Although she was in North Carolina on furlough when the five men were killed, linguist Catherine Peeke’s life had already intersected with the missionary/Waorani story. She later would spend more than two decades living in the Ecuadorian rainforest with the Waorani. Little known except among the Waorani themselves, Peeke and her German co-worker, Rosi Jung, were the linguists responsible for translating the New Testament into "Wao tededo", the language of the Waorani.

In 1953, Peeke helped start the work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International) in Ecuador. In 1955, she accompanied Rachel Saint to a hacienda in eastern Ecuador where Saint first met Dayuma, the Waorani woman who became Saint's lifelong friend and language informant. Initially Peeke helped Rachel and Dayuma communicate because Peeke understood Quichua, Dayuma’s second language, while Rachel did not. Later, Peeke consulted with Saint and others as they began to learn "Wao tededo".

In 1962, Peeke decided to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropological linguistics at Indiana University, focusing her research on Wao tededo. She returned to serve full time in Ecuador in 1968. Excluding furlough years, she worked among the Waorani until her retirement in 1992, often serving as a translator between the Waorani and outsiders. Between 1979 and 1992, Peeke and Jung, assisted by more than a dozen Wao consultants, focused on Bible translation. They revised the work done by Rachel Saint and Dayuma, who had translated the Gospel of Mark and the Book of Acts. Peeke and Jung then translated the rest of the New Testament from scratch. The Wao New Testament was dedicated in June 1992. The quiet, faithful work of Peeke, who died in 2014, and Jung, who died in 2015, made it possible for the Waorani to have the New Testament in their own language.