Schoolchildren in Mukhweya, a village in Bungoma County in western Kenya, recognized Masten Wanjala when he joined a football match on the morning of October 15, 2021. Two days earlier he had walked out of a police station in Nairobi, some four hundred kilometers away, hours before he was due in court to answer for the deaths of children. Word spread. A crowd chased him into a neighbor’s house, brought him out and beat him to death. He was twenty, and nothing the police had said about him had been tested before a judge.
Masten Milimo Wanjala had been arrested on July 14, 2021 over the disappearance of two boys, Charles Opindo Bala, thirteen, and Junior Mutuku Musyoki, twelve. Police said he was caught after demanding money from the family of one of them. He led officers to where the bodies had been left, at Spring Valley in Westlands and near Kabete Approved School on the edge of Nairobi. Police then said he had confessed to a series of killings of children going back several years across more than four counties, and that he had been barely sixteen when he killed the first, a twelve-year-old girl taken in Machakos in 2016.
The figures given publicly were never settled. Police and press accounts put the number he confessed to at ten, at twelve and at thirteen, and the count of murder charges he was to answer at thirteen. Four or five bodies were recovered, some after he showed investigators where to look. Of the recovered bodies, two had been strangled, one had died of head injuries and one cause of death could not be established. Detectives said the children had been stupefied with a white powder and liquid before they were killed, and that he had presented himself to them as a football coach.
The Kenyan police also told the public that he had drunk the blood of some of the children. That description, and the word vampire, ran on front pages across the country and internationally in the months before he died.
He was produced in court within days of the arrest, but plea taking was deferred twice at the investigators’ request, and thirteen murder counts were prepared without ever being put to him. Lawyers for the officers later charged over his escape went further, telling the court he had been held at Jogoo Road since June, not July, and had come to know the station’s workings as well as its staff. That dating conflicts with the arrest date the police gave, and it was never resolved.
He left on the night of October 12 into October 13. The three officers on duty, Inspector Philip Mbithi, the station’s deputy commander, and Constables Boniface Mutuma and Precious Mwende Mwinzi, told a court there had been a power cut. Citizen TV reported that his cell had been filled that night with people arrested for breaking the Covid-19 curfew, who were asked to pay for their release. Police said that before he died he told the crowd in Mukhweya he had passed himself off as one of those petty offenders and paid his way out, then hitched a ride on a lorry to Bungoma. A doctor in Nairobi was also arrested after investigators found she had been in telephone contact with him; how a man in police custody came to have a phone was never explained.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations announced his death on Twitter, saying that agents had been on his trail but villagers had spotted him first, and that the law of the jungle as applied by irate villagers had prevailed. The national police spokesman said basic verification was still being done to confirm the body was his.
The three officers denied two counts, aiding a prisoner to escape and neglect of official duty, and were released on bail on October 22, 2021. In September 2024 Senior Principal Magistrate Robison Ondieki ruled that the prosecution had made out a prima facie case that they had willfully neglected their duty to prevent the escape, and put them on their defense. No verdict has been reported.
He was never charged with murder, never entered a plea and was never convicted of anything. The only criminal case the escape produced is the one against the officers who were on duty that night. What is known about the children’s deaths rests on what the police said he told them, set out in public over three months in which they also called him a vampire, and none of it will now be proved or disproved in court.