Departures of note

In March 1927, Alice de Janzé, an American heiress and member of colonial Kenya's notorious Happy Valley set, shot her lover Raymond de Trafford in a Paris railway station and then turned the gun on herself. Both survived. She was tried for attempted murder, received a suspended sentence and a fine of 100 francs, and was later fully pardoned by the French president. She went on to marry de Trafford in 1932, only to divorce him five years later.

Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1899, Alice Silverthorne was the only child of a textile industrialist and a relative of the wealthy Armour family. After her mother died when she was eight, she was raised by a governess and, with her father's encouragement, entered a wild social life in Chicago. In 1921 she married Frédéric de Janzé, a French racing driver and aristocrat, and moved to Paris. In the mid-1920s, the couple was introduced to the Happy Valley set in Kenya, a community of white expatriates known for hedonism and scandal. Alice soon began an affair with Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, and later with de Trafford.

In 1941, after Lord Erroll was found shot dead in his car outside Nairobi, Alice was regarded as a prime suspect among the white community due to her drug habits, her romantic attachment to Erroll, and her earlier shooting of de Trafford. She had an alibi, and another man was charged and acquitted. That September, after being diagnosed with uterine cancer and undergoing a hysterectomy, she attempted suicide by overdose. A week later, two days after turning 42, she died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, using the same weapon she had once used on de Trafford and herself. Her death was ruled a suicide, but the content of her suicide notes was never publicly disclosed, fueling speculation that they contained revelations about the Erroll murder.