JOSSYLN HAY IS FOUND MURDERED and THE SUICIDE OF ALICE DE JANZE

Well, my readers, if you've come this far into my retelling the story of American heiress and expatriate Alice de Janze, you may realize that the murder of Jossyln Hay is the dramatic conclusion of the story and the book The Temptress. In fact, there have been several books written about the Happy Valley Set that include or are focused on this murder because it remains an unsolved mystery. Author Paul Spicer believes Alice e Janze did murder Jossyln Hay, quite deliberately, and believes that with her suicide she left a letter that admitted it, which was confiscated by the police and never seen or spoken of.  As well, Spicer visited a woman who was the daughter of the doctor who attended Alice when her servants heard the shot she inflicted upon herself, and rallied to save her life. He says this daughter was only eleven years old at the time, but her mother did tell her about Alice's confessional letter.

What if Alice Silverhorne, who married Frederick de Janze, and then Raymond de Trafford, had been born today?  Certainly, there would have been much more psychological and psychiatric help for her. If you recognize yourself in Alice, perhaps you have a mood disorder or you fight depression, or maybe the one you love is an unhealthy obsession.  Know that this is true. Reach out for help!

Josslyn Hay, had created enemies, even if he was a likeable character who, despite his reputation ,had been welcomed into the homes of many of the Happy Valley settlers.  He was likely a sex addict and he had gotten himself involved with many women.  Any number of jilted lovers or husbands could have been to blame. 

In 1941, when he was about 40, he was found in a fetal position on the floor of his car which was slightly off road. The author comes up with a credible scenario on how this murder could have happened, as he was shot at close range.  He proposes that Alice is the one who knew when he would be on the road mid-morning and where and drove to that point. Then, seeing that he knew her, Josslyn might have stopped to talk to her.

But who in Kenya was accused?  Despite the notion that the people who came to Kenya and indulged in sex parties, swinging, changing partners, Open marriages, and so on, did so to escape the restrictions in their lives and experience the freedom to do as they like, many of them suffered from too much drama and chaos that was unlivable without the use of alcohol and other drugs. Many of them, when it comes right down to it, sought the perfect partner.

Someone had decided to repress the evidence and let a likely innocent man go to trial.

A man named Jock Delves Broughton was blamed and went on trial. Jock had reason to believe his wife, Diana, was cheating on him. After the murder Alice visited this man as he awaited his fate in prison, assuring him she knew he was innocent, but  thought she was a suspect, she was never suspected enough to be arrested or brought to trial herself. Jock was an older man and becoming a social outcast  because of this accusation was more than he could deal with. Though he was not convicted, he took a fatal dose of morphine in 1942. Then Diana went on to marry one of the wealthiest men in Kenya, Gilbert Coville, in 1943, a month after her husband's suicide. (Diana went on to marry again in 1955. Despite this, Gilbert still left her his entire estate when he died!)

On Page 195 of Paul Spicer's The Temptress we find an accounting of Alice's very intentional suicide:

Alice killed her dog with sleeping pills, she visited Josslyn's grave, and amended her will,

On September 27, 1941, Alice told her African staff not to disturb her, which wasn't unusual since she normally slept in until 11:00. Then she collected flowers from her garden and decorated her bedroom with the blooms. She put notes on her furniture, friend's names, to alert the staff as to who was to get what.  She wrote letters to her children, to her then boyfriend, Dickie, who was in Egypt, to the police, and then a suicide note.  It was clear she had planned her actions.  She locked her bedroom door, wrapped her chest with a large bandage, which must have been in order to keep the bloody mess she would make to a minimum.  Then she took a huge dose of a sleep medication and before it hit took a revolver and aimed at her heart. The attempt to kill herself didn't work automatically.  Servants forced the door open and found her near death.  A doctor was called and raced to the house but it was still a long trip and by then she had died. 

Her grave was left unmarked so it wouldn't be dug up by fortune hunters.

Dickie Pembroke, the new boyfriend, was devastated as he might have married Aice after the war. (World War II)

Raymond de Trafford survived being a prisoner and the war but because of his notoriety was turned down to rejoin the Coldstream Guards. Eventually he was accepted with the Pioneer Corps posted in Morocco, was discharged at the rank of Captain in 1945 and awarded two medals.  True to form, he went back to gambling, womanizing, and hunting.

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THE MARRIAGE COLLAPSES AND ALICE RETURNS TO IDINA SACKVILLE and JOSSLYN HAY IN KENYA

 After the long wait and all the campaigning, in 1931 Alice de Janze finally got Raymond de Trafford to marry her. She may have been addicted to him but he was addicted to gambling.  Rather than go to Kenya, they settled in Monte Carlo at the Hotel de Paris where he continued to loose her money.  Then they went to Cannes where they stayed at the Carlton, and blame the house, he won back half the money.  They were fighting all the time.  Having won him, now Alice saw her error and wanted a separation.  Had she really thought that marriage would change him?  Or - my question - was it that she had no other prospects? Let's face it that she had a reputation for instability because she had committed a crime of passion that made her infamous, even if no one had ever known that she had been suicidal as a teen. She was a rich and pretty woman and not very old and if she had not shot him perhaps suitors would be lined up for her.

She and Rayond did separate.  He went far away to Australia while she used her British passport (and marital status) to return to Kenya alone.

Alice went on safari with the Vanderbilts in 1933 and soon appealed to the governor of Kenya to stay there. No doubt her elite status and wealth were a consideration, just as it had been when the Pope had granted her an annulment, though she was the mother of two children. Adina and Joss had sold their house, Slains, as part of their divorce, and now Adina had a new house, called Clouds, that she had with a new husband. While Alice awaited her house, which had been rented out for the five years she had been outside the country, to be vacated by renters, she rejoined the Happy Valley set.  Idina was married to the American Donald Haldeman, her fourth husband, who expected her to be faithful to him while he was away on safari's, leading hunters into the wilderness to shoot wildlife was a business for him as well as an adventure.  Of course, there was no way that Idina was going to be sexually faithful. (Would we consider her to be a sex addict today?) Eventually Haldeman returned from a safari to catch one of Idina's lovers making an escape and went ballistic. That marriage would also fail.

Joss had married his conquest, Molly, and they had the grand estate she received as part of her divorce settlement, just as he wanted all along. That did not stop him from once again picking back up with Alice. Mary was not in great shape.  She was drinking and using heroin and not up to tolerating her new husband Joss's affairs. 

The British and American pioneers to Kenya had aged and matured and the sun was starting to set on the Happy Valley Set.

Alice's ex-husband Frederick died in 1933, only 37 years old, of meningitis and sepsis, while working on a journalism assignment. As ex-husbands go, he had been good. She had no relationship with her two daughters, who were raised by relatives. Just as Idina had no relationship with her two sons who were also being raised by relatives. In 1939 when War was declared in Europe (World War II) the children were taken to the United States for their safety and in with Aunt Tatty. Alice had lived her life as an ex-patriot.

Who or what was left for Alice? 

Her mood disorder, cyclothymia, worsened as she got older and now in her 40's she was sleeping in till noon.

Adina's health was starting to fail as well.

Jossyln Hay, Lord Erroll had made some enemies.

Perhaps not everyone who had encountered the Happy Valley Set accepted the affairs that went on.

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BUT ALICE DE JANZE IS NOT THROUGH WITH BAD BOY RAYMOND DE TRAFFORD - NO SHE'S NOT

The story of Alice de Janze, born Alice Silverhorne, certainly has its dramatic twists and turns. After shooting Raymond de Trafford, a man who had left a string of broken hearts before they met and who took the blame for her shooting him, Alice was even forgiven by the President of France. 

She was not free to return to Kenya to stay if she was single or divorced. Perhaps it was basically an acknowledgement on the part of the government of Kenya that no woman should be alone and unprotected, especially not in a time and place where farms and houses were far apart and where going on safaris to kill wild animals was the rage. On page 110 of the book The Temptress by Paul Spicer, it says that when a woman came to Africa already engaged, the first thing she did upon arrival was go straight to Mombasa Cathedral to be married.  As a result of this policy of the Kenyan government about women, I began to think that Idina Sackville and other women in the Happy Valley Set had a motivation for marriage and remarriage beyond personal desires for a man. 

While again visiting Idina Sackville, Alice picked up where she had left it with Joss Hay, who was on his way out of his marriage to Idina and on his way to marrying the richer Molly. "A pattern of frequent separations and intermittent sexual reunions" occurred between Alice and Jossyln Hay, who finally was now Lord Erroll. 

My comment is that such patterns are more addictive. Have you ever been there?

However, Alice had not given up on being united with Raymond de Trafford. It's suggested that he was a whole lot like her own father, a womanizer, a gambler, and not to be relied upon, unfit to be any woman's husband.  Alice had shown interest in Bad Boys as a young woman back in Chicago when she hung out in clubs and met mobsters.

But she wanted him.

In 1927, a few months after the shooting, the divorce from Frederick de Janze came through and Alice was free to remarry. In 1928 an annulment came through as well signed off on by Pope Pius XI. Living in London, though Raymond had told her that he could not marry her because he did not want to be a Kept man, Raymond allowed Alice to cover his gambling debts.

As the years went by, Alice's old friends were moving into new marriages. Her ex-husband Frederick de Janze married in 1930 to an American widow living in Paris. Idina Sackville that same year married her fourth husband, Donald Haldeman, an American who lived in Kenya. Jossyn Hay, Lord Erroll married Mary 'Molly' Ramsey.

Alice was still campaigning to marry Raymond de Trafford.  in 1931 he agreed!  Did he love her or her money?  It had been six years since the two met!  They had a simple, civil ceremony, bypassing religion. Now a British subject, Alice was free to return to Kenya.

This story cannot have a happy ending.

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ALICE DE JANZE SHOOTS RAYMOND DE TRAFFORD and HERSELF!

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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A WHOLE NEW LIFE FOR ALICE IF ONLY RAYMOND WOULD MARRY HER

Alice Silverhorne and Frederick de Janze had married as Catholics.  Despite her affairs, they were still married.

By 1926, Alice de Janze had a new life in Africa, a new house in Africa, new friends in Africa, and she was free of her family in America, but she was not yet free of her husband. She and Raymond de Trafford were understood to be a couple in their set but marriage?

Once again, as was the case with the French noble de Janzes, this rich American heiress was considered to be not quite good enough, below the status of the English de Traffords, due to her American New Money heritage. But also, importantly, they did not like that she was married and it would mean a divorce in order for her to be free to marry again.  A Catholic annulment (the alternative to divorce) was a long process. Pressured by his family to move on from an American with two children who was not even raising them herself, threatened to be totally disinherited himself and shunned out of his family, Raymond broke with Alice on March 25,1927. They had been together less than a year.

Alice was outraged. She pointed out that she had money. She suggested that she was not so religious that she would go through the annulment process. The situation was embarrassing for her.

Even Frederick went to Raymond and told him he should marry Alice, still his wife!  

Raymond showed back up and told Alice he would not marry her. She tried everything. Begging. Reason.  Argument.  Seduction. The man was not budging.  He told her that he would have no income if not for his family and he had no intention of being kept!

(This was on page 92 of the book The Temptress by Paul Spicer and as I read I thought, a ha!  Here we have the term Kept used for a married man whose wife has the money!  You see!)

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ALICE SILVERHORNE - DE JANZE FALLS FOR THE BAD BOY RAYMOND DE TRAFFORD

The people who came to Kenya's Happy Valley in the early 20th century, were people who wanted an escape from the restrictions of their lives, who were searching for something else or more.  

Invited by the pregnant Idina Sackville and her then-husband Josslyn Hay, to visit them at their house called Slains, the de Janzes were introduced to the Happy Valley life.

Idina thought of Alice as her best friend. Now the mother of two small daughters, Alice was not especially enjoying her husband as a lover. During this time Alice and Joss became lovers, just as Idina had planned. I wonder if the two women friends had talked about it and came to an agreement or if it happened naturally.

Perhaps it was the bright African sun, for Kenya was right on the equator, but Alice did feel cured of her depression. However, Alice still must have felt something like "is that all there is?"  She was not besotted with her husband and the affair with Joss made her realize it more so. She did not have designs on Joss as her next husband, but Alice dreaded going home to Europe or America.  So, she and Frederick bought a 600-acre farm and started to build a house on it. (Implied is that it was her money.) After Idina gave birth, her third child and a daughter, in 1926, Alice and Frederick went back to France, to visit their children, which were being raised by his mother. Then they returned to Africa. 

When Alice was introduced to Raymond de Trafford there was an instant attraction. He was 26 and raised Catholic but he had left a trail of broken hearts.  A British aristocrat who was part of Cold Stream Guards, Raymond had escaped having to serve in World War I.  He had recently been to South America where he played polo and went to cattle runs.  Importantly, Raymond was not an heir unlike so many of the Happy Valley Set and had to find a way to make his own money. Not penniless, he bought a small farm which would have to turn a profit. Then he decided that he would trap live African animals and sell them to zoos to earn income.

Now Alice had three men in various stages of relationship with her. Her husband, Frederick, didn't like Raymond but they didn't fight over her either. She also managed to conduct an affair with Raymond without her husband or Joss finding out. The situation didn't please Adina.  Alice knew that her affair with Joss was not the way out her marriage. Joss was on his way out of his marriage with Idina. 

Something I felt aware of as I read the book, The Temptress, was that when it came to money, there were just as many men seeking to marry women with money as there were women seeing to marry men with money.  Idina had married one of the richest men in Great Britain, her first husband David Euan Wallace, but all the money in the world would not have kept her in that marriage. By leaving him, however, she had taken a daring risk - for a woman of those Edwardian times - that was difficult to recover from.

Joss was moving on from Idina, as he had met Mary "Molly" Ramsey-Hill, who was married to Cyril. They lived lavishly.  She had wealth of mysterious origin but perhaps it came from a first husband that she'd married at 16. From that point on, Joss befriended her husband so he could be invited to their impressive home and see Mary. Confident of himself as a seducer, the man certainly seems to have been premeditated in his pursuit, for he would succeed with her.

Frederick came back from a safari with malaria and almost died.  Alice was there for him as he fought the disease. the dutiful wife. In order to overcome the disease, he had to go back to France - alone.  He was medically advised that he should never come back to Africa because another bout of Malaria would kill him.  Alice insisted that their children be in his custody. The heartbroken man left the country and did not argue.  They were Catholic - no divorce.

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THEY'RE BOTH ATTRACTIVE

 

ALICE DE JANZE - THE AMERICAN HEIRESS WHO LOVED AFRICA MORE THAN ANY MAN OR HER CHILDREN

As part of our inquiry to the Happy Valley Set of Kenya, Africa, a group of people who had Open Relationships, who had affairs, and who often divorced and remarried in the 1920's through 1940's, this month we look at the life of an American heiress and ex-pat named Alice De Janze. Born Alice Silverhorne, also a debutant, Alice and her first husband went to Africa and stayed with Lady Idina Sackville at a time when Sackville was called The Life of the Party.  A few years later, when Idina was pregnant while still married to her then-husband Josslyn Hay, she was concerned that he might not stay with her.  So she invited her best friend Alice De Janze and her husband to come and keep Jossyln entertained, choosing who he might have an affair with, in an attempt to control him. Alice did have an affair with Joss.  She probably had a place in her heart for him for many years. Alice, an American heiress, is thought to have been mentally ill, most likely with some form of mood disorder. She had been suicidal at times since her youth. Her life was wracked with violence - including her own. When he was murdered, she was a suspect.

ALICE SILVERHORNE

The author's mother was friend of Alices and in writing this book 

he wanted to set the story straight.

1899 - 1941

Overall, in my reading, the lives of these British aristocrats and other wealthy and important people who chose lives in Kenya over America or Europe, do not seem essentially happy. Some of them worked, even worked hard physically, many did not have to work at all, and it seems they did some hard partying.  The reason the Wanjohi Valley was called Happy was that the high altitudes were said to enhance the effects of alcohol. They almost all drank and some also used morphine or heroin and possibly other drugs. (The only thing missing was the Rock and Roll!) Alice was not a Kept Woman, rather her independent means meant that men were interested in her money. Did she mind?

I'll focus a bit on the scandal in her life a little later in this blog. Right now let's learn

about Alice's childhood and her wealth.  She was born in Buffalo, New York, then the nations 8th largest city, which had its own millionaire's row! Her mother was a society beauty from Chicago and her father was a self-made man, very successful in business and it would seem, rarely home. Her mother's family may have been one of the riches in America at the time. Alice was, like many aristocratic children, home schooled - tutored. She was destined to be a debutant and to have a life of opportunity and advantage. 

But as we know since we've featured a number of debutants here at Mistress Manifesto, the reason for a presentation to society is marriage, early marriage, and the propagation of family through having children as a duty. The Chicago debutant scene bored Alice. She went to jazz clubs. She associated with mobsters and might have had an affair with one. Her mother's family prevailed in moving her towards marriage.

Alice's mother had died at the young age of 35, when Alice was a young girl. Her father rapidly married a cousin of her mothers, who he might have been having an affair with before his wife died. Her father had spent lavishly on her and spoiled her but there was something amiss with their relationship. In 1913 her mother's side of the family had taken action to take her away from her father and his new wife.  Alice reportedly never saw him again. Reading between the lines it might have been that he was inappropriate with her. Her childless Aunt Tattie became her new legal guardian when she was 13 years old. Alice was sent to Mt. Vernon Seminary, a private not religious school in Washington D.C. Alice was devastated at this change in her life. At 16 she was miserable enough to have first tried to take her life. 

Alice came into her inheritance at 18 and her Aunt set her up in an apartment in Paris. It was the jazz age there too but Aunt Tattie was satisfied that she had gotten Alice away from bad influences in America. Alice got a job at a small fashion house. A job was unexpected for a young woman of her wealth an status. She worked long hours but still went out into the Parisian night to clubs where she met celebrities and artists - but no more Chicago mobsters.

Alice did marry. She was 21 and her groom, Count Frederic de Janze was 25.  He came from a family of the French nobility but his mother was an American of Early American lineage. He was Cambridge educated and had already served in World War I so no worry that she might become one of the many thousands of women who lost their young husband to the war. His mother liked her. He had called off an engagement with another American girl and quite possibly his family saw in Alice a way to replenish their wealth. Their engagement made it into the Chicago Daily Tribune. Before she married him, Alice converted to Catholicism, so the relationship was meant to be enduring since in Catholicism there is no divorce. Alice had doubts before the marriage but she went through with it and (echoes of the wedding of Jackie Bouvier to Jack Kennedy) her father was not invited and did not walk her down the isle. Perhaps Alice expected her marriage would provide an escape from her family.

Alice became pregnant on her honeymoon. The couple traveled and then bought an apartment in Paris but she could not get used to the formality of the French nobility. Her first child was born in June of 1922, a daughter.  Alice was perhaps too young to be a mother. overly protected and controlled, unable to experience being independent first.  She continued to socialize in Paris, to go out on the town. Then, the couple went to live at his family stead in Normandy, where his brother and her sister-in-law were also living. Her sister-in-law, from an elite British family, was superior to Alice in education and beauty and dominated the situation there.  Alice had thick curly hair and there was a suspicion that lingered that she had African blood. People started calling her "La Negrese."  Her sister-in-law used that. Alice had a second daughter in June 1924.  She felt depressed, not  much into motherhood. She felt trapped.

Fredrick de Janze and Alice Silverhorne de Janze might not have had a great romance but they became 'excellent friends.'  The man did care about her, the mother of his children. He thought a trip to Africa might be just the thing to improve her spitits, so, in 1925, the could did just that. They went to Kenya (then British East Africa) where they had an invitation from Lady Idina Sackville and her then husband, Josslyn Hay.  It was a month-long journey and no doubt the couple felt far away from all the things in life that controlled them.

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THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO SAY IT : LADY IDINA SACKVILLE'S LAST YEARS WERE TRAGIC

She had been Mrs. Euan Wallace... and Mrs. Josslyn Hay (He'd since become the 22nd Earl of Erroll) ... She had married and married and married.

Idina Sackville had given birth to three children, two sons, and a daughter. True, people of her class were used to sending their children away to boarding school and having relationships with the children then was dependent on letter writing, if that. Idina had been kept from being involved in the raising of her sons though. She'd made an effort to get to know them as they neared adulthood that went not so well. World events affected her personal life as it did so many others.

World War I had affected her life when her first husband Euan Wallace, had joined up and came back uninterested in her or their marriage. He and his next wife, Barbie, had raised those sons as well as three sons of their own.  

Now World War II would further destroy lives.

In a series of tragic events, Euan Wallace and Barbie's three sons would also not live long enough to produce offspring.  

Lady Idna Sackville's daughter by Josslyn Hay would live to adulthood, did marry, have children, and continued on her matriarchal line.  When she married, the Queen and the Princesses Elizabeth (the future Queen Elizabeth II) and her sister attended the wedding. And so, despite all of Idina's scandal, her daughter did not suffer for her mother's reputation. Perhaps that is because relatives had raised the girl.

Idina's sons were killed during service in World War II. As had been the case in World War I, young men of the peerage did not normally avoid military service for their country. This left Euan, who had been so possessive of them without any male heirs.

Then her first two husbands, the fathers of her children died. Josslyn Hay was murdered and her once best friend, Alice De Janze was a suspect.

These deaths put Idina Sackville into a notable depression in which she did not eat or sleep properly and also developed a nerve disease called neuritis, which was said to be made worse because she lived at her house, Clouds, at high altitudes up the mountain. These high altitudes were also said to enhance the effects of alcohol. Idina Sackville was forced to go down the mountain to live in lesser circumstances.

Of great hope to Idina was that her daughter would come to visit her in Africa.  It was not to be. She died before that could happen!

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Excerpts are from The Bolter, a book by Frances Osborne, the main reference for this month's po

My readers, we are not yet done with the Happy Valley Set. Next month we will turn our attention to another book and another woman of that set and learn again how Idina Sackville's life and hers entwined.