A review of Every Hill a Burial Place – The Peace Corps
Murder Trial in East Africa by Peter H. Reid, University Press of Kentucky,
2020.
On March 27, 1966, Peace Corps Volunteer teacher Peppy
Kinsey died. She and her husband Bill went on a picnic to a rock outcropping
near their home. They climbed the rock. Bill said he did not hear her fall, but
realizing she was gone rushed to find her bleeding below, soon to die.
Witnesses reported a struggle. Police
concluded the husband Bill Kinsey murdered his wife and not even from the top
of the rock. Thus begins the saga of who said what, who saw what, what was the
evidence, was there motive, and so forth. Most of the book is devoted to the
case itself and how it unrolled in rural Africa where local police and
prosecutors ended up facing off against sophisticated well financed experts –
both in law and medicine. There is much redundancy. Author Reid goes over who
said and saw what every time a different party provided input. It gets boring,
especially the repetition of the medical evidence, but finally differences
arising from that evidence proved crucial at the trial. The author drew extensively from his own
memories of the event, official transcripts, and notes of those who were
engaged in the process. If nothing else the reader will learn a lot about East
African jurisprudence.
A second part of the story relates how the Peace Corps as an
institution reacted to the event. Was its responsibility to ensure justice for
the dead woman and/or did Peace Corps have an obligation to support her
volunteer husband against the charge of murder? What to say publicly? What to communicate to PCVs
in-country? Initially the Peace Corps
tried to walk a neutral line. Nonetheless, its staff both from Tanzania and
Washington, were deeply involved in the case.
Peace Corps officials assumed that the very presence of Peace Corps in
Tanzania was at stake. A murder conviction would besmirch and jeopardize the
whole program. They surmised that an extremely
overt defense of Bill would antagonize the government of Tanzania as it would
appear that the might of the U.S. government was being arrayed against an
underdeveloped third world nation.
Washington officials also feared that a conviction and hanging would
undermine the Peace Corps globally.
Part of the problem for the Peace Corps was that it did not
have a policy for such an event. Although it scrabbled together a suitable
response to this specific case, apparently, it never codified policies so would
have to reinvent them in the years afterwards whenever PCVs got in similar
predicaments. A useful part of the
long-after-the-fact analysis is a discussion of how Peace Corps
responsibilities towards women volunteers – their health and safety – has evolved.
I won’t divulge the outcome of the trial. It indeed had some
interesting twists. Readers who stick with the narrative will find this an engaging book. Based on the evidence, you get to arrive at your
own judgement of what really happened.
As an aside, I wrote a book in novel form based on the
murder of a woman in Mombasa, Kenya where an American sailor was accused and
stood trial. Ergo, I understood much of
the arcana of East African jurisprudence and the tensions that arose when an
American confronted a different judicial system and when political issues were
also at play. Murder in Mombasa (www.smashwords.com)
