Man-eater Monday: Gustave the Crocodile

Last week, I happened to be in Oxford on a rainy day, and so, found myself at the UK’s only crocodile zoo – Crocodiles of the World, near Brize Norton. And one of the showpiece spectacles is their feeding of the 26 Nile crocodiles they have in the collection.

It was quite something to behold. But despite the many snapping jaws, and many being over two metres or more in length, they were still diminutive compared to a certain legendary Nile.

One named Gustave.

The Animal

Gustave is — or was — a Nile crocodile of extraordinary size. Estimates put him at somewhere between five and a half and six metres in length, making him one of the largest crocodiles ever reliably documented. His weight has been guessed at over nine hundred kilograms. These figures carry the usual caveats: he was never captured and therefore never officially measured. But even accounting for a little over estimation, Gustave appears to have been a genuinely massive animal, an outlier among outliers, operating in the Ruzizi River delta and along the northern shores of Lake Tanganyika near Bujumbura.

Gustave next to some smaller, more typical-sized Nile crocodiles.

It wasn’t just Gustave’s size that made him easy to identify at a distance. He had a grouping of scars along his right rear flank put there by machine gun fire and another visible patch of pink scarring on his right shoulder from either a spear or homemade harpoon. These and other marks were accumulated through decades of encounters he walked, swam, or slithered away from.

He also had two large bony projections on top of his head that seemed to have fused at the rear, something noticed and commented on in the 2004 documentary Capturing the Killer Croc.

And he was old. Dr Alison Leslie, who observed Gustave in the early 2000s first thought he was maybe 100 years old due to his size. But his excellent and full set of dentition meant he was more likely around the age of 60, and still growing. Niles have a typical optimal lifespan of around 70 years in the wild.

Either way, his size and age, if reliably estimated, combined to produce an animal that operated by slightly different rules. For instance, in 2003, a park ranger observed Gustave stalk, kill, and devour an adult hippopotamus – something unheard of.

Another of those differences was something that researchers and locals often observed about his kills. Crocodiles, like all predators, typically don’t kill more than they can eat, or close to it. Yet Gustave appeared to kill well beyond that threshold with reports of multiple victims in a single event, before disappearing for periods. One theory holds that his sheer size made conventional feeding mechanics difficult: he was perhaps too large to roll prey underwater efficiently.

Another possibility, darker and less comfortable, is that the behaviour was simply something akin to personality – Gustave killed because he could. As the dominant animal in whatever patch of river he claimed, his age and size combined with highly territorial instincts would make his mere presence a threat. Whatever the mechanism, the pattern meant that the kill estimates grew, and kept growing, and eventually became uncountable.

The number of alleged human fatalities, between 60 and 300, tells you everything about the problem of documenting Gustave’s victims. Attacks along the Ruzizi and the Tanganyika shore were rarely reported to any central authority. Many victims were fishermen, or people collecting water, in communities with limited access to formal record-keeping. The lower figure probably reflects confirmed attributions; the upper figure is folk accounting and accumulation, the number that feels true even if it can’t be proven. The real figure is somewhere in there, which is its own kind of horror.

My own observation is that Gustave was clearly capable of taking large prey, having been documented attacking the hippopotamus mentioned earlier, other crocodiles, and a mature cow – which was caught on camera. Many of his human victims were found drowned and not devoured (but not all by any means). I think its likely that these kills were either territorial or perhaps those discovered before Gustave could return to them: although the idea of crocodiles storing meat underwater to tenderise the meat is something of a myth (they prefer fresh meat almost always), they have been observed caching larger prey and leftovers in places where the carcass won’t be swept away by strong currents. However, the kills may have also been instinctual: the riverbanks that Gustave called home were often popular with fishermen and their presence may have been too tempting. But perhaps afterwards, Gustave decided they didn’t meet his calorific requirements.

The Man

Patrice Faye arrived in Burundi as a French expatriate and became a long-term resident, which given his interest in herpetology, isn’t surprising. Burundi is an exceptional destination for herpetologists because it sits at a unique biogeographical crossroads. Bridging the Congo River Basin, the Great Rift Valley, and the East African savanna, its isolated, high-elevation montane forests, pristine rivers, and protected nature reserves are a goldmine for discovering endemic and rediscovered reptiles and amphibians. And due to decades of political turmoil, much of the country remains under-surveyed compared to neighbouring East African nations. This offers huge potential for modern field researchers and taxonomists to uncover rare or presumed-extinct taxa.

However, by the 1990s, Patrice had become the foremost chronicler of one reptile in particular – Gustave — not as a scientist exactly, but something between a naturalist, a documentarian, and an obsessive. He photographed the crocodile. He collected accounts of attacks. And eventually he decided to catch Gustave alive.

Faye constructed a large trap. It was a massive, 10-metre steel device designed to hold a crocodile of Gustave’s dimensions. Deployed in the animal’s territory, the plan was to lure him in, secure him, and then keep him in an especially built enclosure, some 60 by 90 feet for study and I’m sure as a potential attraction.

We’ll never know, as after the trap was deployed. Gustave ignored it. He showed some curiosity once live bait was introduced, but never ventured into it.

The 2004 National Geographic/PBS documentary Capturing the Killer Croc followed Faye’s expedition, and what it captured — unintentionally — was the peculiar comedy and pathos of human expertise confronting an animal that didn’t know it was supposed to be catchable. The crew waited. Gustave circled. On several occasions he came close enough to raise heart rates, then turned away. By the end of the documentary he had not been caught and ultimately. never has been.

There is something almost classical in the shape of this. The monster that keeps proving itself uncatchable is a very old story. What’s unusual here is that it’s a true one, documented on film, with a specific man standing at the centre of it — wading into a Burundian river, looking for something he couldn’t quite reach.

The Legend

Here is the moment Gustave crossed from animal into myth: sometime in the mid-2000s, while confirmed attacks were still being reported, communities around the lake began to speak about him less as a crocodile and more as a presence. A territorial entity. Something that had claimed the water and established terms. Fishermen avoided certain areas not merely out of caution but out of something closer to acknowledgement that they were operating in Gustave’s space, and that he might enforce that.

His own skin was a pockmarked testimony of his un-killable nature. And his intelligence was almost supernatural. Faye and other scientists often felt outwitted and out manoeuvred by Gustave – that he was always somehow one step ahead. Even the trap intended for his capture was somehow dislodged. Some say it was by heavy rains. But others say Gustave walked around the cage, took the goat, and dislodged it that way.

This is how living legends get made. Not through any single dramatic act, but through the accumulation of attacks that defy logic, combined with evasions and failed attempts at capture, until the animal stops being an animal and becomes an idea. Gustave’s unusual size also certainly added to his legendary status.

But here is something Burundi’s killer croc has probably never been told: he is very probably now dead.

The rumours have circulated since around 2019 — that Gustave, the most feared predator in Burundi, the Nile crocodile estimated to have killed somewhere between sixty and three hundred people, died quietly somewhere in the reed beds along Lake Tanganyika. No body. No confirmed sighting in years. Just the slow absence of a presence.

The probable death, if the 2019 rumours are true, is interesting precisely because of how little it has settled. There was no body. No confirmed final sighting. No Faye standing over something conclusive. The absence of evidence is indistinguishable, at this distance, from a six-metre crocodile lying low in deep water. And so Gustave continues to circulate — in articles, in forums, in conversations. Here, now, in this one.

It should be noted that Faye was arrested and imprisoned in Burundi in 2011, on five charges of rape, serving a 25-year sentence. Although the case must be taken seriously for obvious reasons, it is marred by possible corruption and questionable proceedings. However, the point is that since 2011, Gustave’s main documenter has been out of the game. So maybe, just maybe, Gustave still stalks the riverbanks of the Ruzizi River delta and the northern shores of Lake Tanganyika

The Honest Admission

There is something worth acknowledging about the fact that the people most fascinated by Gustave — researchers, filmmakers, writers, readers of blogs like this one — are, on some level, rooting for him. Not for the attacks. Not for the deaths, which were real and brutal and happened mostly to people living modest lives beside a beautiful lake. But for the persistence of the animal itself.

It is difficult to explain this without sounding callous, so let’s try to be precise: what people are rooting for is the idea that something this large, this old, this impervious, is still out there. That the world is still a place where a creature can operate entirely on its own terms, evading every trap, outlasting every pursuit, accumulating a toll that becomes legend — and then disappearing, silently, on its own schedule.

We built our categories — man-eater, monster, legend — and Gustave filled them all without ever being asked.

And ultimately, we must consider the part humans played in creating the circumstances that enabled or even drove Gustave towards becoming a man-eater. In the 1950s, when Gustave was less than two metres long and barely ten years old, Burundi’s deltas were home to buffalo, elephant, warthog, and wild herds of numerous antelope. But each was made geographically extinct in a few short years. The only wild large mammal to survive was the hippo.

It’s not hard to imagine as livestock were introduced and brought to the water’s edge that Gustave became acclimated to the presence of humans. And then, one day, after growing used to taking the cows, he missed or opportunistically targeted their human companion. And a legend was born – perhaps one that will never truly die.

Man-eater Monday: The Beast at the School Gate

On January 14th, 1991, near a High School in Boulder, Colorado, Scott Lancaster went for a run and didn’t come back. He was 18. It was the first recorded fatal mountain lion attack on an adult in the United States in over a century, and the first ever recorded fatality in Colorado. Yet, everything that preceded it meant it should never have been a surprise.

A Town That Loved Its Lions

Boulder, Colorado, sits at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. It has earned a reputation as a liberal, outdoorsy, environmentally conscious city that had, by the late 1980s, cultivated a particular relationship with the wilderness on its doorstep. Nature was not something to be feared or managed. It was something to be celebrated, protected, and welcomed. Its herd of deer were prolific and welcomed by many, even when they strayed into gardens.

When mountain lions began reappearing in the foothills and open spaces around the city, rebounding after decades of persecution and bounty hunting, many residents greeted the news with similar delight. These were apex predators, returned to their ancestral range. It was, surely, a conservation success story. Perhaps at the time, the link to the significant and incredibly tame deer on their doorstep, had not been made.

What it was, in reality, was a slow-motion disaster that David Baron would later document with forensic clarity in his book The Beast in the Garden — a narrative that traces the paved-with-good-intentions road from Boulder’s love affair with its lions to the death of a teenage boy behind his high school.

Less than Subtle Warning Signs

The escalation began quietly. On February 8th, 1989, a mountain lion snatched a cock-a-poo named Fifi from the porch of the McCain family home. Bernice McCain hit the lion with a broom, twice, but it didn’t flinch. It backed up, took the dog over the fence, and was gone.

Wildlife specialist Michael Sanders considered this among the first true escalations in lion behaviour in the area. The lion had not fled from a human. It had simply ignored her.

That same year, Rob Altschuler, a member of the Boulder Emergency Squad, was monitoring an area in the aftermath of a wildfire, when a mountain lion approached him with unsettling confidence. He retreated to his Chevy Blazer — a vehicle with orange flashing lights running, the kind of presence that should, in theory, have sent any wild animal in the opposite direction. The lion was unmoved.

The dogs kept dying. On November 30th, 1989, a Highland Terrier was attacked despite sharing a pen with a much larger Great Dane. The lion had already visited the pen earlier and left a small wound on the terrier, one the owners had assumed was caused by the other dog. It came back to finish the job. The Great Dane was not a deterrent. Nine days later, an 85-pound Doberman was mauled so severely that the veterinarian who treated it described the dog as a pin cushion, owing to the number of puncture wounds. A German Shepherd followed. A black lab. Then others.

By February 1990, there had been enough incidents that the Division of Wildlife sponsored a public meeting in Coal Creek Canyon. The intention was practical: advise residents on how to safeguard their pets and property. What happened instead was a glimpse into the fatal blind spot at the heart of Boulder’s relationship with its lions.

Those who had lost animals found themselves on the receiving end of hostility from their neighbours. The message from a vocal portion of the room was clear: people needed to adapt to the presence of mountain lions, not the other way around. There was a strong anti-kill sentiment, as one might expect. But beneath it lay something more troubling — a failure to reckon with what these animals actually were. Not symbols. Not neighbours. Apex predators that were running out of reasons to be afraid of people.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Lynda Walters expressed frustration and jealousy when her father, Bill, spotted a mountain lion, from his car. “I wish I could see one”, she had said,

She got her wish on June 2nd, 1990. Lynda was a medical student and studying hard. She gave herself one daily reward – a 5pm run. She was jogging through Dry Gulch, near Canyon Drive, when she encountered not one, but two mountain lions.

The first she spotted on a bank, just fifteen feet from her. She raised her arms and yelled, intending to drive the cat away. It didn’t budge. Then she noticed the movement in her peripheral vision. A second cat was moving in behind her.

She threw rocks. She stood her ground. Eventually, the only option left was a tree, and she climbed it.

One of the lions climbed after her and clawed her leg. She stomped on its head.

Lynda eventually broke a branch and fashioned a makeshift spear, using it to keep the cats at bay while, below her, they waited. She was in that tree long enough for the light to die. In the darkening canyon, above two mountain lions that showed no inclination to leave, she listened to the not-distant sounds of civilisation – of cars passing on the road, a dog barking and children playing in a nearby sub-division.

Lynda later said she imagined her own death many times over, expecting at any moment that the animals would come up and take her.

What saved her was a deer. It appeared across the creek, making its way through the brush. The cats caught its scent, abandoned their interest in Walters, and slipped away into the dark to stalk it. She climbed down and ran.

The lions that stalked Lynda Walters were not aberrations. They were the product of years of habituation: a generation of animals that had grown up in and around human settlement, learning that people did not pose a threat. Boulder’s open spaces had become, in effect, a nursery for large predators with no fear of the species they lived alongside.

Scott Lancaster’s Final Run

On January 14th, 1991, Scott Lancaster, 18 years old, went out for a training run around the trail circuit at Clear Creek High School. Scott was a keen athlete and cyclist, training hard. With a free period to burn late in the day, Scott took advantage.

He borrowed the gym kit of his locker share, James Valdez, and the running shoes of another friend, Eric Simonich. He headed out into a beautiful winters’ afternoon. As he began his run, he waved at a teacher before veering off onto the hillside, following a route carved out by him and his ski-team buddies.

His route took him past the windows of a fifth-period English class, and the students inside watched him go by. He put on a show for them, making like he was out of control with wobbly legs and arms. His friends cheered and laughed, anticipating his next run past. They knew he usually ran several laps of around fifteen minutes each.

Scott didn’t come round again.

At some point in the next few minutes, within a few hundred yards of his friends in the classroom, Scott was knocked to the ground and killed. It was a cold, calculated, brutal, and efficient attack. It is thought the loss of blood from the wounds made it relatively quick and painless.

When Scott failed to return, initial suspicion, albeit briefly, fell on the idea that he might have simply left. Absconded. But Scott’s family knew better. He would never leave his beloved custom bicycle behind. His friend James Valdez opened their shared locker and found his own gym clothes gone and Scott’s street clothes still inside. He had gone out, and he had not come back.

Sheriff’s deputies searched. Volunteers combed the area. Dogs scoured the hillside. For nearly two days, there was no trace of him. It was Steve Shelafo, a 28-year-old emergency medical technician, who found him.

The mountain lion was still there, guarding the body, when Shelafo arrived. It was shot dead at the scene after a short and hectic chase. The animal was a young, adult male, approximately 100 pounds. An autopsy revealed fragments of human heart in its stomach.

Scott Lancaster was the first adult killed by a mountain lion in the United States in over a century. He was not though, as Baron’s account makes searingly clear, an unforeseeable victim of a random wild encounter. He was the end point of a trajectory that had been visible for years, to anyone willing to see it.

The Myth of Wilderness

Baron closes his account with an argument that has only grown more relevant in the decades since: that what killed Scott Lancaster was not simply a lion, but a myth: the idea that wilderness is a pristine, self-regulating thing that humans can live alongside without active management, without accepting the responsibilities that come with sharing space with large predators.

Boulder had created something that looked like a wild landscape but functioned like nothing that had existed before: a place where apex predators learned that humans were harmless, where the social structures that once governed the boundary between human settlement and wild land had quietly dissolved, and where the consequences of that dissolution were still, somehow, a shock when they arrived.

The lion that killed Scott Lancaster had likely never learned to fear people. Why would it? Nobody had ever given it a reason to.

In the 35 years since, there have been eleven more recorded fatal attacks. The lesson Boulder failed to learn in 1991, that coexistence with apex predators requires honesty about what they are, has not notably improved with time. We are still, by and large, a culture more comfortable with the idea of wilderness than with its reality.