On the evening of March 25, 1927, inside the Gare du Nord station in Paris, Alice de Jan pressed a pistol to her lover’s chest and fired. Raymond de Trafford, a thirty-year-old English aristocrat, collapsed with a bullet lodged near his lung. Alice then turned the weapon on herself, shooting herself in a failed attempt to die alongside him. It was a murder-suicide that did not succeed, and the scandal that followed would follow her for the rest of her life.
Alice had been born into extraordinary wealth in Buffalo, New York, on September 28, 1899, as Alice Silverthorne. Her father, William Edward Silverthorne, was a leading textiles manufacturer of the Gilded Age, and her mother, Julia Bell Chappin, came from a family of comparable standing. Julia’s uncles, Philip and Harmon Armour, controlled Armour and Company, the largest meat distributor in the world at the turn of the century. Alice was an only child, and her mother’s death from tuberculosis in 1907, when Alice was still young, left her heiress to a considerable future estate.
Her father remarried and produced more children, but money was never a concern for Alice. Her upbringing was chaotic. William Silverthorne was an alcoholic, frequently absent, and indulged rather than disciplined his daughter. He actively encouraged her social life and behaved in ways that some biographers have suggested crossed into impropriety.
At one point during visits to France in the 1910s, he introduced Alice to acquaintances as his mistress, whether as a peculiar joke or something more serious remains unclear. At least one relative contested his fitness as a parent in court, and for a time the teenage Alice was placed in the custody of an uncle from her mother’s side of the family. Yet she continued to spend long periods with her father in France, a country she gradually came to love and eventually treated as her adopted homeland. At twenty-one, Alice married Frédéric de Jan, a French count who had gained a measure of fame in France as a motor racing driver and as a pilot in the French air force during the First World War.
The courtship lasted only a few weeks. Two daughters, Nolwen and Paule, were born in 1922 and 1924. The couple settled in Paris, where they maintained a busy social life, leaving the care of their young children largely to a large household staff. The Roaring Twenties were in full swing, and Alice, by then in her twenties and a mother, continued the extravagant, unguarded life her father had encouraged.
She socialized with well-known literary and artistic figures in Paris’s jazz clubs and developed a reputation as an erratic, eccentric presence who courted notoriety. In 1925, the de Jans left France to join friends, Lord and Lady Erroll, in the expatriate colonial community in the Wanjohi Valley near Nairobi in Kenya. Nairobi was then a center of British colonial government in East Africa, and the community of Europeans and Americans there became known as the Happy Valley set, notorious for its appetite for parties, alcohol, drugs, and infidelity. It was in this environment that Alice’s growing reliance on opiates became a serious problem.
She stood out among the residents for her beauty, her mood swings, and a sarcastic sense of humor, earning the nickname “the Wicked Madonna. ” She had a brief affair with Lord Erroll, but her next romance proved far more consequential. In Kenya, Alice met Raymond de Trafford, son of an English baronet. She fell in love with him, and the affair quickly became an open secret within the Happy Valley set.
Frédéric initially tried to ignore it, focusing on hunting and hoping the relationship would fade, but it became evident that Alice was genuinely in love with Trafford. Frédéric later referred to the situation as an infernal love triangle. Pressured by his scandalized family and Alice’s increasingly erratic behavior, he separated from her. They divorced in 1927.
A year later Frédéric published a book, Vertical Land, a biographical account of the Happy Valley set, in which he described his former wife as suicidal and unstable, prone to severe depression exacerbated by her opium and alcohol habits. Members of Alice’s extended family had themselves committed suicide, and she clearly suffered from some form of clinical depression. On March 25, 1927, Raymond informed Alice in Paris that they could not marry. His Roman Catholic family objected to the social scandal the union would cause and threatened to disinherit him.
Hours later, at the Gare du Nord, where Raymond was to catch a train for the English Channel and then a ferry to England, Alice shot him and then herself. The couple was rushed to the Lariboisière Hospital. Raymond was in critical condition for days, nearly dying after the bullet grazed one of his lungs. Alice, who had suffered only a minor wound, was expected to recover.
French police guarded her hospital room, and she was to be charged with attempted murder. Alice did little to protect herself. Though she claimed she regretted her actions, she openly admitted to a friend that she had shot Raymond but refused to explain why. Her extended family launched a media and legal campaign to protect her and the family’s reputation, as the shooting had made international headlines.
She was sent to a clinic to recover from depression, where she admitted to having attempted suicide many times in the past. After Alice recovered, Raymond made a statement that undermined the prosecution’s case. He described the event differently, saying that as they were about to part, she kissed him, and he told her he loved her, whispering that she should not treat his decision as irrevocable. As she was leaving him, he said, she attempted suicide, and his movement deflected the weapon.
He insisted he was sure she had not intentionally fired at him. On December 23, 1927, Alice was tried only on a charge of assault, the attempted murder charge having been dropped. Her lawyer convinced the examining magistrate that her chronic melancholy had deadened her intelligence, making her mentally irresponsible at the time. The trial resulted in a minor suspended sentence and a financial fine.
In 1928, Alice returned to Kenya and briefly resumed her affair with Lord Erroll, but she was asked to leave the country and soon returned to Paris. Over the next three years she continued to pursue Raymond de Trafford, and they finally married in 1932. The marriage collapsed within months after a heated argument over their honeymoon destination. They divorced in 1937, having been separated for years.
Trafford had been able to endure being shot by his future bride, but marriage itself proved too much. The second half of the 1930s brought increasing isolation for Alice. The jazz culture of the 1920s had ended, new social movements had passed her by, and the scandal of the shooting had driven many people away. Lonely and increasingly reliant on opiates, she drifted between countries, sometimes deciding to return to America, then changing her mind and going back to France or Kenya.
Her children, raised by Frédéric’s extended family after his death from blood poisoning in 1933, rarely saw her. They later described her as an aunt or uncle who appeared once or twice a year with presents and disappeared just as quickly. In January 1941, Alice became embroiled in the second great scandal of her life. On January 24, Lord Erroll, the man who had first drawn the de Jans to Kenya fifteen years earlier, was found shot to death in his car near Nairobi.
Suspicion quickly fell on Alice, given her known relationship with Erroll, her unstable character, and her history of having tried to kill a former lover. She was questioned by police and offered an alibi, but it was tenuous, and suspicion continued to circulate. In the end, there was not enough evidence to charge her. Investigative reporting over the years has reached different conclusions, with some believing she was the most likely culprit and others pointing to other members of the colonial expatriate community.
The case has never been definitively resolved. Alice did not outlive Erroll by long. In poor health, she was soon diagnosed with uterine cancer and underwent a hysterectomy. Depressed by her isolation, her declining looks, and her spiraling drug use, she attempted suicide twice within the space of eight days at the end of September 1941.
She succeeded on the second attempt, shooting herself with the same pistol she had used in the Gare du Nord fourteen years earlier. She was forty-two years old. After her death, searchers found suicide notes, and she had left notes on furniture to give to people she knew.
It was a peculiar end to a peculiar life.