AS I TRAVELED THROUGH the verdant suburbs and gritty shanty towns of Nairobi, I was struck by the vehement antipathy among blacks toward the Delamere heir. "Tom should get the death penalty," said my driver, Ben, a Kikuyu from central Kenya. "Nobody can shoot two people dead in one year and claim that it was self-defense. He is a killer." Several people I talked to—a taxi driver, a journalist for The Daily Nation, Kenya's largest newspaper, a bellboy at the Norfolk Hotel—referred to Cholmondeley as a "Kenyan cowboy," a term used to describe a particular breed of macho white Kenyan who manifests the same racially superior attitude as his colonial-era ancestors.

To some black Kenyans, however, Cholmondeley has been the victim of a rush to judgment. Philip Murgor, the chief prosecutor who dismissed Cholmondeley's first murder charge, believes that jealousy, greed, and reverse racism all contributed to an unfair targeting of the white rancher. After overruling the police and ordering Cholmondeley freed from jail on May 18, 2005, Murgor provoked outrage across Kenya; for that and other reasons, he says, he was fired by President Mwai Kibaki a week later. A trim, light-skinned black man,

"We have a problem in Kenya," says Koigi wa Wamwere, a member of Parliament. "THESE WHITE KENYANS THINK THAT THEY REMAIN THE MASTERS, and we blacks are the servants. They don't see why they should treat blacks differently from colonial times."

Murgor, 45, says he got involved about a week after ole Sisina was killed, when he learned that Simon Kiragu, the Rift Valley senior police officer handling the investigation, announced that he was planning to charge Cholmondeley with murder. "It was a premature statement," Murgor told me. "Besides that, it wasn't even his decision to make—it was the attorney general's. He was completely out of line. The police were trying to tie our hands." Nine days after the shooting—and five days shy of the normal 14-day waiting period for filing charges against an accused killer—the Naivasha police formally charged Cholmondeley with murder. With that, Murgor told me, "alarm bells went off," and he began looking into the case file personally.

As I sat in his cramped office in downtown Nairobi, Murgor handed me a copy of the official report filed by the Rift Valley Criminal Investigations Division (CID) shortly after the ole Sisina killing. In stilted English, the report states that the KWS ranger "ran for his dear life," while Cholmondeley "chased him for about 61 [yards] where he eventually shot him in the neck and killed him instantly." Cholmondeley had given the police a drastically different version of the incident, claiming that he fired at ole Sisina from some distance only after the ranger took the first shot. "I shot the man in the firm belief that he was a robber with intent to cause harm to myself and my staff," Cholmondeley said in a statement to police. "There was no indication that he was a KWS ranger and I am most bitterly remorseful at the enormity of my mistake. I beg the authorities for leniency."

Murgor says he learned that the police had ignored key evidence, such as the fact that several employees inside the slaughterhouse insisted that they'd heard ole Sisina's small-caliber revolver go off before Cholmondeley fired his Luger. The deeper Murgor probed, the more convinced he became that Cholmondeley was being railroaded: He told me that he suspects that powerful politicians put "intense pressure" on the police to rush through a murder charge. "This is all about land," Murgor told me. "The Delamere ranch is the [biggest tract of land] in the Rift Valley, and a lot of people want it."

At the time of Kenya's independence from Great Britain in 1963, the country's first president, Jomo Kenyatta, guaranteed to respect the titles of the country's white landowners, who then numbered about 3,500. Only an act of Kenya's parliament could undo Kenyatta's guarantee, a step that almost every political figure and lawyer I spoke to in Kenya said was highly unlikely. But, according to Murgor, some Kenyan political figures believe that prosecuting Cholmondeley on a capital-murder charge could force the family out of Kenya or oblige them to divest their land in the hope of getting more lenient treatment.

Immediately after Murgor ordered Cholmondeley released, the former prosecutor charges, the media and some politicians engaged in an orchestrated campaign to whip up a furor. OUTRAGE AS DELA MERE IS FREED OVER KILLING, declared the front page of The Daily Nation—a headline that, Murgor says, was as much intended to create a stir as to report on one. In the story, ole Sisina's brothers called the dropping of the charges a travesty of justice and insisted that "our brother's life has been treated like that of a dog," while Edward Nkoiboni, the councilman for the Ntulele ward, where ole Sisina lived, said, "The government has clearly demonstrated that it has two sets of laws: one for the poor and the other for the rich."

But Cholmondeley's own behavior, as much as the comments of politicians and the press, contributed to the heated atmosphere. The morning after his release from jail, a photograph ran on The Daily Nation's front page showing him sitting in the back of a police vehicle, flanked by officers, smiling jubilantly and flashing two thumbs up. His friends believe he was set up by the media to look bad. "Do you know what the Kenyan press did?" one close friend of Cholmondeley asked me. "They screamed, 'Tom, show us your hands are free.' So he gave them the thumbs up, and it came across as 'Yahoo, I got away with murder.' " Cholmondeley reportedly also went back to his standard practice of carrying weapons around his property, despite warnings that he was under police and media scrutiny.

"Everybody who knew Tom thought he was making a mistake by carrying guns," one friend told me.

When news broke of the Njoya shooting, it created a predictable uproar. OH NO, NOT AGAIN, screamed The Standard, Kenya's daily tabloid. This time, according to news reports, the Rift Valley police confiscated all firearms from Cholmondeley, and politicians warned prosecutors that the consequences of another release would be disastrous. "The government goofed the last time . . . and it should be reminded that people . . . will not take things lying down this time," former cabinet minister Anyang' Nyong'o told The Daily Nation. At Njoya's funeral, in May, Koigi wa Wamwere, a deputy minister of information and member of Kenya's parliament from the town of Nakuru, urged the crowd to "take [the law] into your own hands" if Cholmondeley were released from prison.

I went to see Wamwere at his tenth-floor office in downtown Nairobi during a break from a legislative session. It was two and a half months after the Njoya shooting, and Wamwere, who had championed democracy and human rights during the repressive era of Daniel arap Moi, was still making incendiary comments about the case.

"We have a problem in Kenya," he told me, peering through wire-rim spectacles. "These white Kenyans think that they remain the masters, and we blacks are the servants. They don't see why they should treat blacks differently from colonial times." A small, wiry man clad in a black Nehru jacket and black cotton pants, Wamwere shook his head when I brought up Cholmondeley's contention that he had killed both of his victims in self-defense. "That is ridiculous," Wamwere told me. "This man is a Kenyan cowboy and he's not alone. Go to the flower farms in the Rift Valley and look at them—carrying pistols, swaggering around like the cowboys in Texas. That mentality has not left the white landowners. They are running around, thinking they can shoot a black as easily as they shoot a wild animal."

Sipping from a cup of sweet milk tea, he flashed an incongruous smile. "If he were set free and people took the law into their own hands, who would blame them?" he said. "I don't want to see that happen, but, believe me, people will be very angry. Tom Cholmondeley will be a marked man."