A Peace Corps Death in Tanzania

 

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)