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The Men with the Revolvers. One day last week, he was traveling across Java from Bandung to Cheribon a jeep mate with brilliant Yale Sociologist Raymond Kennedy, 43. Professor Kennedy (The Ageless Indies, etc.) was an old Indies hand, had a deep affection for the people whose ways he had studied for years. Like Doyle, he believed that the way to approach them was with a smile.
At a lonely stretch of road near the village of Tomo, according to one report, a sedan overtook the jeep. Four men wearing uniforms without insignia got out of the car, forced Doyle and Kennedy at revolver's point to leave the jeep, led them into a wood a few hundred yards from the road. There, they shot the two unarmed Americans at close range from behind.
Then the men stripped the bodies and forced frightened peasants who had come to the scene to bury them. Within minutes the killers had sped away. The peasants told authorities about the murders. The Indonesian army exhumed the two bodies and transported them to Bandung for burial. Mrs. Doyle received the news in Hong Kong, where she had been waiting for her husband's return; Mrs. Kennedy received the news in New Haven, where she had been preparing for a trip to join her husband.
The Indonesian government, which deeply deplored the murders (see box), launched an immediate hunt for the killers. By week's end, they had not been found. Countless armed bands like the one that killed Doyle and Kennedy were roaming in Indonesia—and elsewhere in the chaos which is Asia in 1950. No one could blame the killings on the Indonesian government, yet if that government was to survive (as Doyle and Kennedy had hoped), it would certainly have to get the lawless men with the guns under control—quickly.