Masten Wanjala, Confessed Child Killer, Beaten to Death by Mob After Escaping Custody
Two days after slipping out of a Nairobi police station before his court date, Wanjala, 20, was recognized in his home village in Bungoma County and killed before he could be tried.
Published
Masten Milimo Wanjala was due in a Nairobi court on Wednesday, October 13, 2021. That morning, as officers at the Jogoo Road police station went down the list of suspects to be taken to court, they found he was not in his cell. "We found him missing and no one knows how he escaped," a senior officer told Capital FM. "He must have escaped on Tuesday." Two days later, on Friday, October 15, the twenty-year-old who had confessed to killing at least ten children was beaten to death by villagers in Mukhweya, in Bungoma County, the place he came from in western Kenya.
According to the police and the local chief, schoolchildren recognized him on Friday morning, soon after he reached the village, and raised the alarm. "He comes from this area and so the children saw him and knew it was him," the chief told Capital FM. As word spread, people from the village chased him. "In the end he ran into a neighbour's house but he was flushed out and lynched."
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations said its Special Service agents had been tracking him in western Kenya, but that villagers spotted him and beat him to death before the agents could re-arrest him. The directorate, it said, had been determined that he face justice in a court of law for each crime he committed. "The law of the jungle as applied by irate villagers prevailed." The national police spokesman, Bruno Shiosho, said detectives had opened an investigation, including forensic work to confirm that the dead man was Wanjala. "The locals have said it is him," he said.
Detectives had arrested Wanjala on July 14. The police called him a "bloodthirsty vampire" and said he had killed some of his victims "in the most callous manner, sometimes through sucking blood from their veins before executing them." The killings he confessed to, of children aged twelve and thirteen, went back five years, police said. After his arrest he led detectives to at least six sites in Nairobi and western Kenya: in Shauri Moyo, in Nairobi, where he said he had killed and dumped two children; in Westlands, where another body was recovered; and at Kabete, where the bodies of two more were taken from a river. He was said to have committed other murders in Machakos and Bungoma, and the bodies of several children feared to have died at his hands had not been found.
He was never tried. Investigators had asked more than once for his plea to be put off so they could finish their work, and at his last appearance the prosecution had applied for a mental assessment at Mathari Hospital before taking him to the High Court on murder charges. How many counts he would have faced was reported differently at the time.
The three officers on duty at Jogoo Road when he got away, Phillip Mbithi, Boniface Kamakia and Precious Mwinzi, appeared before Senior Resident Magistrate Jane Kamau on Thursday, October 14, without taking a plea, and the prosecution asked for fourteen days to hold them while police investigated. On Friday, the day Wanjala died, the magistrate refused, ruling that detaining them would violate their rights. She released each on cash bail of 100,000 shillings, ordered them to report to the investigating officer every morning, and gave the police seven days to finish. Investigators, she said, "ought to act with speed to reinstate the confidence of the public" in the police.
Sources
- DCI Kenya statement on X (thread), October 15, 2021, Directorate of Criminal Investigations, Kenya
- Serial child killer Masten Wanjala killed by a mob in Bungoma, Capital FM (Kenya)
- Cops on escape case granted bail as Masten Wanjala killed, The Star (Kenya)
- Escaped Kenyan child killer beaten to death by mob, Associated Press (via Irish Examiner)