The dramatic narrative reads like a real-life version of the fictional adventures of Tarzan, the baby brought up by apes in the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic, and Mowgli, the feral child raised by wolves in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories.
Piecing together what they know, Mrs Chapman and the Eusse family believe she was born in about 1950, which would make her 62. Colombia had yet to plunge into its bloody civil war, but abductions for ransom were common and children were snatched by kidnap gangs. That appears to be what happened to Marina, but the abduction was botched, says Carlos Velásquez, her adoptive cousin who remains close to her.
In an interview at his textile company near Bogotá, he recalls what she told him. “Her memory is that she was kidnapped when she was three or four and put in the boot of a car. The gang who took her drove and drove, but for whatever reason, they left her by the road and she walked into the jungle.
“She was living near monkeys and she learned from them. In order to survive, she would imitate them and eat what they ate. She learned to find berries, bananas, other fruits, even roots.
“She ended up near an Indian village, but they didn’t treat her well and threw stones at her if she came close during the day. So she waited until dark, then scavenged rice and leftovers from the village and took it back to the jungle to eat. She lived in a hollow in a tree trunk. She was all black and dirty and had long filthy hair and long nails.”
Marina has no real idea how long she spent in the jungle, but it was apparently at least a year or two. Then one day, she saw a group hunting for wild birds and parrots.
“She ran towards them. One of them was a woman and she clung to her leg,” says Mr Velásquez. “The woman looked down at her and seemed to be thinking, what is this thing with a dirty black face. Marina probably looked like a monkey.
“Then she realized it was a girl and said, 'Put her in the back of the truck’ with the crates of birds. They were driving back to Cúcuta but when she got near the city, Marina was scared by all the lights and jumped out of the truck and ran away.”
The account of her life with the monkeys is so incredible that it understandably prompts questions about its accuracy. But she had relayed similar details to Nancy soon after her adoption by the family.
“She told us that she had been kidnapped when she was very young, then abandoned. She’d lived in the jungle, lived with monkeys, and said there were bad men who had not treated her well. She always said she was scared of men in high boots. We don’t know if they were hunters or soldiers or the men who took her. She was very frightened about those days and didn’t want to discuss it much then. We were just kids at the time.”
Both Mr Velásquez and Miss Forero Eusse, who had not coordinated their stories before this newspaper approached them, separately noted that the young Marina showed both great agility, demonstrated in particular by her penchant for tree-climbing, and strength, despite her small physique, after her years in the jungle and on the street.
“I think she just tried to suppress the memories of those experiences for a long time,” says Mr Velásquez. “But Luz Marina was never the sort to invent things; she’s very straightforward and honest. If she had not been such a strong child, it would be more surprising. But when I looked back, she even seemed to move like a monkey at times.”
To investigate her story further, The Sunday Telegraph visited Catatumbo, a sweeping blanket of lush foliage ringed by mountains straddling Colombia’s border with Venezuela. Based on her recollections and its proximity to Cúcuta, it is here that her family think she lived after her abduction.
What was immediately evident was how challenging it would be for anyone to survive beneath its soaring canopy, never mind a girl of just three or four. It is an area of breathtaking beauty but also contains deep dangers, both from nature and man.
Much of the jungle is still what Colombians call a “red zone”, controlled by the Marxist guerrillas who have waged Latin America’s longest-running insurgency. The country’s notorious cocaine cartels also use the cover of the rainforest to conduct their narco-trafficking operations.
And there are plenty of threats from the animal kingdom, too, as Antonio Ramirez Rodriguez, chief biologist and Catatumbo veteran, explains from his state environmental agency outpost. “The predators include eagles, snakes, tigers and wildcats. In this place, either you eat or you’re eaten.”
So could a small girl have survived in the jungle, learning how to scavenge for food from Catatumbo’s colonies of small carablanca monkeys? Known for their intelligence as well as their distinctive white faces, the carablancas grow to a maximum size of 22 inches. “If the monkeys didn’t see her as threatening or competing, if she didn’t behave in an aggressive manner, then yes, it is possible,” says Mr Ramirez.
“They are omnivores who eat anything, from fruits and vegetables to insects, lizards and rats. They organise hunting parties, have social structures, they protect, help each other and follow a group leader. It’s possible that a child could have adapted to those structures.”
But while there are recorded cases of abandoned children who have been brought up by larger primates in Africa, it would be a first in South America where the monkeys are notably smaller.
Nonetheless, the young girl did manage to survive, only for another dangerous phase to then begin in her life as a child on the streets. In her memoir, she will tell how she ran a children’s crime gang during those days. It was from here that the first unnamed family took her in, probably when she was about eight, treating her as a domestic slave. She would at times seek temporary refuge by scampering out of reach up the tree where her saviours from the Eusse family first saw her.
The Sunday Telegraph last week visited the Eusse family home in Cúcuta in a working-class neighbourhood of small, pastel-coloured dwellings with red-tile roofs. A single-storey yellow house, which has been owned by the family since the 1950s, is home to Alberto Eusse, Marina’s uncle and a local musician who still gives guitar lessons and plays on Sunday nights at a popular outdoor restaurant despite his age.
It was here that Maruja Eusse, the family matriarch and grandmother of Nancy Forera Eusse and Carlos Velásquez Eusse, took pity on Marina when she came pleading for help. Mrs Eusse helped the girl escape and sent her to Bogotá to live with her daughter, Maria, and son-in-law Amadeo Forero, who soon adopted Marina as one of their own, alongside their five natural children. Life was already tough for the family, as Nancy Forero Eusse recounts outside their old home in the poor Bogotá barrio of Bosa. The floors were dirt and there were no roads, only tracks in those days. Her father, Amadeo, was a taxi driver and then a manager at his cousin’s textile business. “We were poor, struggling for money.”
Her mother Maria, a frail 86-year-old who spends most of her days surrounded by relatives in a wicker rocking chair, and her father Amadeo, 83, and in failing health, treasure the memories of the little girl they took in as one of their own. “Luz Marina was a lovely, well-behaved girl who always helped me with the chores,” says Mrs Forero Eusse. “She was happy and honest and always wanted to be of use. She was a pleasure to have in the house,” says her adoptive mother.
Her sister Elena had meanwhile married Pedro Velásquez, a textile trader. And when Marina was in her mid-teens, they offered her a job as a housekeeper and nanny for Carlos and their other children.
“Marina worked for us for about 10 years in Bogotá,” says Mr Velásquez. “Then my Dad’s textile business went bankrupt and he decided the family should move to Yorkshire. He always loved England and he had already sent two of my sisters to study at university in Bradford, and then sent me to study English there, too. Marina was part of the family and he asked her to come to look after the children and she accepted.”
The textile industry was still flourishing in Bradford at the time. Mr Velásquez looked for work while his children studied, and Marina – with no formal education and little grasp of the English language – stayed at home to help cook and clean. Despite Colombia’s strong Catholic roots, the deeply religious family worshipped at the newly-formed evangelical Abundant Life church in Bradford, a short distance from their four-bedroom home in Shipley. They had hoped to start a new life and settle in England, but within months, the family were beset by more financial troubles as Mr Velásquez failed to find work in the textile business. He returned to Colombia with his wife Elena and some of their children, but others stayed in England to finish their studies. Two daughters soon married British husbands.
Luz Marina also had other plans. She had fallen in love with the church organist, John Chapman, a quiet, 28-year-old bacteriologist, even though neither of them spoke the other’s language. Their wedding in 1979 was an intimate ceremony at the church, though some members of her adoptive family attended. The Chapmans began married life in the sleepy town of Wilsden, where they had their first daughter Joanna in 1980 and their second, Vanessa, three years later. Marina began slowly learning the language and the culture, but made sure not to forget her own, teaching Spanish to the girls and recounting stories from her childhood. According to her publishers at Mainstream, that included showing them how she could scale trees and catch wild birds and rabbits with her bare hands.
She later worked as a cook at the National Media Museum before making the decision to work with children, in part to make up for missing out on much of her own childhood. She took a childcare course through the Rathbone charity in Bradford while working part-time at a nursery where her daughter Joanna was manager. She also became heavily involved in fund-raising for her church, and supported the charity, Substitute Families for Abandoned Children. Rachel Knox, a Rathbone childcare training adviser, remembers Mrs Chapman as a sensitive figure who had a natural affinity with children.
“When I met her I thought she was incredible. I was amazed at what she’d been through, her life story is like a TV drama,” says Miss Knox.
“I couldn’t believe it when she said she’d never been to school. Marina is such an inspiration. She shows what can be achieved with determination and hard work when it seems the odds are stacked against you.”
Former neighbours meanwhile recounted how she had fitted in to the community, despite her struggles with the language. “It’s hard to reconcile what she must have gone through as a child with the confident woman everyone knew,” said Janet Robson. “She was always the beautiful, exotic-looking woman who brightened up the street. She was a doting mother to her two baby girls and would always be cooking for everyone, which made her very popular.”
In Allerton, where the Chapmans now live, her neighbours have no idea of her past, other than that she grew up in rural Colombia. It was her daughter Vanessa James, 28, a composer, who persuaded her mother to turn her story in a book. The Girl With No Name will be published in April.
But in Bradford, she is better known for once cooking a quiche at a local fair for the Duke of Kent, who apparently declared it the best he had ever had. Indeed, she recently started her own business called Marina Latina Food.
“Marina has been cooking since she was tall enough to reach a cooker!” she writes on its Facebook page. “You’ll never forget your first 'Marina’ experience. Mama Mia!”
For a woman who once had to forage in the jungle with monkeys simply to survive day-by-day, it is perhaps no surprise that food is such a passion.
Philip Sherwell, Cucta Colombia
It is an inspiring life-story but one that Mrs Chapman has long been reluctant to share beyond her closest family. She is now, however, going public with a memoir, to be published next year to raise funds for a street-children’s charity, and which has already been sold to seven countries after a scramble by publishers to obtain the rights.
The Sunday Telegraph tracked down her relatives there, visited her childhood homes in Cúcuta and Bogotá, and travelled to the Catatumbo jungle, a rebel stronghold where her family believe she probably spent her time in the wild.
The dramatic narrative reads like a real-life version of the fictional adventures of Tarzan, the baby brought up by apes in the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic, and Mowgli, the feral child raised by wolves in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories.
Piecing together what they know, Mrs Chapman and the Eusse family believe she was born in about 1950, which would make her 62. Colombia had yet to plunge into its bloody civil war, but abductions for ransom were common and children were snatched by kidnap gangs. That appears to be what happened to Marina, but the abduction was botched, says Carlos Velásquez, her adoptive cousin who remains close to her.
In an interview at his textile company near Bogotá, he recalls what she told him. “Her memory is that she was kidnapped when she was three or four and put in the boot of a car. The gang who took her drove and drove, but for whatever reason, they left her by the road and she walked into the jungle.
“She was living near monkeys and she learned from them. In order to survive, she would imitate them and eat what they ate. She learned to find berries, bananas, other fruits, even roots.
“She ended up near an Indian village, but they didn’t treat her well and threw stones at her if she came close during the day. So she waited until dark, then scavenged rice and leftovers from the village and took it back to the jungle to eat. She lived in a hollow in a tree trunk. She was all black and dirty and had long filthy hair and long nails.”
Marina has no real idea how long she spent in the jungle, but it was apparently at least a year or two. Then one day, she saw a group hunting for wild birds and parrots.
“She ran towards them. One of them was a woman and she clung to her leg,” says Mr Velásquez. “The woman looked down at her and seemed to be thinking, what is this thing with a dirty black face. Marina probably looked like a monkey.
“Then she realized it was a girl and said, 'Put her in the back of the truck’ with the crates of birds. They were driving back to Cúcuta but when she got near the city, Marina was scared by all the lights and jumped out of the truck and ran away.”
The account of her life with the monkeys is so incredible that it understandably prompts questions about its accuracy. But she had relayed similar details to Nancy soon after her adoption by the family.
“She told us that she had been kidnapped when she was very young, then abandoned. She’d lived in the jungle, lived with monkeys, and said there were bad men who had not treated her well. She always said she was scared of men in high boots. We don’t know if they were hunters or soldiers or the men who took her. She was very frightened about those days and didn’t want to discuss it much then. We were just kids at the time.”
Both Mr Velásquez and Miss Forero Eusse, who had not coordinated their stories before this newspaper approached them, separately noted that the young Marina showed both great agility, demonstrated in particular by her penchant for tree-climbing, and strength, despite her small physique, after her years in the jungle and on the street.
“I think she just tried to suppress the memories of those experiences for a long time,” says Mr Velásquez. “But Luz Marina was never the sort to invent things; she’s very straightforward and honest. If she had not been such a strong child, it would be more surprising. But when I looked back, she even seemed to move like a monkey at times.”
To investigate her story further, The Sunday Telegraph visited Catatumbo, a sweeping blanket of lush foliage ringed by mountains straddling Colombia’s border with Venezuela. Based on her recollections and its proximity to Cúcuta, it is here that her family think she lived after her abduction.
What was immediately evident was how challenging it would be for anyone to survive beneath its soaring canopy, never mind a girl of just three or four. It is an area of breathtaking beauty but also contains deep dangers, both from nature and man.
Much of the jungle is still what Colombians call a “red zone”, controlled by the Marxist guerrillas who have waged Latin America’s longest-running insurgency. The country’s notorious cocaine cartels also use the cover of the rainforest to conduct their narco-trafficking operations.
And there are plenty of threats from the animal kingdom, too, as Antonio Ramirez Rodriguez, chief biologist and Catatumbo veteran, explains from his state environmental agency outpost. “The predators include eagles, snakes, tigers and wildcats. In this place, either you eat or you’re eaten.”
So could a small girl have survived in the jungle, learning how to scavenge for food from Catatumbo’s colonies of small carablanca monkeys? Known for their intelligence as well as their distinctive white faces, the carablancas grow to a maximum size of 22 inches. “If the monkeys didn’t see her as threatening or competing, if she didn’t behave in an aggressive manner, then yes, it is possible,” says Mr Ramirez.
“They are omnivores who eat anything, from fruits and vegetables to insects, lizards and rats. They organise hunting parties, have social structures, they protect, help each other and follow a group leader. It’s possible that a child could have adapted to those structures.”
But while there are recorded cases of abandoned children who have been brought up by larger primates in Africa, it would be a first in South America where the monkeys are notably smaller.
Nonetheless, the young girl did manage to survive, only for another dangerous phase to then begin in her life as a child on the streets. In her memoir, she will tell how she ran a children’s crime gang during those days. It was from here that the first unnamed family took her in, probably when she was about eight, treating her as a domestic slave. She would at times seek temporary refuge by scampering out of reach up the tree where her saviours from the Eusse family first saw her.
The Sunday Telegraph last week visited the Eusse family home in Cúcuta in a working-class neighbourhood of small, pastel-coloured dwellings with red-tile roofs. A single-storey yellow house, which has been owned by the family since the 1950s, is home to Alberto Eusse, Marina’s uncle and a local musician who still gives guitar lessons and plays on Sunday nights at a popular outdoor restaurant despite his age.
It was here that Maruja Eusse, the family matriarch and grandmother of Nancy Forera Eusse and Carlos Velásquez Eusse, took pity on Marina when she came pleading for help. Mrs Eusse helped the girl escape and sent her to Bogotá to live with her daughter, Maria, and son-in-law Amadeo Forero, who soon adopted Marina as one of their own, alongside their five natural children. Life was already tough for the family, as Nancy Forero Eusse recounts outside their old home in the poor Bogotá barrio of Bosa. The floors were dirt and there were no roads, only tracks in those days. Her father, Amadeo, was a taxi driver and then a manager at his cousin’s textile business. “We were poor, struggling for money.”
Her mother Maria, a frail 86-year-old who spends most of her days surrounded by relatives in a wicker rocking chair, and her father Amadeo, 83, and in failing health, treasure the memories of the little girl they took in as one of their own. “Luz Marina was a lovely, well-behaved girl who always helped me with the chores,” says Mrs Forero Eusse. “She was happy and honest and always wanted to be of use. She was a pleasure to have in the house,” says her adoptive mother.
Her sister Elena had meanwhile married Pedro Velásquez, a textile trader. And when Marina was in her mid-teens, they offered her a job as a housekeeper and nanny for Carlos and their other children.
“Marina worked for us for about 10 years in Bogotá,” says Mr Velásquez. “Then my Dad’s textile business went bankrupt and he decided the family should move to Yorkshire. He always loved England and he had already sent two of my sisters to study at university in Bradford, and then sent me to study English there, too. Marina was part of the family and he asked her to come to look after the children and she accepted.”
The textile industry was still flourishing in Bradford at the time. Mr Velásquez looked for work while his children studied, and Marina – with no formal education and little grasp of the English language – stayed at home to help cook and clean. Despite Colombia’s strong Catholic roots, the deeply religious family worshipped at the newly-formed evangelical Abundant Life church in Bradford, a short distance from their four-bedroom home in Shipley. They had hoped to start a new life and settle in England, but within months, the family were beset by more financial troubles as Mr Velásquez failed to find work in the textile business. He returned to Colombia with his wife Elena and some of their children, but others stayed in England to finish their studies. Two daughters soon married British husbands.
Luz Marina also had other plans. She had fallen in love with the church organist, John Chapman, a quiet, 28-year-old bacteriologist, even though neither of them spoke the other’s language. Their wedding in 1979 was an intimate ceremony at the church, though some members of her adoptive family attended. The Chapmans began married life in the sleepy town of Wilsden, where they had their first daughter Joanna in 1980 and their second, Vanessa, three years later. Marina began slowly learning the language and the culture, but made sure not to forget her own, teaching Spanish to the girls and recounting stories from her childhood. According to her publishers at Mainstream, that included showing them how she could scale trees and catch wild birds and rabbits with her bare hands.
She later worked as a cook at the National Media Museum before making the decision to work with children, in part to make up for missing out on much of her own childhood. She took a childcare course through the Rathbone charity in Bradford while working part-time at a nursery where her daughter Joanna was manager. She also became heavily involved in fund-raising for her church, and supported the charity, Substitute Families for Abandoned Children. Rachel Knox, a Rathbone childcare training adviser, remembers Mrs Chapman as a sensitive figure who had a natural affinity with children.
“When I met her I thought she was incredible. I was amazed at what she’d been through, her life story is like a TV drama,” says Miss Knox.
“I couldn’t believe it when she said she’d never been to school. Marina is such an inspiration. She shows what can be achieved with determination and hard work when it seems the odds are stacked against you.”
Former neighbours meanwhile recounted how she had fitted in to the community, despite her struggles with the language. “It’s hard to reconcile what she must have gone through as a child with the confident woman everyone knew,” said Janet Robson. “She was always the beautiful, exotic-looking woman who brightened up the street. She was a doting mother to her two baby girls and would always be cooking for everyone, which made her very popular.”
In Allerton, where the Chapmans now live, her neighbours have no idea of her past, other than that she grew up in rural Colombia. It was her daughter Vanessa James, 28, a composer, who persuaded her mother to turn her story in a book. The Girl With No Name will be published in April.
But in Bradford, she is better known for once cooking a quiche at a local fair for the Duke of Kent, who apparently declared it the best he had ever had. Indeed, she recently started her own business called Marina Latina Food.
“Marina has been cooking since she was tall enough to reach a cooker!” she writes on its Facebook page. “You’ll never forget your first 'Marina’ experience. Mama Mia!”
For a woman who once had to forage in the jungle with monkeys simply to survive day-by-day, it is perhaps no surprise that food is such a passion.
Philip Sherwell, Cucta Colombia
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