Richard Alden, the cable and telecoms executive accused of the murder of a Kenyan woman, has returned home having been cleared of the charges.
In a Broadband TV News interview, Alden said he would be spending the next few weeks in Spain before spending Christmas with friends and family in South Africa.
Grace Wangechi Kinyanjui was painted in police reports as being Alden’s mistress. The reality was she was helping Alden clear out his house in the Nairobi suburbs he had shared with his wife Martine and children.
Martine and the family had left a few months earlier on the completion of his three-year term as chief executive of entertainment and communications company Wananchi. Alden had only returned from Mexico, where he was leading the bid for a new mobile telephony licence, to remove his remaining belongings.
He was in the property with Kinyanjui and his housekeeper when he heard a shot from the bedroom. With two guards he drove her to the local hospital where she was later pronounced dead.
Alden was later charged with her murder leading to 18 months under suspicion including 63 days in jail.
The breakthrough came through an old school friend, now one of the co-heads of Merrill Lynch, who knew Jeffrey Katz, who came to prominence for his investigation into the death of Vatican banker Roberto Calvi.
“He reached out to me and offered the help. My lawyers said that defence reports were not needed until later in the proceedings… but we managed to turn it round”.
Alden with his wife Martine and Grace Kinyanjui’s mother Anastasia who also supported him.
Katz enlisted Geoffrey Arnold, a former Metropolitan Police forensic firearms specialist, who was able to work out that the bullet had hit the floor, killing Kinyanjui on the rebound.
“The first thing the police did was to ask about the mark in the floor…They took the photographs but did nothing with them”.
It appears Kinyanjui was posing by the mirror, while holding the gun, and pulling back the trigger.
“It was a terrible tragedy. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I got caught up in it because people didn’t bother to look into it,” said Alden. “The police made a series of statements that were totally factless and then the press went and published them.
“To be fair at the end the police did a full report. They went back to speak to people who they’d already spoken to at the beginning.”
This included the pathologist, who after seeing the Arnold evidence, remarked that it explained why the bullet had made the marks it did.
“It was done in a shabby way, which was why I knew I would be cleared in the end. From the early stage people didn’t realise that it wasn’t quite right.”
Alden says he now needs time to think about his next career move, the Mexican project now having successfully been won with another executive at the helm
