Woman raised by monkeys now - jungle and brothel to housewife in Bradford

02 January 2024 , 19:50

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She's the woman with the extraordinary backstory - raised by monkeys after being abducted from home and abandoned in the depths of the Colombian jungle.

Marina Chapman, now 73, claims she was brought up by capuchins where she learned how to eat like them, swing from trees, and sleep in a hollowed-out tree trunk. Her life turned on its head once again as she claims to have been found in the wild and sickeningly forced into prostitution before arriving in England to start on a regular path with a husband and children in West Yorkshire.

The mum-of-two unveiled her story to the world with her 2013 book, The Girl With No Name, co-written with her daughter, and her remarkable journey now features in the new series of Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild, starting on Channel 5 tonight. Her youngest Vanessa Forero has followed in her footsteps after leaving Bradford behind for a new life in Minca where she lives off the land. But what happened to Marina and where is she now? Here, we take a look at her mum's unbelievable past and new life in the English suburbs...

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Marina loved making monkey noises and climbing trees in the family back garden

Marina was kidnapped when she was just four years old and lived in the jungles of Colombia, where she claims to have been raised by monkeys

Marina claims she was snatched in 1954, when child-trafficking gangs were commonplace in Colombia. “I saw a hand cover my mouth – a black hand in a white hanky,” Marina previously said. “Then I realised there were two people taking me away.” For reasons that are unclear, she was later dumped in the rainforest.

After around two days she says she saw a troop of capuchins and began copying them to survive. She would watch which nuts and berries they ate, catch bananas they dropped and drink from their watering holes. Eventually – as she began to walk on all fours and stopped talking – the monkeys began to accept her.

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She said: “One day one of the younger ones landed on my shoulders and, if you’ve never been hugged and this animal puts their hands on your face, I tell you it’s the nicest touch.” She was there for around five years until she was found by hunters.

“One day, the regular cacophony was pierced by an immediate-danger call from one of the monkeys”, she wrote in her book. “The [hunters’] nets, I realised as I watched, were for catching and stealing whatever creatures they fancied.” She claims the hunters took her to a brothel in Cucuta and that she later became a street child before eventually finding employment as a maid.

By her late teens, she worked in the capital city Bogota and accompanied the family she was working for on that life-changing trip to the UK, as they attempted to emigrate. In 1978, they spent six months in Bradford, where Marina met and fell in love with John Chapman, the organist at an evangelical church where she worshipped.

She claims to have been raised by capuchins (Getty Images/LatinContent RF)

The couple went on to have two daughters, Vanessa, now 40, and Joanna, 43, and Marina became a housewife. The couple still live in a three-bedroom semi in Allerton, a suburb of Bradford. But it wasn't an easy transition for Marina, as she was forced to re-learn everything from childhood - from how to dress properly to how to pick up food.

However she couldn't help but refrain from some of her wild tendencies, as her daughter Vanessa remembers her mother swinging from trees when she picked her up from school. She would usually be blowing a whistle and waving from the branches of a tree she had just climbed. "I knew other mums didn’t do that," Vanessa recalls. "But that was just mum. My playful mum.

"She loved the outdoors, creating obstacle courses in the back garden, making monkey noises, climbing trees. Our pets were animals that my mum caught for us – we had a couple of wild rabbits that eventually escaped and a seagull."

When Marina’s book was published, it was met with scepticism. Some suggested she was a fantasist, others that her brain was making false memories due to childhood trauma. But Vanessa is confident it’s all true. She explained: “Various tests have been done to determine whether my mum really was in the jungle, because obviously many people are sceptical. I would be too if she wasn’t my mum. They found Mum has strange jungle diseases lying dormant in her blood that she couldn’t possibly have if her story wasn’t true."

While Marina's eldest Joanna became a civil servant, married, with three children living in Leeds, the bizarre family story has a final twist in that Vanessa has left the UK to set up home in the same type of Colombian jungle where Marina claimed to have lived like a female Tarzan.

The grandma initially feared her daughter was making a mistake. “I felt uneasy at first because I never felt Colombia’s easy… or safe,” she tells Ben. “But I’m not worried anymore. She won’t get in a mess. She’s smart and I’m very proud of her.”