In July 2024 relatives searching for a missing woman went to a disused, flooded quarry used as a rubbish dump at Kware, in the Mukuru kwa Njenga settlement in Nairobi. Reports at the time said the family had been guided there by a dream. What was recovered over the following days were dismembered human remains in plastic sacks, reported as at least nine bodies and by some accounts ten, all of them women. The discovery caused national outrage in Kenya and heavy criticism of the police.
On July 15 police arrested Collins Jumaisi Khalusha, then thirty-three, a former motorcycle taxi driver from Vihiga County. Senior officers described him publicly as a vampire and a psychopath, and said he had confessed to killing forty-two women over roughly two years beginning in 2022, the first of them his own wife, Imelda Judith Khalenya, who died in 2022. Two other men, Amos Momanyi and Moses Ogembo, were arrested after being found with mobile telephones said to have belonged to some of the dead.
Almost everything in that paragraph is contested. His lawyer, John Maina Ndegwa, said the confession had been obtained by torture, and Khalusha told a court he had been coerced into it. When Kenyan television went to the village named as his home, some people said they did not recognise the name or the photograph the police had circulated, while others said they knew him as a motorcycle taxi driver. Kenyan reporting raised openly the possibility that he was a fall guy for somebody else. He was due to enter a plea to six counts of murder, not forty-two.
He never entered it. On the morning of August 20, 2024 he escaped from Gigiri Police Station along with twelve Eritrean men who were being held over immigration offences, cutting through the wire mesh of a covered yard and climbing the perimeter wall. The escape was found when breakfast was taken to the cells. Kenya’s acting police chief said preliminary investigations indicated it had been aided from inside the station; eight officers were arrested and five appeared in court.
He has not been seen since. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations offered a reward of one million shillings in September 2025, publicly denied reports of his re-arrest the following month, and in June 2026 the Interior Cabinet Secretary confirmed he was still at large, saying for the first time that he may have had help from accomplices while rejecting any suggestion that state agencies were involved.
What the record holds is therefore very little. Bodies were found, and there is no dispute about that. The number forty-two comes from a confession the accused says was beaten out of him, repeated by police officers who had already called him a psychopath in public. No charge was ever formally entered against him, no evidence was ever tested in a courtroom, and no court has made any finding about him at all. The killings at Kware are unsolved.