Masten Milimo Wanjala was arrested on July 14, 2021, aged twenty, in connection with the disappearance of two boys, Charles Opindo Bala, thirteen, and Junior Mutuku Musyoki, twelve. 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 days before he died.
He escaped from Jogoo Road police station on October 13, hours before he was due in court to take a plea. The circumstances were never explained: the three officers on duty were arraigned for allowing and assisting an escape and told the court there had been a power cut at the station that night. He travelled some four hundred kilometres west to Mukhweya, the village in Bungoma County where his parents live. Schoolchildren recognised him after he joined a football match, and word spread. A crowd chased him into a neighbour’s house, brought him out and beat him to death on the morning of October 15.
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.
He was never charged, never entered a plea and was never convicted of anything, and this archive records no established count against him. What the case establishes with certainty is narrower and concerns the state rather than him: a suspect in the deaths of children walked out of a police station in the capital on the night before his plea, and was killed by a crowd two days later, after the police had spent three months describing him to the public as a bloodthirsty vampire. Whatever he did, none of it will now be proved or disproved.