JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Today we're listening to a story about Lucy.

ROBERT: The confused chimp.

JAD: Confused chimp.

ROBERT: This is the chimp that's raised as a human.

JAD: Who dressed like a human.

ROBERT: Talks like a human.

JAD: Even ...

ROBERT: Well, a little bit, anyway.

JAD: ... sexually attracted to humans.

ROBERT: So the thing to understand before we go on in this story, says Charles Siebert, is you can do this, and you can do it heartily, and you can get one confused chimp. But at some point, nature reasserts itself, at least in this way. As a chimpanzee grows, it becomes ...

JAD: Very strong.

ROBERT: Very strong.

JAD: And that, says Charles, is usually the point where the human owner throws in the towel. CHARLES SIEBERT: And, you know, there are people who really—who can't have children, who have chimps as their substitute children. And they all have to go through that moment where the chimp gets too big, too strong, too willful, too sexually mature, and they invariably relinquish the chimp.

JAD: But in Lucy's case, what happened?

CHARLES SIEBERT: So in Lucy's case, the Temerlins really hung on way longer than most. Lucy was 10 going on 11. They had, by this time, rigged up an entire portion of the house for this very strong, willful animal, you know, behind bars, padded rooms so you can bounce ...

ROBERT: Behind bars? Bars—they built a cage inside the house?

CHARLES SIEBERT: In their house.

JAD: Which defeats the entire purpose of the whole thing.

CHARLES SIEBERT: That's right. That's right.

ROBERT: Was she destroying things?

CHARLES SIEBERT: Oh God, she was tearing the house to shreds.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, voiceover: Lucy was into everything. She could take a normal living room and turn it into pure chaos in less than five minutes.]

CHARLES SIEBERT: And with company, she would just jump on a guest and start bouncing up and down.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, voiceover: Our friends and relatives began to visit us less frequently. Now that she's grown and is five to seven times stronger than I am, she could tear us apart, literally.]

CHARLES SIEBERT: It was more and more challenging and time consuming and upsetting, to the extent that he and his wife finally said, "All right, we can't do this anymore. This is too much."

JAD: Experiment over. The memoir ends with a big, fat question: what will happen to Lucy? On the final page, Maurice Temerlin says, "Well, we know we can't keep her, but we don't—we don't know what to do. The end."

CHARLES SIEBERT: I was raised in the romantic tradition, and I like books to have happy endings. If they don't have happy endings, they should have tragic endings. I hate books which have no ending, like this one.

[phone rings]

JANIS CARTER: Hi.

JAD: Hi. Is this Janis?

JANIS CARTER: Yes, it is.

JAD: This is Janis Carter. Not only does she know the ending of the story, she's actually the key player in it.

JANIS CARTER: Yeah. I hope we have a decent conversation, because the lines here are really terrible.

JAD: Took us a really long time to find Janis Carter. She lives in a remote part of Gambia in Western Africa, and that'll become relevant in a second.

ROBERT: How did you meet Lucy?

JANIS CARTER: I met her—one of my part time jobs that I had to put myself through grad school was to clean Lucy's cage. That's how I met her. I was—I cleaned up after her.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: In fact, Janis says she was one of the few people who could actually handle Lucy when she was out of her cage.

JANIS CARTER: Which surprised the Temerlins because she had been quite difficult to previous caretakers.

ROBERT: Was that because you were stronger than the predecessor caretakers, or you were cleverer? Or ...

JANIS CARTER: Well, I think it was probably more timing. I think that the time that I entered Lucy's space, she was looking for something outside of that sphere of mom and dad, and I was a friend.

JAD: In any case, Janis ended up being in Lucy's life at the exact moment when the Temerlins finally decided what they were gonna do with Lucy.

JANIS CARTER: They visited a number of ...

JAD: It's 1977. They had just spent a year traveling around the world looking at different options—zoos, research labs, chimp retirement homes, which were these facilities that were springing up to house chimps like Lucy, who had been raised by humans or were in the circus. But every place they visited, she says, was just too depressing for them, too cage-like for this being that they essentially considered their daughter. And so the decision they came to was that the best way to honor Lucy, the best way to really make her happy, was to simply let her go in the wild. And they asked Janis to help them do it.

JAD: Did you have any idea or any experience of what you were getting yourself into?

JANIS CARTER: Zero. I didn't—I didn't have a clue.

JAD: So after a 22-hour flight, Janis, the Temerlins and Lucy arrive in Dakar, Senegal.

JANIS CARTER: I remember arriving really early in the morning, and how hot it was, even early in the morning.

JAD: Compared to Oklahoma, this was just different.

JANIS CARTER: Lots of insects, mosquitoes, and high, high, high humidity. It was the rainy season.

JAD: After they landed, she says, they piled into a car ...

JANIS CARTER: And crossed the Gambia River.

JAD: And made their way to a nature reserve.

JANIS CARTER: The nature reserve.

JAD: Which was basically just a bunch of big cages ...

JANIS CARTER: Really large enclosure there.

JAD: ... sitting right outside in the jungle. So they get there, coax Lucy into one of these cages, say their goodbyes for the night, and they leave her to spend her very first night alone outdoors. After a few weeks, Maurice and Jane Temerlin decided to leave. And the plan was that Janis, for just a little while, would stay behind, you know, to help Lucy with the transition.

JANIS CARTER: She started to lose her hair and get skin infections. And no, I wasn't happy being there either. I hated it.

JAD: How long did you think you would be staying there?

JANIS CARTER: Three weeks.

JAD: Three weeks? Wow!

JAD: It's worth saying that Janis Carter has actually never left.

JANIS CARTER: At the end of those three weeks, there was just no—no way that I could leave Lucy.

JAD: The weeks turned into months and then into a year, and still Lucy's stressed out. She's not eating. Her hair is falling out.

JANIS CARTER: It was just way, way ...

JAD: And by this point, a whole 'nother group of chimps shows up at this nature reserve. These are former captives like Lucy, and they start to deteriorate as well. So Janis decides what she needs to do is change locations, so she takes Lucy and all these other chimps to this abandoned island that she'd found.

JANIS CARTER: A long, narrow island.

JAD: This is in the Gambia River.

JANIS CARTER: A mile wide at its widest point. Very thick, green forest.

ROBERT: And the idea here was that you would release them, and they would be able to do whatever in the island, and learn how to climb trees and learn how to forage and learn how to establish relationships with each other. Was that the notion?

JANIS CARTER: Yeah, in a nutshell.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JANIS CARTER: And you would think that if you gave them freedom, they would just jump for joy. And that's—that's the last chapter of the book.

JAD: But it's not what happened. She says that when Lucy and the other chimps got to the island and she let them loose, they clung to her. During the day, she'd walk them around the island and point out to them, "Here are the fruits you should be eating, and these are the leaves you should be eating." But they weren't interested in any of that stuff.

JANIS CARTER: Oh, no.

JAD: They were actually more interested in her stuff, which is what they were used to.

JANIS CARTER: I had human objects and tools that I needed for my own survival, and they wanted to use them. Like, when I would cook or brush my teeth or take a bath or anything that I wanted to do, they wanted to be doing it with me.

JAD: Janis figured the only way this was gonna work is if she could somehow keep the chimps away from her and her tools. And so here's where she does something really radical. She had run into a couple of British army officers who were passing through the Gambia on some kind of wilderness training thing, and she somehow convinced them to build her a cage, a giant metal industrial cage, then to fly it over to her island ...

JANIS CARTER: In a helicopter.

JAD: ... and drop it—thunk!—right in the center. And the thing about this cage is that it wasn't for the chimps. It was for her.

JANIS CARTER: Yes.

ROBERT: You lived in a cage?

JANIS CARTER: I lived in a cage, yes.

ROBERT: Wow!

JAD: And in the beginning, she says, her cage didn't even have a roof.

JANIS CARTER: No. In the rainy season, it rained on me.

JAD: The only thing above her head was this fine wire mesh to keep the chimps out.

JANIS CARTER: And then the chimps all wanted to be inside with me. When I said no, then they would climb on top of the cage and sleep out in the open, on the wire on top, right above me. Every time there was any sound in the night of a hyena or anything, they would immediately squeal and defecate and urinate right on top of me.

JAD: Oh, God!

ROBERT: Really?

JANIS CARTER: Then I put corrugates on the roof, but then they started dancing on the corrugates. They really liked the sound that it made. So they were, all day long, busy dancing.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JANIS CARTER: It sounds funny, and it was at times, but it distracted them from being chimps.

JAD: After about a year, says Janis, most of the chimps lost interest in her. You know, because they couldn't get her tools, she was stuck in a cage. They gave up. They stopped hanging around her, and they'd just wander off into the forest and forage for themselves.

JANIS CARTER: But Lucy would stay behind. She, for obvious reasons, thought that she was different than all the rest of the chimps.

JAD: And so Janis and Lucy entered into a kind of sign language battle of wills.

JANIS CARTER: If I came out of the tent to look to see if they were all gone, there she was right there, looking really forlorn at me, and using sign language to tell me to come out, to be with her.

JAD: But Janis would sign to Lucy, "No, Lucy. Go."

JANIS CARTER: Go.

JAD: Lucy would then sign back, "No. Janis come."

JANIS CARTER: "No, Lucy. Go."

JAD: "No. Janis come."

JANIS CARTER: "Lucy. Go."

JAD: And this went on and on.

JANIS CARTER: I tried and I tried and I tried and I tried.

JAD: But Lucy wouldn't move. She would just stand there waiting for Janis to help her.

JANIS CARTER: Sometimes I would stay inside the tent all day long. And I would try to ignore her, ignore that she was there thinking that if I ignored her, then she'd go off with the others. But that didn't work. And if I did look at her, then she would sign that she was hurt. She would use the sign for hurt.

JAD: Meanwhile, she wasn't foraging for herself. She was getting thinner.

JANIS CARTER: And I tried everything, and really, really knocked myself out trying to do things for her. And I just started to think maybe she never was gonna do it. And we would argue about it. I ate everything. I was eating ants, I was eating sticky latex from figs. I was doing everything that I was finding really nauseating to do, just so that she would watch me do it and think, "Wow, if she's doing it, then I'm gonna do it, too." And she wouldn't do it. She'd just turn her head away. And I honestly thought at one point that she would rather starve to death than have to work for her food. I was losing hope.

JAD: But incredibly, Janis kept at this for years. She'd have to toss Lucy some food, some of hers, just to keep Lucy from starving, but she kept at it. And then one evening, after a really, really long day ...

JANIS CARTER: Oh, what a drag of a day.

JAD: ... Janis and Lucy are walking through the forest, and they both stop because they're so beat and crash.

JANIS CARTER: And we just—we fell asleep.

JAD: On the ground together.

JANIS CARTER: When I woke up, Lucy was actually holding my hand. And she had a leaf.

ROBERT: She's holding out a leaf?

JANIS CARTER: Yes. She reached out and she offered it to me, and then I offered it to her and she ate it. It was a miracle. It was an absolute miracle.

JAD: And after that, says Janis ...

JANIS CARTER: Things turned.

CHARLES SIEBERT: And actually, from that moment on, Lucy did start to make the effort and go off.

JAD: And be a chimp.

CHARLES SIEBERT: And be a chimp.

JAD: That's Charles Siebert again.

CHARLES SIEBERT: And it was not too long after that that Janis went away and ...

JAD: Left the island?

CHARLES SIEBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Janis says she'd, you know, periodically circle in a boat just to keep an eye on Lucy. But she says she never, not once, set foot on that island. At least not for a year. And then one day, she decided to go back.

JANIS CARTER: This day is the first day that I went actually on the island.

JAD: She pulled her boat up to the tip of the island where there was this little clearance, and she parked. And as she did, Lucy and the other chimps who'd heard the boat came out of the forest and into the clearing, and Lucy and her walked toward each other.

JANIS CARTER: And I took with me some of Lucy's possessions that had been important to her, like her mirror. And she used to like to draw and books, just to see how she responded to it.

JAD: And what did she do?

JANIS CARTER: Well, she was—she looked at the things. She looked at the book, she looked at herself in the mirror, and she signed to herself in the mirror. Then all of a sudden, she grabbed me. I mean, really grabbed me. One arm circled all the way around me. And she sort of held me really, really tight. It just really made me breathless, and I started crying. She started to give these soft little pants, and I feel pretty certain what she was saying to me was, "It's okay. You know, it's all okay now."

JAD: At that moment, somebody in Janis's boat snapped a picture of her and Lucy hugging. It's a picture that Charles Siebert printed in his book, and it's one of those images that when you see it, I don't know why, it just haunts you. Lucy has her head against Janis's chest, and Janis has her arms around Lucy.

CHARLES SIEBERT: It's one of the more fraught moments. You have to just look at the picture. I mean, it sort of made me want to write the book, something about the complexity and the invertedness of that picture.

JANIS CARTER: After that, the other chimps had started to go, and she wanted to go with them. And she got up, and she—she didn't turn back to look at me. She just kept walking. She wanted to go with the other chimps and she did.

JAD: A year later, Janis went back to visit Lucy again, but when she got there this time, Lucy was gone.

JANIS CARTER: And I went to all the different places looking to see if we could find anything. And we did. We found her—the body.

LULU: She was lying right near the place where Janis's cage had been. Just a skeleton.

JANIS CARTER: Her skull and her hands and her feet were separated from the rest of the skeleton.

ROBERT: So how'd you know that that was her body?

JANIS CARTER: She had a split between her front teeth, and she was very long. And there was nobody else missing.

JAD: Hmm.

JAD: And maybe the saddest, strangest thing was that ...

JANIS CARTER: We didn't find any signs of her skin or hair.

JAD: It appeared that Lucy had been skinned.

CHARLES SIEBERT: And no one knows actually what happened, but because the hands were taken, which poachers do, they thought—one of the conjectures, which makes it really unbelievably tragic is that they think that Lucy, always the first to approach humans, just sort of guilelessly approached poachers, not knowing that they were that, and that they just took advantage of their unwitting and overeager prey. But that's—that was Lucy's end.

JANIS CARTER: The scenario that I have developed to cope with her death is that a fisherman or someone who—some local person that just happened to pull up next to the land and was going to take a break or put a raffia palm down or do something, and because she always felt confidence around humans, she probably approached the person. Perhaps when she surprised the person, and just on reflexive defense, she was probably shot. I've got no other explanation.

JAD: Janis Carter still lives in Gambia, where she now works, not just with the chimps, but with the local population to protect the habitat for the chimps. And Charles Siebert's latest book, which is a really tremendous book, is The Wauchula Woods Accord. Our sincere thanks to him for turning us on to the Lucy story. Also, if you go to our website, Radiolab.org, you can see pictures of Lucy and Janis, and also that particular picture that I describe of the hug. It's—it's just one of those pictures you really just have to see. It's at Radiolab.org.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message 11.]

[ROGER FOUTS: Hi. Roger Fouts again. And support for NPR comes from NPR stations and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.]

[CHARLES SIEBERT: Helping NPR advance journalistic excellence in the digital age. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. More information at MacFound.org.]

[ROGER FOUTS: And the George Lucas Education Foundation, creator of Edutopia. Presenting an in-depth look at the digital generation. At Edutopia.org.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

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