by Paul Spicer
“You know, my mother told me all about Alice’s confession letter,” said Alice Boyle obliquely one day over lunch in London. She seemed to assume that I already knew about the existence of such a letter. I began to question her further, trying to suppress the true degree of my curiosity, in case it should disturb the telling of her story.
When Alice Boyle was eleven, she informed me, her mother, Ethnie, had told her that Alice de Janzé had left a confession letter addressed to the police before her death, along with her suicide notes. Dr. Boyle had shown his wife these letters before submitting them to the coroner’s office. Ethnie Boyle had seen the confession letter with her own eyes and had told her daughter all about it. Alice Boyle continues to stand by the clear memory of her mother’s words: “Alice de Janzé confessed to shooting Lord Erroll in a letter.” When I went back to my copy of James Fox’s White Mischief, I even found a reference to this vital piece of evidence: “She [Alice] left several notes. One was to the Police—its contents were never released,” wrote Fox.
So, if a confession did indeed exist, whatever happened to this missing letter? It is true that its contents were never released, and the Kenya police deny that there is any record of the note existing in their archives. Although Dr. Boyle definitely submitted the note at the original coroner’s inquest, the letter has since disappeared. Certainly its contents were not disclosed at the inquest. What happened to the missing note? It is possible that the confession letter never reached the police in the first place. It is my guess that the coroner was so shocked at the implications of Alice’s confession that he directed the note to the personal attention of the attorney general, Sir Walter Harrigan. Harrigan was the attorney general from 1933 to 1944, and prosecutor for the Crown at the trial of Jock Delves Broughton. Harrigan would doubtless have been extremely alarmed by the letter’s contents. He would have weighed the implications carefully, bearing in mind that the Crown’s case against Jock had failed and that numerous suggestions had been made both during and after the trial (some in writing) that the murder had been carried out by a discarded mistress. Rather than open up a can of worms, Harrigan could easily have decided to suppress the confession, justifying his decision on the grounds that he was stabilizing speculation about a controversial murder. To protect himself, he could have sent the confession out of the country in the diplomatic bag to London for safekeeping, with a memorandum explaining his actions.
I soon discovered that I was not the only one to have learned of Alice’s confession letter. Alice Boyle had recently revealed her story to Gordon Fergusson. At the time, Fergusson was in the process of writing a history of the Tarporley Hunt Club, entitled The Green Collars. Tarporley, founded in 1762, is the oldest hunt club in England and once counted Jock Delves Broughton among its members (in fact, he was the only member of the club ever to have been tried for murder). As a result, Fergusson was familiar with the Erroll case. When he met Alice Boyle socially in 1993, she told him the story about her mother and the confession letter. Fergusson felt he had information that would finally and definitively clear Jock’s name, and so he published his findings in The Green Collars in 1993. When Fergusson’s book came cut, the Peter-borough column in the Daily Telegraph picked up the story, publishing it under the headline TARPORLEY MAN PUTS THE FINGER ON ALICE. This led to a little flurry of correspondence in the paper. “No!” replied J. N. P. Watson, a cousin of Dickie Pembroke. “Alice was deeply in love with Pembroke and was in bed with him at the time of the murder.” Watson went on to argue that, apart from her alibi, it would have been “quite out of character for Alice to have hidden in the back of Erroll’s car in order to shoot him, or to have killed him up on the road.” But there is no doubt that Alice had the “motive, means, and mentality for murder,” wrote Fergusson, adding that her alibi was “one that any woman could have arranged.”
During my investigations, I came across other clues further implicating Alice. In White Mischief, James Fox wrote that after the trip to the morgue on the morning of Joss’s death, Lizzie Lezard always suspected Alice, as “the murder fitted in with her morbid preoccupations.” Fox even went so far as to suggest that Alice might have confessed the murder to Lizzie. “In later years Lezard was untypically evasive on the subject,” Fox writes. Then there was Betty Leslie-Melville’s memoir about her time in Kenya, The Giraffe Lady, published in 1997. Betty’s mother-in-law, Mary Leslie-Melville, was once Alice’s neighbor in the Wanjohi Valley. In The Giraffe Lady, Betty recounts the time she asked her mother-in-law who she thought had shot Lord Erroll. Mary replied without hesitation, “My Dear, I do not think who may have killed him, I know.”
It was Mary’s firm belief that Alice had shot Lord Erroll. Betty wrote, “Alice knew that Erroll was due to have dinner at Muthaiga Club on the fateful night. Mary also knew that Alice was aware of the road Lord Erroll would take to drive back from Karen afterwards. So Mary’s theory was that Alice had waited at the cross road where the murder took place. The sight of her on the road would have stopped him. She would then have walked up to the car and shot him in the head. Afterwards she drove home.”
And Mary claimed to have actual proof. A few years after Erroll’s killing, Mary’s headman was fishing rocks out of the little river that separated Mary’s property from Alice’s Wanjohi Farm in order to repair the road. Here he found a gun buried under one of the rocks. He took the gun to Mary. According to Mary, this gun was the exact make and caliber of the missing revolver used to shoot Joss. Mary concluded that Alice must have thrown it there after returning from shooting Joss on the night of his murder.
“What did you do then?” Betty asked, astonished.
“Nothing.” Mary replied. “Erroll was dead. Alice was dead. What good would it have done to tell anyone?”
Mary led Betty to the hall cupboard in her Nairobi house, unlocked the door, and showed the revolver in question, which was just hanging there. By the time I read these words, Mary Leslie-Melville had long since died and the whereabouts of this supposed murder weapon was unknown. But its existence, as described by Betty, added further fuel to my theories.
With the clues provided by Alice Boyle and by Mary’s story, I became convinced that it was Alice who had murdered Joss. Still, several questions remained in my mind: Why would Alice have killed the man she loved? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to kill her rival, Diana?
In 1998, I finally succeeded in calling on Alice’s former housekeeper, Noel Case (then Mrs. Eaton-Evans). Noel was white-haired by this time, in her eighties, and living with her husband, Tom, at Diss, in Norfolk. I had already sent various questions to her through Alice Boyle, and, contrary to all my expectations, I was received hospitably by both Noel and her husband. We talked at length that day, exchanged letters, and when I called on her again a year later, she offered me photographs of her time at Wanjohi Farm, along with various letters pertaining to Alice’s life there.
During my first interview with Noel, I asked her if she thought it was Alice who had murdered Lord Erroll.
“It could have been Alice who shot Erroll,” Noel replied thoughtfully. “Why she would want to do this is a mystery, because she was madly in love with Erroll and surely it would have been more motivating to kill Diana and not Erroll. But, on the other hand, with her belief in the occult and her firm belief about the other side, it is possible that she thought that if she could send Erroll to heaven, where he might just have qualified for entry, she could join him there.”
In the French courts, when Alice was being tried for attempted murder, she had told the judge that she had shot Raymund because she wanted to join him in the “Great Beyond.” If she did kill Joss, then this desperate act must be seen in the same context. Alice had always believed in an afterlife. She had been brought up in the Presbyterian faith. She took as gospel that when you die, your soul goes to be with God, where it enjoys God’s glory and awaits the final judgment. The Presbyterian Scots Confession states, “The chosen departed are in peace, and rest from their lab
ours…they are delivered from all fear and torment….” Alice took for granted that after her death she would be reunited with her loved ones, and that all her pain would be washed away. “Now you are mine forever,” she told Joss in the mortuary.
By killing herself, Alice completed what had begun on the night of Joss’s murder. Hence her strange words to Patsy Bowles just days before her death: “If you have an obsession or a very deep wish, or even two wishes which you dream about and want—they often happen. The first of my wishes has happened. I wonder if the second one will occur?”
Her first wish was to kill Joss. Her second wish was to kill herself so that she could be reunited with him in the Great Beyond. Her own suicide had always been part of the plan, and yet she held off, unable to finish the job. Perhaps it was Dickie’s devotion that kept Alice alive for the subsequent eight months after the murder. It was only after Dickie left for Cairo that she could no longer put off the inevitable.
As Alice’s fatal dose of Nembutal took hold just a few months later, what were her final thoughts? Had she forgiven Joss for forsaking her? Had she forgiven herself for his murder? Did she think only of Joss as she approached her own death, or also of her long lost mother and estranged father, both waiting for her, she believed, on the other side? She had even ensured that her beloved dog Minnie would be there, too. The revolver lay on her heavily bandaged bosom, its muzzle pointed at her heart. One squeeze of the trigger and she would finally be free. This time, she did not falter.
Author’s Note
There was a set of compelling reasons and coincidences for writing about Alice de Janzé.
One of my first encounters with Alice’s story was through her erstwhile husband, Raymund de Trafford. I was a schoolboy, living with my family at Yarmouth, on the Isle of Wight. It was wartime—shortly after the Battle of Britain, the famous aerial conflict between British and German forces that took place in the skies above the southeast coast of England during 1940. One of the UK’s largest radar stations was located on the Isle of Wight, at Ventnor, and as a result, many thousands of tons of bombs had been dropped on the surrounding area during the conflict. On one occasion, a “stick” of bombs narrowly missed our home, destroying the house next door. Later, I witnessed a German ME-109 shot down on the farm opposite, and I bicycled to the scene. The German pilot survived and was taken to nearby Parkhurst Prison.
Parkhurst was where Raymund was incarcerated throughout 1940. When he was released the following August—his sentence had been reduced due to good behavior—he made immediately for our home at Yarmouth, where he knew he would be welcomed by my mother, his friend Margaret Spicer. It was six in the morning when he arrived at our door. My father had sent a car for him. The cook and maid were up early and gave him a very good breakfast of toast, eggs and bacon, and coffee. I was at home from school for the summer. I remember Raymund’s gray-looking, badly shaven face. He talked and talked. He spoke as if delivering a monologue, rattling off the names of numerous people from his Kenya days, describing his prison life, and complaining about being left out of the war. He also spoke about Alice. This was a name that was familiar to me because it often came up in family conversations—my mother and Alice having been friends from their Kenya days. Although Raymund was divorced from Alice by the time of his release, he was evidently still in contact with her, because I distinctly remember him describing Alice’s fury at the entry of Diana Delves Broughton into the tight-knit Happy Valley circle.
Before his departure at around eleven that morning, my mother asked him, “What are you going to do now?”
“I have written forty-five hundred words about my life in Parkhurst Prison,” Raymund replied. “And I shall offer it to the Sunday Dispatch. But my family will pay me more not to publish. So that will set me up for a bit.” Even as a young boy, I could detect Raymund’s aggression and toughness. He did not take much notice of me and concentrated such charm as he had on my mother. I do not think he liked my father.
As can be imagined, the appearance of an ex-convict at the breakfast table was extremely exciting for a young boy, and I can still picture Raymund puffing out his cheeks before exhaling his cigarette smoke. After breakfast, Raymund announced he was off to nearby Cowes, where he would stay with his old friend Poppy Baring, the banking heiress, at her family’s country seat. It was Cowes Week on the Isle of Wight and the annual yachting regatta was taking place despite the war. Raymund would doubtless have enjoyed the magnificent vantage of the Barings’ Nubia House, with its views onto the silvery waters of the Solent, where, even in war time, hundreds of boats had gathered for the regatta. Many years later, while researching this book, I met Raymund’s nephew, Sir Dermot de Trafford, who told me that after Cowes Week, Raymund had traveled to London, returning to his club, White’s, to see if he could locate any familiar faces. Raymund’s contemporaries, however, had all been called up for the war and the club’s venerable elder members refused to acknowledge this recently released prisoner. The story goes that Raymund went up to an elderly and extremely bald senior member of White’s, who was sunk deep in his chair, with his Times held high in the air. When the man refused to as much as look at him, Raymund smacked him on his bald pate and declared, “Hoity-toity!” The room broke up with laughter.
Although I remained fascinated with Raymund, it was his appearance at my family’s home that marked the point when my mind became concentrated on Alice’s existence. Later, as a young man, I had my own firsthand glimpse into her world. It was 1950, and I was stationed in Kenya for two years to work for the British oil company Shell. The Erroll murder was almost a decade old, but it was still a subject of fascination for those I encountered, and I became intrigued. One day, I decided to motor up to Kipipiri, on the peak beside the Wanjohi Valley, to see if I could find Idina Sackville at Clouds. I had already heard tales of Idina’s infamous house parties during those early days in Happy Valley, so I approached with a degree of curiosity mixed with trepidation. When Idina opened the door, I introduced myself. She was then in her late fifties, and had a strong upper-class English accent and an impressively girlish figure. She greeted me with great enthusiasm and questioned me closely about my mother and my father, whom she remembered. She also wanted to know whether I was related to the Spicers of Spy Park in Wiltshire, into whose family her sister, Avice, had married (in fact, we are distantly connected). When Idina invited me to stay the night, I accepted.
That evening, the moon was serving as an overhead lamp; a cool breeze swept down from the Aberdare Mountains behind the house and dinner was served at 11:00 P.M., as was customary in the carefree world that Idina had created for herself. After dinner was over, my hostess then turned to me and said, “After I go to my bedroom, I shall wait ten minutes and then switch off the generator. So that is all the time you have in which to undress and go to bed.” In my room, I found a new pair of silk pajamas laid out on my pillow, together with a bottle of brandy, a glass, and a lighted candle on the bedside table. I lay in bed and watched for the electric lights to dim. Ten minutes later, as I was dozing off, I heard the door handle turn. Who could want to enter my room at such a time? Was it to be Idina herself? I pulled up the sheet to my neck and waited in dread anticipation. It was not Idina, but Jimmy Bird, Idina’s live-in companion. That evening, he was obviously worse the wear for drink and had possibly mistaken my bedroom for his own; I told him to leave, which he did quickly, and I locked my door. That night, I learned that when in Happy Valley, a locked door is a valuable defense against late-night intruders.
Later that month, I visited Thomson’s Falls and went to the hotel there for lunch. (Thomson’s Falls is not far from the road entrance to the Wanjohi Valley.) While waiting in the lobby, I was approached by a man of medium stature, whose faded fair hair, almost orange in color, was brushed to both sides over his ears in elegant quiffs. He introduced himself as Fabian Wallace and asked if I happened to be Paul Spicer. He said he had heard from Idina that I was in the area and asked if I were free f
or lunch. I gladly accepted and followed him in my car to his nearby house, which was set in a well-kept garden. There was a river at the end of the lawn, swept by weeping willow trees and bamboo. I sat on his veranda sofa, which was covered in newly laundered white linen, eagerly awaiting the luncheon. I was very hungry. I remember the menu, because the first course was a hot consommé with a superb flavor. A servant wearing white gloves and dressed in a long white kanzu, or robe, topped by a tall red hat called a tarboosh, served us. The second course was blue trout cooked in the French style, the fish having been caught from the stream below. After lunch, we sat back on the veranda sofa and drank coffee. Fabian produced a thick white carton of cigarettes with a “By Appointment” insignia on the lid; inside were one hundred perfect hand-rolled cigarettes imported from St. James’s Street, London, each unusually fat cigarette containing Fabian’s favorite blend of Virginia tobacco. I was young, earning very little money, and readily impressed by the delightful comfort of the surroundings in which I found myself, if a little concerned that Fabian might make advances toward me (in fact, he did not). Unfortunately, we did not speak of Alice during that memorable lunch, although Fabian had been Alice’s neighbor and had known her well in the years immediately preceding her death.
The world that Fabian and Idina inhabited would change irrevocably during the course of the 1950s. Land disputes had already become a source of increasingly bitter conflict between the local Kikuyu and white settler farmers. While a small number of Kikuyu landowners consolidated their farms and ingratiated themselves with the colonial administration, by the early 1950s, almost half of all Kikuyus had no land claims at all. Such glaring disparity led to division among the Kikuyu and extreme resentment toward the settlers. Oath-swearing ceremonies took place throughout Kenya; those participating believed that if they broke with their promises, they would be killed by supernatural forces. In the beginning, tribe members swore to acts of civil disobience, but as time went on, their rituals demanded that they fight and kill the Europeans. In 1952, the Mau Mau rebellion began in earnest and the British administration declared a state of emergency. Settlers took to carrying loaded revolvers wherever they went, placing them out on the table at dinner, the time of day when many attacks took place. Spurred on by reports of extreme violence and brutality, the British government sent troops to assist the colonists, although by the end of the conflict, the numbers of native Kenyans killed far exceeded that of the European casualities. When the core Mau Mau leader, Dedan Kimathi, was captured in 1956, it signaled the end of the rebellion and victory for the British. The brief era of Happy Valley, however, was most definitively over. What’s more, the days of British rule in Kenya were also drawing to a close. The first elections for Africans to the legislative council took place in 1957, and when the Kenya African National Union, led by Jomo Kenyatta, formed a government in 1963, the stage was set for Kenyan independence.