After a week in the vast Maasai Mara wildlife reserve, the British couple headed to the powdery white beaches of Kiwayu Safari Village, an exclusive resort on Kenya's northern coast.
Previous guests at its 18 thatched huts have included movie icon Mick Jagger and Princes William and Harry, but on this particular night the Tebbutts had the place all to themselves.
After dinner the 58-year-old publishing executive and his 56-year-old wife, a social worker, walked in the moonlight along the edge of the sea to their secluded $1,720 (Sh172,000) a-night lodgings.
Shortly after midnight, one of the resort's watchmen heard a single gunshot. David Tebbutt was found face-down across the bed, its mosquito net cradling his head, dead from a bullet through his chest.
His wife was gone. Footprints in the sand showed how she had been marched more than a kilometre up the shore to a cove where a skiff (small boat) had apparently been moored.
A search started immediately, but there was little hope of finding her. The resort is only a short distance south of a land that for the past generation has had no law but the gun: Somalia.
The September 11, 2011 incident proved to be only the first in a series of unprecedented attacks.
Twenty nights later and some 110 kilometres farther down the coast, a gang of Somali gunnies kidnapped Marie Dedieu, 66, a retired French journalist.
And two weeks ago, even as Kenya's armed forces strengthened their presence against attacks from the sea, suspected a
l-Shabaab... Harakat ash-Shabaab al-Mujahidin aka the Mujahideen Youth Movement. It was originally the youth movement of the Islamic Courts, now pretty much all of what's left of it. They are aligned with al-Qaeda but operate more like the Afghan or Pakistani Taliban. The organization's current leader is Ibrahim Haji Jama Mee'aad, also known as Ibrahim
al-Afghani. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a Kenyan al-Qaeda member, is considered the group's military leader...
militia members grabbed two Spanish women who were working for Doctors Without Borders in the Dadaab refugee camp, some 240 kilometres inland.
The sprawling city of makeshift tents and huts has become home to roughly 450,000 Somalis who have been driven from their own country by war and famine. (A senior al-Shabaab official denied that his group had anything to do with the abduction.)
Somalia's problems have boiled over and are threatening Kenya. In the past the failed state's pirates confined their attacks to ships on the open sea, and the Islamists focused their ransom kidnappings on aid workers inside Somalia.
Now both groups are making hostage-taking raids on dry land, and Kenya is a victim. Tourism, a mainstay of the economy, was already hit hard by the global recession.
But since the attacks began, many vacationers have cancelled their reservations. Foreign investors have halted funding for major projects until the government sorts out its security problems.