Love story: Knut mourns his keeper
Wednesday, September 24 2008The documentaries that showed him strumming Elvis's "(You're The) Devil in Disguise" on a guitar as he lulled the world's most famous polar bear to sleep were enough to win the hearts of millions of Germans.
This week, Thomas Dörflein, the Berlin zoo keeper who raised Knut from cub to full maturity, was found dead in mysterious circumstances in a friend's Berlin apartment. (Reports suggested the cause was cancer or a heart attack, but ruled out suicide.) It emerged that it wasn't only the bear who had been receiving bucketloads of fan mail. With his endearing manner, thick black beard and shoulder-length hair swept back in a ponytail, Dörflein, who was just 44, was an unlikely heart-throb who had been deluged with letters from admiring women. According to reports yesterday, in the past few weeks the keeper had been fending off groupies every time he left the apartment he shared with his girlfriend, Daniela.