On that day, Cholmondeley and his friend Carl Tundo, a rally-car driver, were prospecting a remote area of the Delamere estate near Lake Elementaita. They were looking for a suitable site for a house Tundo wanted to build. The place was thick with mpilipili trees, which look a little like densely growing olive trees, and it was late afternoon. In the fading light, the two whites stumbled upon a poaching party — three men from Kenya's majority Kikuyu tribe and as many as six dogs (accounts vary) — and their slaughtered impala. These men allegedly set their dogs on Cholmondeley and Tundo. Cholmondeley was armed, as Africans often are in a bush filled with dangerous Cape buffalo, and he shot at the dogs with a Winchester .303 hunting rifle, killing two but also hitting Njoya. A game warden at nearby Nakuru National Park later testified that Cholmondeley had phoned him after the shooting and uttered the Swahili words "Nimechapa mmoja matako" — "I have hit one in the buttocks."
Cholmondely murder case Kenya
