Peter H. Reid - Every Hill a Burial Place: The Peace Corps Murder Trial in East Africa

Praise for Every Hill a Burial Place

Peter Reids account of the 1966 Tanzanian murder trial of Peace Corps volunteer Bill Kinsey is suspenseful and gripping. It is also a careful, judicial examination of the difficulties the Peace Corps faced in balancing its responsibilities to the deceased, to the accused, and to US relations with Tanzania. Both the research and presentation are masterful. John Hamilton, former US ambassador to Peru and Guatemala

Peter Reid transforms the gripping story of a Peace Corps volunteer death and the acquittal of her husband into an epic study of the Peace Corps from its first days during the Kennedy administration to the present. And the fact that he successfully places this human tragedy within the complicated and troublesome days of the Cold War and after makes the book a stunning achievement. It is an amazing, suspenseful report about two young American volunteers in Tanzania that also deepens our understanding of the Peace Corps, America, and their entangled history for the last six decades.David Rudenstine, dean emeritus of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and author of The Day the Presses Stopped and The Age of Deference

Every Peace Corps volunteer has a story to tell. Few, however, are as surprising and suspenseful as this one.John Coyne, novelist and former Peace Corps staff (Ethiopia)

The violent death of a Peace Corps teacher in Tanzania has shocked, saddened, and perplexed the Peace Corps community for more than fifty years. Was Peppy Kinseys death a horrific accident, or did her husband, Bill, batter her to death, as some African witnesses claimed? Exhaustive, coherent, thoughtful, and suspenseful, Reids account of the Kinsey murder trial and its aftermath could well be the final word on this dark eventunless, of course, this remarkable book triggers new revelations.Richard Lipez, author of the Donald Strachey series and former Peace Corps teacher (Ethiopia, 19621964)

Peter Reid has written a meticulously researched and fascinating true story about the ambiguous death of a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania in the 1960s and the subsequent prosecution of her husband, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, for murder. Equally compelling is the backstory about a range of issues receiving intense local and worldwide attention, including calls to send in the Marines to rescue the accused, an apparent lack of concern about justice for the deceased, and the perception of special treatment for a white American in a newly independent African nation.Skip McGinty, 1960s Peace Corps Africa Volunteer and Peace Corps Country Director, Oman

Every Hill a Burial Place

Every Hill a Burial Place

The Peace Corps Murder Trial in East Africa

Peter H. Reid

Copyright 2020 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving
Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of
Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson
Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky
Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead
State University, Murray State University, Northern
Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University
of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western
Kentucky University.

All rights reserved.

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www.kentuckypress.com

Map by Dick Gilbreath

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Reid, Peter H., 1942 author.

Title: Every hill a burial place : the Peace Corps murder trial in East Africa / Peter H. Reid.

Description: Lexington, Kentucky : The University Press of Kentucky, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020017972 | ISBN 9780813179988 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813180007 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813180014 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Kinsey, Bill HaywoodTrials, litigation, etc. | Trials (Murder)Tanzania. | Peace Corps (U.S.)Officials and employeesLegal status, laws, etc.Tanzania. | Volunteer workers in social serviceLegal status, laws, etc.Tanzania.

Classification: LCC KTT3.7 K56 R45 2020 | DDC 345.67802523dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017972

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements
of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper
for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Member of the Association of University Presses

For Barbara, whose sense of humor, support, and kindness
keep me going, and for Ada, Brian, Hadleigh,
and Paul, who are the joys of my life

Contents

Abbreviations

Prologue

In December 1964, Bill Kinsey and Peppy Dennett were married in an Episcopal ceremony at Peppys home in Riverside, Connecticut. The wedding took place three days before they left to serve as Peace Corps volunteers in East Africa. The Kinseys had met and begun dating only a few months earlier during Peace Corps training in Syracuse, New York. The proposed marriage came as a huge surprise to Peppys family; her mother was unhappy about their short relationship, but in the end the Kinseys married without a hitch. Sixteen months later in the small town in Tanzania where they taught, Peppy would die, and Bill would be charged with her murder.

Introduction

I once shared a house in Africa, nestled among the giant boulders along the shores of Lake Victoria (with apologies to Isak Dinesen and the powerful sense of place evoked by the opening lines of Out of Africa). My housemate and I were Peace Corps volunteers teaching in a secondary school in Tanzania; both of us had graduated from college in 1964, John Oliver from the University of North Carolina, I from Stanford. We began Peace Corps training in the fall of that year at Columbia University in New York and arrived in Tanzania in December.