Authors: James Fox
There were many reporters filing for newspapers overseas, including a woman who had travelled from Chicago to provide her paper with daily exclusives. (Broughton smiled at her one day, on his way up from the cells, and said, “As long as you’re here, my head feels safe on my shoulders.”)
The courtroom crackled with old class divisions. Diana, especially, the symbol of privilege and wealth, the object of sexual conjecture, was a strong target for those who felt the Colony had been shamed when the war demanded public sacrifice. She attended court every day, returning each evening to her suite in the New Stanley Hotel. On that first day, she made a spectacular entrance as the crowd twisted round to see her. To their amazement she had come dressed as a widow, in a little black hat with a black face veil, and covered in diamonds. Diana’s wardrobe was one of the wonders of the trial—it was said that she never wore the same costume twice. She took her place at the
front of the court, a few feet from the Attorney-General. Then Broughton appeared from the cells, looking a little waxy, having lost some weight in jail. He shuffled to the dock, his right foot dragging, to hear the charge of murder from the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Joseph Sheridan.
Harragin, a tall, pale man with greying hair, began his opening address by saying that the case had “created a profound and painful impression on the minds of everyone in this Colony. There can be few of you who have not discussed and possibly come to some conclusion either on the case or on the various details which have been reported …”
What then followed for three weeks is recorded in detail in the 600 closely typewritten pages of the court record—a document of absorbing interest and a striking portrait of a confident oligarchy in the last years of its reign.
Broughton was asked at one point, “I think Mrs. Barkas has told us how you spent the succeeding days. You played golf croquet, bridge and backgammon at the Club.”
A: “Yes, each day.”
Lunches, dinners and sundowners intervene.
Mrs. Barkas was asked, “Do you recall other topics of conversation [with Broughton] that day?”
“We were hoping it would get fine and we could play croquet.”
“It is a very mild outdoor game, is it not?”
“I think so.”
“Just pushing a ball through the hoop with a light mallet?”
“It is not light to me,” said Mrs. Barkas.
African servants and askari policemen pass through the pages and are asked the routine question, “Can you tell the time? What time is it now by the court clock?” After each reply to this question the stenographer added the word “correct” in brackets. One African witness, Mutiso Wa Thathi, was asked, “Did you have a watch with
you that night or is it just what you think?” He replied, “I had a watch with me but mine was fast because I kept it fast. It was l½ hours ahead.”
There are the “experts”—doctors, chemists, ballistic scientists—alternating on the stand with the socialites, including the group of young officers: Portman, Pembroke, Dickinson, Llewellin, Lezard; and above all there is the remarkable performance of Broughton himself, who elected to give evidence and held the floor for several days.
The transcript vividly records a great defence barrister at work. Harry Morris, later immortalised in a biography called
Genius for the Defence,
was described by a lawyer on the opposing team as “bluff, rough and impassioned, contemptuous … prone to descend to burlesque, abuse, even insolence.” From a reading of this case, that description is unfairly pejorative. Morris would never insult a witness gratuitously, although he often managed to provoke one into angry retaliation. His style in court was aggressive, and sometimes abrasive. It relied upon a rich sense of humour, a sharp wit, and a degree of sarcasm. Morris also displayed an exceptional memory and a prodigious grasp of detail which he used to greatest effect in reducing expert witnesses for the prosecution, whenever possible, to the level of confused amateurs, tangling them up in petty contradictions.
It was in his talent for manipulation and mystification that Morris truly shone as a barrister. He believed that expert witnesses, forensic scientists and the like, with their carefully prepared evidence and their professional sureness and self-esteem, were the easiest prey for a good defence counsel. Furthermore, Morris was a leading lay authority on ballistic science—the knowledge of guns and bullets, especially the microscopic markings found on spent bullets that could identify them with the barrel of a particular gun. On his arrival in Nairobi he told both Broughton and Kaplan that he could defeat the Crown case on one simple point of ballistics alone.
In fact Morris was perplexed that the Crown case had
left him such a “simple answer” to give to the jury, namely to disprove the Crown’s contention that the murder weapon was that same Colt .32 that Broughton had used for shooting practice at Nanyuki and which had subsequently been “stolen” from his house three days before the murder. But he gave no clue about his simple answer, even to his clients.
Linking the murder bullet to Broughton’s Colt formed the main plank of the prosecution’s somewhat flimsy case. They also maintained that live cartridges had been found in the undergrowth where Broughton and Diana were shooting, and that these were charged with black powder, which had not been manufactured since the outbreak of the First World War. There were marks of this same powder surrounding the wound on Erroll’s head.
It was a carefully premeditated murder, claimed the Crown, the first step of which had been Broughton’s faking the theft of the revolvers. He had begun to plan it on January 18th, when Erroll had refused to go away and give up Diana. Broughton’s subsequent actions—his magnanimous renunciation of his wife, his honouring of the marriage pact with such fastidiousness, his drunkenness on the night of the murder, his forgetfulness of details afterwards, were all an act, according to the prosecution. Instead, when Broughton saw that his marriage was threatened by Erroll, his real nature showed itself: his exceptional jealousy, his anger, his deviousness and finally his desire to kill his rival. It was Broughton’s character that was to be put on trial.
The Crown would show that Broughton had the opportunity to do the deed, yet Harragin could never explain how Broughton got out of the house undetected by Wilks or June Carberry, so he showed that it was possible to leave by the drainpipe, or walk soundlessly down the stairs. (Poppy had masterminded both experiments, although the drainpipe climbing he had merely supervised. Hugh Dickinson, who happened to be at Karen that day, had volunteered
for the task.) Neither was he able to reveal exactly how the accused had acted when he left the house. Had he hidden in the car and shot Erroll just before the junction? Or had he walked to the junction and waited for him? The Crown could only guess at Broughton’s actions. The leading evidence against Broughton came from the policemen, the African servants and the scientists. Dr. Francis Vint believed that the shots were fired by someone standing on the running board of the car, shooting through the open window, or sitting in the seat beside Erroll. From the scorchmarks on the skin, Vint concluded that the gun could not have been more than eighteen inches from Erroll’s head when it was fired. The second bullet travelled straight across the top of the spinal column from ear to ear. (The first bullet went wide, striking the metal partition between the doors.)
The bruises on Erroll’s forehead suggested that he had hit his head on the steering wheel as he ducked when he first saw the gun. The second shot killed him instantly. At some point, said Vint, the body must have fallen sideways—there were bloodstains exactly where the wounded side of Erroll’s head would have touched the passenger seat. Vint also noticed that there was blood on Erroll’s right trouser leg, below the knee, which suggested that Erroll had been upright at the wheel long enough for the blood to drip downwards—but nothing was made of this, although it might well have had some bearing on how the body arrived in that position in the footwell of the car, the knees tucked under the body, and the hands clasped in front of the head. There were smears of blood on both hands, particularly on the left one.
After many experiments, Poppy and Vint concluded that the body must have been manipulated into the footwell to get it free of the wheel and the pedals, that it would never have fallen that way naturally: the steering wheel itself would have prevented it from falling into the footwell on the car’s impact with the ditch.
Poppy believed that Broughton had moved the body from the driving seat in order to be able to steer the car off the road. The ignition had clearly been switched off by hand; the lights were still on but because the knob was missing from the light switch it required a pair of pliers to turn them off—and a pair was found in the car.
To shoot from the running board while the car was moving would have required some agility, said Vint, but to shoot from the seat beside Erroll would have been relatively easy, if the murderer turned his back to his own door. He didn’t suggest that the best position—if the car was stationary—was with the door open and the murderer stepping out backwards. Evidence was also given that the armslings in the car—which Mrs. Carberry, who always used them, said had been definitely in place the day before the murder—had not been wrenched off, but unscrewed and removed.
Harragin then tried to show that Broughton’s behaviour both before and after the murder reeked of suspicion, especially his second call on June Carberry at 3:30 a.m., after Erroll had been shot—surely a blatant attempt at establishing an alibi. Wasn’t it suspicious, too, that at Nyeri he had asked June Carberry if she had told the police that he had been bad-tempered and peevish in the Club that night, and had told her that she couldn’t go away because she would be “his” main witness (June couldn’t remember if he had said “his” or “a” main witness); and that he had asked the police, when they came to question him, what were the chances of finding a gun “buried somewhere in Africa”; and that he had asked at another moment whether a man would be hanged if he shot his wife’s lover, having caught them
in flagrante delicto?
After Soames had told him that the police had been to his farm to look for bullets, didn’t Broughton show an unnatural interest in ballistics, comparison microscopes and so on, especially in a conversation with Carberry at Karen after the murder?
Then there was Broughton’s hasty lighting of the bonfire, on which police discovered a burnt golf stocking stained with blood (and his obsessive need to tell Poppy in such detail about the lighting of the bonfire); his trip to the police station with the handkerchief, shaking with nerves, incredulous, according to the police, that Erroll’s death was being treated as a motor accident, and his impatience to know the result of the post mortem. Didn’t Broughton say to June Carberry in the Club, “I won’t give her the Karen house and £5,000, and she can damn well go and live with Joss,” and “To think I’ve only been married three months, and she treats me like this”? Was this the attitude of a man who had gracefully conceded? And what of Broughton’s visit to the Union Castle agent to rebook the passage to Ceylon on the same morning that the death of Erroll was announced?
Harragin showed, too, that, far from being physically disabled, Broughton was quite capable of sustaining long walks on hunting safaris and toting heavy rifles, and that he was therefore equally capable of having pushed Erroll’s body from the seat into the footwell to enable him to drive the car; and then of walking the 2.4 miles back to Karen in the blackout in time to call on June, despite his protestations of lameness and night blindness. None of this constituted hard proof, but Harragin was trying to forge links between each piece of evidence to build up what was ever more clearly a difficult case for the Crown to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
Apart from Poppy and the ballistics experts, Harragin’s own main witnesses were June Carberry and Gwladys Delamere. June turned out to be of more use to the defence. She provided Broughton’s only alibi; she alone gave the times of their leaving the Club together and returning to Karen, and she is the only source for what took place at the house after their return, since neither Wilks nor Diana gave evidence. Could they indeed have got back home much sooner than 2:00—which is June’s estimation?
June’s evidence was never really challenged, and Broughton himself explained his lapses of memory by claiming that he was too drunk to remember anything. June fully supported this. She even had to help him up the stairs, she said, with her arm around his waist. She was sure that Broughton at this stage was far beyond feeling any “emotion”—an ironic comment from a heavy drinker like June, unless she was claiming that Broughton was actually unconscious. But then she said that at 2:10 a.m. Broughton was in his dressing gown, bidding her good night with a knock on her door. At about 2:25 Diana arrived—also June’s estimate—and from 2:40 Diana stayed in June’s room for about half an hour. Broughton then paid a second visit to her at 3:30, twenty minutes after Diana had left to go to her own room, “to make sure she was all right.”
“Did anything else attract your attention that night?” she was asked. “Yes, after that [Diana’s retirement] Jock Broughton came along.”
“About how long afterwards?”
“About ten or twenty minutes. It is difficult to judge the time.”
“Had you no way of judging the time?”
“No.”
“Did anything else happen in the house about that time to attract your attention?”
“Diana’s dog was barking.”
“Loudly?”
“Yes, quite loudly.”
“What happened when Sir Delves came to your room?”
“He just knocked on the door and asked if I was sure I was all right.”
The only damaging evidence June gave against Broughton was her description of his tirade against Diana after the lovers left the Muthaiga Club, though this had been overheard by other witnesses. To set against that was her favourable account of Broughton’s character—his
cheerfulness, his even mood, his sense of humour, his fundamental lack of jealousy, or even bitterness. June was very sure of herself in the witness box and as she stepped down, Harragin’s secretary heard her say, “Well, I’ve left his head safer on his shoulders.”