The tale of a Yorkshire housewife, who spent five years in her childhood with a colony of capuchin monkeys in Colombia, is going to be told for the first time in a book and planned television documentary, it has been revealed
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Marina Chapman learnt how to catch birds and rabbits with her bare hands after being abandoned in the jungle by kidnappers.
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The Tarzan-like episode was brought to an end when she was discovered by hunters but by her ordeal continued when she was sold to a brothel in the city of Cucuta and groomed for prostitution.
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According to the account given to a newspaper, Chapman escaped and spent years on the streets, sometimes being arrested and kept in a cell but was eventually taken in by a Colombian family to work as a maid in her mid-teens, and took the name of Marina Luz.
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Later, during her mid-twenties she travelled with a neighbouring family who went to stay in Bradford on business for six months and stayed after she met John Chapman, then a 29-year-old bacteriologist, at a church meeting.
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They married in 1977.
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She and her family have now decided to tell her story to help highlight the horrors of human trafficking in South America.
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Chapman believes she was born in about 1950 and she was kidnapped when she was five before being abandoned in the jungle.
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“It’s assumed that the kidnap went wrong,” the telegraph quoted Vanessa James, one of Chapman’s two daughters, as saying.
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The film and TV composer has helped her mother with her book ‘The Girl with No Name.’
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“All she can remember is being chloroformed with a hand over her mouth. And all she can recall of her life before that is having a black doll as a toddler,” Vanessa told the Sunday Times.
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“She obviously learnt to fend for herself and only once got very ill when she ate some poisonous berries.
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“I got bedtime stories about the jungle, as did my sister. We didn’t think it odd - it was just Mum telling her life. So in a way it was nothing special having a mother like that,” she said.
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Experts say monkeys have been known to accept young humans into their fold and there has been a previous case in which a four-year-old Ugandan boy was left in the jungle for more than a year to live with vervet monkeys before being rescued and adapting well to life with people.
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