Ken Kimathi alias Sultan, the prime suspect in the murder of Seth Nyakio (inset).
Dressed in a yellow hoodie boldly inscribed “Girl Boss”—a slang phrase celebrating female independence—Ken Kimathi sat quietly at the Kiambu Law Courts on Wednesday, his expression betraying little of the storm surrounding him.
The 27-year-old is facing murder charges and could spend up to 40 years in prison if convicted over the killing of Seth Nyakio, a budding businesswoman and the only daughter of Kirinyaga County nominated ward representative Lucy Njeri.
Ms Nyakio was found murdered on October 14, 2024, inside an apartment in Biafra Estate, Thika town, Kiambu County.
Murdered student Seth Nyakio, a victim of femicide.
The house belonged to her friend Phoebe Mwende, who told detectives from Thika Police Station that she had left the deceased alone in the apartment, only to return later and find her lifeless body.
Investigators say Kimathi was entangled in a fragile and turbulent relationship with Ms Mwende. According to family members and detectives familiar with the early stages of the investigation, Kimathi repeatedly accused Ms Nyakio of pressuring Mwende to end their relationship.
These details emerged when Kimathi appeared before the Kiambu Law Courts Resident Magistrate Nellian Ng’ang’a for a mention.
After the killing, Kimathi vanished.
For more than a year, he lived on the run—until December 13 last year, when detectives from the Homicide Unit of the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI), working alongside the Crime Research and Intelligence Bureau (CRIB), finally caught up with him.
Kimathi had gone to great lengths to remain invisible.
The suspect in Seth Nyakio's murder.
The court heard he avoided owning a mobile phone or registering a SIM card, keenly aware of phone triangulation—a tracking technique that estimates a phone’s location by measuring its signal strength and timing across multiple cell towers.
But his caution was not foolproof.
Detectives combing through the mobile phones of Kimathi’s parents noticed a curious pattern: frequent calls from two foreign numbers registered in Uganda and Burundi.
Though Kimathi avoided direct contact, he regularly used friends’ phones to call home and assure his parents that he was safe.
These calls stopped abruptly after detectives and the victim’s family circulated his photos on social media, appealing to the public for help in tracking him down.
By December 10 last year, Kimathi had resurfaced in Busia, where he was working as an attendant in a cereal shop and frequently crossing into Uganda.
It was there that his long evasion unraveled.
Following a confrontation with a friend, Kimathi was arrested and briefly released over an assault.
During the heated exchange, he allegedly issued a chilling threat—boasting that he would kill his rival the same way he had killed the daughter of a Kenyan politician before disappearing into hiding.
That moment sealed his fate.
The man, fearing for his life, secretly took a photo of Kimathi and searched for it online. He was stunned to discover that the person threatening him was a man wanted for murder.
According to detectives and family members who spoke to Daily Nation, the informant verified the information and traced the social media accounts of the deceased’s mother. After failed attempts to reach Kirinyaga County landline offices, he reached out directly to Ms Njeri.
She immediately reported the tip to detectives.
A covert operation was swiftly mounted at the Kenya–Uganda border. Kimathi was arrested, driven to Nairobi, and later arraigned in court.
Prosecutors successfully applied to have him detained for 21 days to allow investigators to complete their inquiries.
When Kimathi appeared in court on Wednesday the prosecution sought to extend his detention until January 19, citing the need for a medical assessment to determine his fitness to stand trial and to secure a government advocate, as he remains unrepresented.
The court granted the request.
The victim’s mother Lucy Njeri broke down, clutching a framed portrait of her daughter as she cried uncontrollably, pleading for swift justice.
“I am broken. Nyakio was my only daughter,” she sobbed. “Why did you rape and kill my daughter?”
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A postmortem report revealed that Ms Nyakio died from manual strangulation. Her nose and mouth had been covered with a piece of fabric, cutting off her air supply until she suffocated.
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