THE VILLAGE OF KIONGURURIA, in Kenya's Great Rift Valley, is a hardscrabble place, with mud huts scattered among green hills and a forlorn collection of businesses—a maize-meal store, a bar, a phone exchange—strung along a potholed highway. When I stopped there on an overcast morning in late July looking for friends and family of 37-year-old Robert Njoya, whose death earlier this year has riveted Kenya, a drunken man wearing a Green Bay Packers cap staggered up and shoved his hand in my face, demanding money. Three friends sitting on a stoop burst out laughing. I gave the man 50 Kenyan shillings—about 70 cents—and he stumbled away.

A minute later I ran into Daniel Losut, a gaunt man who told me he'd been a neighbor of the victim. He offered to take me to meet Njoya's widow, Serah, and together we drove up a rutted path to a hut surrounded by a fence of roped branches. Just beyond an adjacent plot of corn, an unkempt hedge marked the boundary of 50,000-acre Soysambu Ranch, founded a hundred years ago by the third Lord Delamere—the legendary big-game hunter and cattle baron who moved to Kenya from Britain at the turn of the last century. Since no one was home, Losut borrowed my cell phone to try to track Serah down, but he couldn't reach her. As we waited, on the off chance that she'd show up, I asked Losut whether reports about the dead man—who'd been described in the Kenyan newspapers as a schoolteacher, a stonemason, and a day laborer—were true. He laughed and said that while Njoya sometimes did manual labor in the village, "he didn't have a lot of work. Robert was a poacher. He liked to shoot everything—gazelles, warthogs, even buffaloes."

Late on the afternoon of May 10, 2006, as the equatorial sun sank low in the sky, Njoya, with four local men and six dogs, apparently clambered over the hedge beside his house and illegally entered the Delamere estate. At the same time, Thomas Cholmondeley, the third Lord Delamere's 38-year-old great-grandson, set out for a walk with a friend from his colonial-era home, Jersey Hall, a five-bedroom converted cattle barn on the family's ranch.

Just before dusk, Kenya's two social extremes collided. The five black men emerged from a thicket, carrying bows and arrows and, over one man's shoulders, a skinned impala. What happened next is a matter of dispute. In Cholmondeley's telling (which has been backed up by his walking companion that afternoon, another white Kenyan named Carl Tundo), the poachers set their dogs on him and he fired four shots in self-defense from his .303 Lee Enfield rifle—killing two of the animals and accidentally hitting Njoya, who was hiding behind a hedge, in the groin. Those who were with Njoya say that Cholmondeley opened fire without warning as they were carrying the dead impala toward a nearby tree. They heard several shots and fled; Njoya never made it back to his hut. Tundo says Cholmondeley bandaged the injured man with a handkerchief, yelled for a car, and told the driver to take Njoya to the nearest hospital. By the time the vehicle arrived at the hospital, Njoya had bled to death.

Losut and I waited for half an hour in front of the hut, then we got back in the car and set off in search of Njoya's older brother James, who owns a butcher shop just off the highway. There had been rumors that this was where Njoya often took his poached animals to be butchered. When we arrived at the dank, tin-roofed shack, I found James huddled in a back room, surrounded by hanging meat and rifling through a wad of account slips. He looked at me suspiciously.

"A lot of foreign journalists have stopped here asking me questions about my brother," he said. "Then they print lies." I told James I was interested in hearing about Cholmondeley's reputation among the locals—there were allegations that he had treated the people of Kiongururia harshly when he found them trespassing on his land. He said he needed to confer with the rest of the family. He asked for my cell-phone number and promised to call later that evening. I never heard back from him.

HAD THE KILLING OF ROBERT NJOYA been an isolated incident, it would probably have rated only a few lines in local newspapers. But one year earlier, on April 19, 2005, Thomas Cholmondeley (pronounced CHUM-lee) had been involved in a strikingly similar confrontation. In that incident, Samson ole Sisina, a 45-year-old ranger for the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), was dispatched to Soysambu with two KWS corporals on an undercover mission. The three government officers were investigating whether members of the Soysambu staff were illegally shooting wild animals on the property and selling the meat. With ole Sisina at the wheel, the team arrived at the ranch in an unmarked Toyota Corolla station wagon with fake license plates. Posing as meat buyers from Nairobi, they talked their way past the security man inside the guardhouse, signed a register using false names, then drove ten minutes down a gravel road to the slaughterhouse, a low, white-painted stone building with a tin roof. Ole Sisina's two colleagues entered, asked about buying game meat, were told that none was being sold at the ranch, then left without finding incriminating evidence.

As the KWS employees were leaving Soysambu, however, they passed a Land Rover heading into the ranch carrying a buffalo that had been shot a few hours earlier. (Cholmondeley later explained that the buffalo was a "problem animal" that had been