A bloody Rift 2 : source: Men's Vogue

On that day, Cholmondeley and his friend Carl Tundo, a rally-car driver, were prospecting a remote area of the Delamere estate near Lake Elementaita. They were looking for a suitable site for a house Tundo wanted to build. The place was thick with mpilipili trees, which look a little like densely growing olive trees, and it was late afternoon. In the fading light, the two whites stumbled upon a poaching party—three men from Kenya's majority Kikuyu tribe and as many as six dogs (accounts vary)—and their slaughtered impala. These men allegedly set their dogs on Cholmondeley and Tundo. Cholmondeley was armed, as Africans often are in a bush filled with dangerous Cape buffalo, and he shot at the dogs with a Winchester .303 hunting rifle, killing two but also hitting Njoya. A game warden at nearby Nakuru National Park later testified that Cholmondeley had phoned him after the shooting and uttered the Swahili words "Nimechapa mmoja matako"—"I have hit one in the buttocks." Cholmondeley then brought Njoya to officials, who took the man to a local hospital, where he bled to death.

"So you turned and ran when you heard the shot?"

"I dropped the impala and ran. I didn't see anything as I was running." Kamau said that he and the other surviving poacher, Peter Gichuhi, went back to the scene and showed police the snares they had set to catch game: crude wire nooses attached to fences that scooped up the animals as they forced their way under. The moments leading up to the shooting were exhaustively recounted: The three men met at Njoya's house in the nearby village of Kiongururia at 4:00 p.m., then slipped onto the Soysambu lands, where they found a snared impala. They decapitated it and carved out the intestines for the dogs. "So," Ojiambo roared, "the dogs had their lunch?" In single file, Kamau, Gichuhi, and Njoya then made their way to a prominent tree to hang the impala carcass in preparation for butchering. They were a yard apart from one another. When the first shot rang out, the three dispersed, but none of them fell. It's a crucial detail, because it suggests that Cholmondeley might have been shooting at men who were fleeing.

"You kept running for ten minutes?" Kamau nodded, and then said he heard five shots, rapping five times on the stand to demonstrate the intervals between them.

"So that was six shots in all?"

"Yes," Kamau said in Swahili.

The following day, I heard it reported on the radio that Cholmondeley had shot Njoya as the poacher was running away. Ordinarily, the details might not have been reported at all: In Kenya, poachers are shot dead on estates nearly every week, and rarely are the killers white. But on April 19, 2005, Cholmondeley had also shot dead another man, one he had presumed to be a robber but who was, in fact, an undercover ranger with the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), a 45-year-old Masai named Samson ole Sisina. The circumstances surrounding the first Cholmondeley killing were as chaotic as those of the second. According to Cholmondeley, Sisina fired first, and he returned five shots with a Luger pistol, killing the ranger instantly. The KWS had been called to the estate—by whom, or why, no one knows. Cholmondeley had supposed that Sisina and his fellow unidentified KWS rangers were armed intruders holding his employees at gunpoint.

The case, with Ojiambo arguing for the defense and the possibility of the death penalty for Cholmondeley, was dropped by the director of public prosecutions, Philip Murgor, at the urging of the attorney general's office. The ambitious young lawyer accused the police of shoddy investigative work, but was then himself dismissed in May 2005 by the government amid Masai protests against what they interpreted as favoritism toward Cholmondeley, the high-profile heir to the Delamere estate, arguably the most storied swath of land in the country. (Murgor had also been pursuing a broader inquiry into corruption within the Kenyan police force. He believes his firing was a response to these efforts.) The media soon began to cast Cholmondeley as a holdover from the string-'em-up colonial days. But others pointed to a breakdown of law and order throughout rural Kenya—the escalating tensions between herdsmen and farmers as well as between poachers and landowners—and to the ineptitude of the police. Four months before the shooting of Njoya, armed intruders broke into the house of Lord Delamere, Cholmondeley's father, and shot one of the estate's property managers in the stomach, leaving him for dead. The man survived. But in the lonelier parts of Kenya, some argue, you might do well to shoot first—and Lord Delamere's son might have felt the same way.