She shot him. She did.
Alice de Janze met Raymond de Trafford in a restaurant to say good-bye. One wonders if she knew all along that she would do so. At lunch they joked and talked - reportedly. Then they went shopping. They went into a gun shop where she said she wanted to buy a gun as a present for her husband, Frederick de Janze. She also bought herself a .38 caliber Colt revolver. Then the two of them went to the train station where they were supposed to say their last farewells. In the ladies' room she loaded the Colt with bullets. For all the earlier friendliness, Alice later said that she had intended to kill herself. Was she cold-blooded? She got on the train and decided to kill him instead, she said. As he bent for a final kiss, she shot a bullet into Raymond de Trafford's chest and then turned the gun on herself. They were both taken to the hospital and operations were performed. It's said that Alice always had pain in her body from the gunshot she self-administered from that point forward.
They were in France. Alice was arrested and thrown into a jail where women who had commit crimes of passion were held.
Her lawyers called her an excellent mother and wife until she met the person responsible for the crime - Raymond! (Please!)
It helped that Raymond de Trafford did take responsibility!
Not surprisingly, what we would call domestic violence today, was called a crime of passion and understandable then. Given six months sentence, Alice spent the whole six months out of jail as the sentence was suspended.
Her reputation as unstable would forever proceed her.
For now all she wanted was to get back to Kenya,
In 1928 she did go back to Kenya, hosted by her friends Idina Sackville and Joss Hay, who she'd had an affair with while Idina was pregnant. The settlers were inclined to think that Raymond de Trafford had gotten what he deserved. But what about all that Swinging. all those Open relationships? There was a hitch. A divorced woman was not wanted in Kenya!
When I read that, I began to understand something that I had not earlier, something that might explain all the marrying. If Idina Sackville had wanted to stay in Africa she had to be married. If Alice wanted to stay in Africa, she had to be married. Single women were not to be admitted to Kenya. Was this the real reason these women went through so many husbands?
In 1929 the President of France fully pardoned her! It goes without saying perhaps. Money talks!
That he lived, she lived, and she claimed to have done so as a crime of passion allowed her to get away with it. No doubt her social status and wealth and the best lawyers also had something to do with that acquittal.
Crime of passion or not, Alice knew how to use a gun, owned guns as did most of the European settlers who had agricultural estates in Africa. They protected themsleves from the wild life, the Big Game, they were likely to encounter just living their lives there. Many of them also went on safari's to kill big game for the challenge and for the trophies they would acquire. In Britain and America, aristocrats went after foxes and deer and birds. In Africa they wanted to bag a lion or an elephant or one of every animal alive.
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