In July 2024 relatives searching for a missing woman went to a disused, flooded quarry used as a trash 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 in which she showed them where to look. 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, among residents, human rights groups and women's rights campaigners, and heavy criticism of the police.
On July 15 police arrested Collins Jumaisi Khalusha, then thirty-three, a former motorcycle taxi driver. He had been born in Vihiga County on February 3, 1991, to Margaret Rose Jumaisi, and after his father died in 1995 he moved with his mother and three siblings to Migori County. Senior officers described him publicly as a vampire and a psychopath, and said he had confessed to killing forty-two women, aged roughly eighteen to thirty, over about two years beginning in 2022, the first of them his own wife, Imelda Judith Khalenya, who died in 2022. A search of his home was reported to have turned up mobile telephones, identity cards and SIM cards. Two other men, Amos Momanyi and Moses Ogembo, were arrested after being found with telephones said to have belonged to some of the dead, and a court allowed the three to be held for seven more days of the twenty-one the prosecution had asked for.
Almost everything in that paragraph is contested. His lawyer, John Maina Ndegwa, said the confession had been obtained by torture. "He says he was strangled to confess," he told the BBC. "You could tell he was in distress, terrified and in anguish." Khalusha told a court he had been coerced; the prosecution denied it. When the Kenyan station NTV went to Malovu, the village in Vihiga named as his ancestral home, some people who were presented as relatives said they did not recognize 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, on Friday, August 23. Most reporting says he never entered it; at least one account says he pleaded not guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter.
At about three on the morning of August 20, 2024, he escaped from Gigiri Police Station along with twelve Eritrean men who were being held over immigration offenses, 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 on duty were suspended and arrested, and five appeared in court.
He has not been seen since. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations lists him as a wanted suspect, offered a reward of one million shillings in September 2025, and publicly denied reports of his re-arrest the following month. On the night of June 22, 2026, the Interior Cabinet Secretary, Kipchumba Murkomen, said in a television interview that Khalusha had still not been arrested and suggested for the first time that he may have been helped by accomplices, while rejecting any suggestion that state agencies were involved. "There is no benefit for the government to assist such a horrible human being," he said.
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.