Watch the Last episode of "The Case of the Earl of Erroll" bellow ...
The series presents dramatised accounts of five distinct unsolved murders from British history. Actor and Academy Award-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes appears as a 'historical detective', who guides the audience through the events leading up to the murder, and proposes a solution to each case.
Fellowes presents and narrates each episode, sometimes walking into the action to explain a point. He appears again at the end to conclude the case, putting forward his theory on the identity and motivation of the murderer.
Fellowes co-wrote all five episodes of the series
"The Case of the Earl of Erroll"
Julian Fellowes examines the 1941 murder of the Earl of Erroll in colonial Kenya. With rumours abounding about the Earl’s affair with Diana Delves Broughton, her husband Jock was put on trial for the murder.
The Case of the Earl of Erroll was condemned by Juanita Carberry, whose stepmother was a friend of Diana Delves Broughton, as "littered with inaccuracies". She criticised Fellowes’ pronunciation of Kenyan place names, and challenged his assertion that Delves Broughton had been present during the shooting of Lord Erroll. Fellowes responded: "I am sure she’s right when she says I mispronounced place names – it was the first time I had been in the country." He added: "As for Diana being at the scene, I have a source whom I believe is equally as sturdy as Juanita...she asked me never to reveal her identity.
Writer's TV murder 'investigation' strewn with errors, says witness
Last updated at 10:01 10 January 2006 in Mail online
Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes - off to New York today to collect yet another glittering showbusiness prize - is famously a stickler for facts. Everything in his historical dramas and TV documentaries is researched down to the finest detail.
His well-received BBC docu-drama of the wartime murder in Kenya of the dissolute, womanising Earl of Erroll - a crime which inspired the 1987 film White Mischief - was a masterclass of his thoroughness. Or so it seemed.
For Fellowes' hour-long programme - broadcast a fortnight ago - did not go down well with the last surviving witness to the real-life shenanigans of Kenya's louche Happy Valley set: Twice-married Juanita Carberry, 80.
Her stepmother June was a close friend of Lord Erroll's lover Diana Delves Broughton - the bed-hopping scarlet woman whose baronet husband Jock was acquitted of the murder.
Juanita, who lives in Chelsea, was 15 at the time and says Jock confessed to her while on the run from the police shortly afterwards - a fact she guarded for decades and which saved him from the gallows. It gave her a unique ringside seat at one of the most notorious crimes of passion in the era of empire.
"This programme was littered with inaccuracies and I have written to the Director General of the BBC to complain," she tells me.
"I am fed up with all these people thinking they know best what happened." Her biggest gripe is Fellowes' assertion that Lady Delves Broughton was wounded during the shooting of Lord Erroll, a "complete invention", insists Juanita. "Diana was at home with my stepmother at the time," she says. "I had lunch at her house the very same day and, believe me, she had not been shot.
"I can't understand why Fellowes didn't take the trouble to find out the facts - I would have been happy to talk to him."
Juanita adds: "Despite posing as an old Kenya hand, Fellowes repeatedly mispronounced place names. The film also made out that my father John was a wife-beater. Although he had many faults, in 17 years I never once saw him raise his hand to my stepmother."
Over to Fellowes: "I am sure she's right when she says I mispronounced place names - it was the first time I had been in the country and I hope I never gave the impression I was an old Kenya hand. She may well be right that Carberry was not a wife-beater - that was down to BBC researchers, not me.
"But as for Diana being at the scene, I have a source whom I believe is equally as sturdy as Juanita. Sorry, but she asked me never to reveal her identity.
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