The family of slain businesswoman Caroline Wanjiku Maina suspects that there could be more to her murder than the debt she owed to a shylock.
“The investigators are digging deep to establish what kind of deal it was that forced the killers to murder my sister. The money involved is rather too little to warrant such a heinous act,” her sister, Ms Pauline Muthoni Maina, told Nation yesterday.
Ms Wanjiku, a former employee at the Co-operative Bank in Embu, was kidnapped after someone lured her with the promise of helping her boost her Stima Sacco shares. She had withdrawn Sh350,000 from her bank account at the Co-operative Bank Stima Plaza branch on the afternoon of February 12.
The following afternoon, her concerned family reported her as missing at Muthangari Police Station. They also reported that her car, a silver Toyota Axio, had been traced to Gatina Primary School in Kawangware after which police found it and towed it to the station.
The officers at Muthangari then circulated a missing person’s signal and the matter was referred to Muthangari Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) officers who opened investigations. They immediately arrested a Mr Edwin Otieno Odiwuor,Mr Stevenson Oduor Ouma, Mr Samwel Okoth Adinda and Ms Mercy Gitiri Mongo, a former director of youth affairs at the Embu County government.
Also recovered at the time was the first suspect’s car, a black Toyota Crown, that was detained at Kabete Police Station. Investigations revealed that Ms Wanjiku was with this suspect in his car in Ngara on the day she went missing. The family also began a frantic search for her both on social media and in mortuaries in Nairobi. Unbeknown to the detectives and family, a partly decayed body had been found dumped in a bush in Paranai by herders and a boda boda rider, who informed the area chief.
A police report filed at the station indicated she may have been killed elsewhere and the body dumped at the scene. The body was then moved to the Kajiado County Referral Hospital mortuary for fingerprint taking and a postmortem exam. On Friday, detectives accompanied by two suspects — Edwin Otieno Odiwuor and Samuel Okoth Adinda — went to the place where the body was found.
At the scene, they recovered a blue surgical mask, which was identified by the two suspects as the one which had been worn by the victim on the fateful day.
Also recovered were a pair of handcuffs that were used to restrain the victim and a stamp belonging to her company.
At the Kajiado Police Station, the detectives received information that, on February 15, the body of an unknown female adult had been recovered at the same location about eight kilometres from the station and was lying in the mortuary in Kajiado.
The team then moved to the Kajiado County Referral Hospital, where the victim’s body was positively unidentified by her sister Rose Thongori Maina.
“The body had physical injuries on both wrists and private parts. Her eyes had been gouged out. She appeared to have been tortured before the murder,” the team observed. On Saturday, Wanjiku’s family transferred her body to Kenyatta University Funeral Home where a postmortem exam is scheduled to be performed on Tuesday ahead of her burial on Thursday in Kangari, Murang’a County.
After graduating with a degree in food science at Egerton University, Wanjiku, a Limuru Girl’s High School alumna, later got a job at the Co-operative Bank in Embu where she worked between 2010 and 2016 before she quit to venture into real estate.
“She was the most hard-working of all my sisters, jovial, trusting and would easily make friends. Sadly, she now leaves behind two children and a blossoming real estate company. As a family, we have accepted what happened since we cannot reverse it but we hope that justice gets to be served,” said Ms Muthoni.
