In the small hours of January 24, 1941, a Buick was found at a road junction outside Nairobi, in the British colony of Kenya. Slumped in the front was Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, hereditary High Constable of Scotland, a staff officer at East Africa Command and the best-known philanderer of the settler set in the highlands known as Happy Valley. He had been shot in the back of the neck with a revolver. The husband of his latest lover was tried for the killing and acquitted, and a string of books since has named at least four different culprits.
What happened
Erroll had come to Kenya in 1924 with his first wife, Lady Idina Sackville, and settled among a circle of wealthy expatriates whose drinking, drug use and partner-swapping became a byword in Britain. By the late 1930s he had also become a serious colonial politician: he joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists on a visit to London in 1934, sat on Kenya’s legislative council, and after war broke out became assistant military secretary at East Africa Command, with the rank of captain.
In late 1940 he began an open affair with Diana Delves Broughton, the young wife whom the wealthy baronet Sir Henry “Jock” Delves Broughton had married only two months earlier. On the evening of January 23 Erroll danced with Diana at the Muthaiga Club, the settlers’ social center in Nairobi; Broughton, unusually, had insisted that her lover bring her home by three in the morning. Erroll dropped her at the Broughtons’ house at Karen and drove off. About forty-five minutes later the car was found at a junction on the road out toward Ngong, with no sign that he had struggled.
The investigation
Suspicion fell on the betrayed husband. Broughton was arrested on March 10 and tried in Nairobi from late May. No one had seen the shooting, the prosecution’s case was circumstantial and thin, and the defense was led by Harry Morris, who later set out his reasons for believing the verdict right. Broughton was acquitted on July 1, 1941. He killed himself in a Liverpool hotel the following year, at a time when, as the journalist Simon Courtauld has noted, he faced charges over insurance fraud. Erroll was buried at Kiambu, outside Nairobi.
The explanations
The jealous-husband theory got its fullest airing in White Mischief, a book by the journalist James Fox based on research he had undertaken with Cyril Connolly; it was later filmed. A key witness for Fox was Juanita Carberry, then a teenager, who said Broughton told her days after the murder that he had shot Erroll and thrown the gun into a waterfall at Thika. She kept it from the police, later saying she had played the stupid child when asked to testify, and told the story publicly only decades later. In 2007 newly surfaced material was reported to show that Broughton was guilty after all.
Others disagree. In 2000 Errol Trzebinski argued that Erroll was killed by British intelligence because of his politics, relying on a document she called the Sallyport papers; a reviewer in The Spectator found the source unconvincing, describing it as reading more like a novel’s outline than an intelligence file. In 2010 Paul Spicer named Alice de Janzé, a former lover of Erroll who had once shot a man in a Paris railway station, and who took her own life later in 1941; Courtauld, reviewing the book, judged it entertaining but thin on evidence and said he still leaned toward Broughton’s innocence after reading Morris’s account of the defense. Diana herself has also been accused in print.
Where it stands
Every suspect is long dead, the trial left the killing officially unsolved, and the fresh evidence produced since rests on recollection and documents no court has examined. Broughton remains the most likely culprit in most accounts, but the case against him has never been proved.