1. Friederike Victoria "Joy" Adamson was a naturalist, artist and author.
23 Facts About Joy Adamson
1. 2.
Joy Adamson's book, Born Free, describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa.
3.
Joy Adamson's parents divorced when she was 10, and she went to live with her grandmother in Vienna.
4.
Joy Adamson grew up on an estate near Opava in the village called Kreuzberg.
5.
Joy Adamson married three times in the span of ten years.
6.
Joy Adamson went to Kenya in 1937 where she met and married in 1938 the botanist Peter Bally, who gave her the nickname "Joy".
7.
Joy Adamson met her third husband, senior wildlife warden George Adamson, while on safari in the early 1940s and married him in 1944.
8.
Joy Adamson is best known for her conservation efforts associated with Elsa the Lioness.
9.
Joy Adamson submitted it to a number of publishers before it was bought by Harvill Press, part of HarperCollins.
10.
Joy Adamson spent the rest of her life raising money for wildlife, thanks to the popularity of Born Free.
11.
Joy Adamson wrote The Spotted Sphinx and Pippa's Challenge about Pippa and her cheetah family.
12.
Later, Joy Adamson reached her goal of many years, when she obtained an African leopard cub.
13.
Penny was eight weeks old when a ranger acquaintance of George Joy Adamson found her in 1976.
14.
Joy Adamson's work included portraits of the indigenous populations commissioned by the government of Kenya, as well as botanical illustrations for at least seven books on East African flora.
15.
Joy Adamson did animal paintings, among them studies of Elsa and Pippa.
16.
On 3 January 1980, in Shaba National Reserve in Kenya, Joy Adamson's body was discovered by her assistant, Pieter Mawson.
17.
Joy Adamson mistakenly assumed she had been killed by a lion, and this was what was initially reported by the media.
18.
Joy Adamson was a few weeks short of her 70th birthday.
19.
The police investigation found Joy Adamson's wounds were too sharp and bloodless to have been caused by an animal, and concluded she had been murdered.
20.
Paul Nakware Ekai, a discharged labourer formerly employed by Joy Adamson, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment.
21.
Joy Adamson escaped capital punishment because the judge ruled he might have been a minor when the crime was committed.
22.
Joy Adamson was cremated and her ashes were buried in Elsa the Lioness's grave in Meru National Park in Meru, Kenya.
23.
George Joy Adamson was murdered nine years later in 1989, near his camp in Kora National Park, while rushing to the aid of a tourist who was being attacked by poachers.