Did girl, 17, kill her stepsister and dump her body in a borehole?

By MURIMI MWANGI

Samuel Gikandi, 50, has a heavy heart — one weighed down by the tribulations that have dogged his matrimonial life — from a breakup with his first wife, and mother of his two kids, to the death of his second wife while giving birth to their child.

His third and final marriage also yielded a share of his present pain, after the daughter born out of the union was murdered.

The agonising memory of how he lost his daughter has tormented him for five years – and at every recollection of the sight of his daughter’s lifeless body, Gikandi shudders and sheds a tear.

Linnet Wangari, then a two-year-old girl looking up to a beautiful future, lost her life to a callous murderer – who not only bashed her head several times with a hard object, but also dumped the badly mutilated body into a borehole to conceal the act.

Her mother, Jane Wanjiku Gikandi, 33, suffered the grief first-hand, as she went through an agonising five day search for her missing daughter.

Baby Wangari mysteriously disappeared from a couch in her sitting room where she was having a nap before her body was discovered dumped in a neighbour’s borehole.

It was on October 18, 2009, and the ‘young princess’ was enjoying a late evening siesta while her mother was preparing to attend a church fellowship. Her father was away in Nairobi where he worked.

At 3pm, when the mother left the homestead for the fellowship, the child was still absorbed in the siesta, beautifully tossing and turning on the couch, probably savouring a moment in dreamland fantasising about her future.

Later in the evening, Wanjiku returned home spiritually charged from the fellowship. But she was shocked not to find the child playing in the compound as she always did. She wondered why Wangari had overslept, being the jovial and playful girl she was.

Frantic search

Wanjiku sent her stepdaughter, who had been living with the family at the time, to awake the child. She returned with some rather disturbing news – baby Wangari was not on the couch, neither was she anywhere in the house.

A frantic search for the child yielded no fruit, neither did a panicky enquiry among neighbours on the missing girl’s whereabouts. A distressed Wanjiku called her husband and informed him of the disturbing news. None of them slept that night.

Come Saturday morning, Gikandi boarded a vehicle to Nyeri, before detouring to his home located at Gaturia Village, about 500m from Mukurweini town.

There, a dull cloud of grief reigned and tormented the dwellers as hours gradually grew into days with baby Wangari nowhere to be found.

Four days later, the village got a near breakthrough in the search for the missing child after her clothes were discovered inside a neighbour’s pit latrine.

But a volunteer who descended down the pit latrine climbed back up with a bundle of filthy smelling clothes of baby Wangari, soaked in human waste. The child had not been thrown in the latrine.

The villagers broke into a louder wail, with grief now reeling back its ugly head more menacingly at the recollection that the girl was still missing even after her clothes had been found.

A day later, a woman from the neighborhood, while going about her work in a nearby farm, made a shocking discovery that unearthed the gruesome death of Wangari. The woman was fetching water from a borehole at a corner of her horticultural farm when she came face to face with the horrific sight of Wangari’s badly mutilated body floating in her borehole.

She had just lowered the fetching container down the hole when it hit a solid object – which she found unusual, as she always covered the borehole after work.

Peeping keenly into the hole, she spotted Wangari’s body floating on the water and let out a deafening cry that brought the neighbours to the scene.

And when the body was finally retrieved Gikandi and his wife broke into a loud wail, thinking critically of the heavy loss they had just suffered – losing their two-year-old to a cruel murderer was really more than they could handle.

The first suspect was their stepdaughter, who had been left with the kid on the day she disappeared. But after a short interrogation at a nearby police station, she was set free.

The anguish of losing the daughter would not, however, let Gikandi’s wife tolerate her stepdaughter anymore. She sent her back to her (stepdaughter’s) mother, who was Gikandi’s first wife.

About nine months later, Gikandi, while still mulling on how to get justice for his slain daughter, got some information from his first wife, implicating a close cousin of his.

“She requested me to meet her at her Nyahururu home with two relatives but I told her I would only meet her elsewhere at a neutral place,” recounted Gikandi.

They met, and the woman told him their daughter, who the stepmother had sent packing nearly a year earlier, had been heard claiming that a cousin to Gikandi allegedly stormed the home on the day Wangari disappeared.

The daughter, then aged 13, would later repeat the same allegations when she testified before a Nyeri Court, where Gikandi’s cousin Susan Gitahi is charged with the murder of Wangari.

Psychiatric assessment

In her testimony, the girl claimed that on the material day, Susan demanded for the baby from her. When she declined to hand her over, Susan said she would violently steal the child.

The court queried the young girl’s testimony and directed the prosecution to investigate her to find out whether she conspired in the murder.

Early this month, the prosecution found the teenager, now aged 17, culpable for the murder of her stepsister. But she could not take a plea, just yet, as State Counsel Stephene Cheboi, who is handling the case, requested that she be taken to a psychiatrist for assessment.

Justice James Wakiaga made an observation that the girl may be a minor, and asked her lawyer to confirm her age after which it emerged that she will be turning 18 in June.

Wakiaga ordered that the girl be immediately moved to the Ruring’u Juvenile Remand, pending the outcome of her mental and age assessment.

Susan’s case is still ongoing and the next hearing is slated for September 16, this year, while the teenager’s case — for the murder of her stepsister — may commence on May 28, if the psychiatrist certifies her fit to stand trial.