Rage, tears after house girl kills her employer and baby

Elizabeth Achieng Ojwang and her three months old son, both allegedly killed by a house help at Shauri Yako estate in Muhoroni Kisumu county on June 7th 2018. (Collins Oduor, Standard

Elizabeth Achieng, 26, and her three-month-old son Leon Benedict Okoth lie lifeless side by side on a cold slab at the Star Hospital Mortuary in Kisumu. The infant’s head is twisted, facing his mother’s head.

A moment of madness and rage by a once trusted, knife wielding nanny called time on their lives.

In what reads like the script of a classic horror movie, Achieng, a counsellor, and her son are suspected to have been killed on Wednesday evening by their househelp who had been part of their lives in Kisumu County’s Muhoroni for barely a month.

The maid, whose only identity is a screen grab of her face from a birthday party in Kisumu about a month ago, is suspected to have strangled the infant before she wrestled her employer, strangled her as well, stabbed her multiple times, eventually burning part of her body with what investigators believe to be a hot electric iron box or acid.

Neighbours were drawn to a noisy commotion in the house that fateful night. The following day, when they went to find out the cause of the noise, they found only the maid, only known as Jacky, who is believed to be a Ugandan. She, seated calmly in the living room, assured them all was well.

“She told us that Achieng had taken the baby to hospital. Since we found her with the other baby, we did not suspect anything sinister,” said Mark Onyango, a neighbour.

A three-year-old niece to Achieng, who she also lived with, survived.

By midday, Achieng could not be found. The neighbours then went back to the house to find out if perhaps she had returned from hospital.

“We found the house help eating chips and mangoes together with the other baby. Achieng’s bedroom was locked from outside with a padlock. When she was done, she left as though she was going to the market and never came back,” he said.

At work, colleagues were concerned. When calls went unanswered they called her relatives and husband Evans Okoth. But they too could not reach her. It is at this time that the horror of what had transpired during that noisy night began to unravel.

A distraught Okoth, a clinical officer in Nyamasaria on the outskirts of Kisumu, narrated in tears how he desperately made calls which never went through to his wife.

He said when his first call to her on Wednesday could not go through, he assumed her phone had gone off or she just wanted rest for the night as she had just resumed work after a long maternity leave.

DESPERATE SEARCH

But on Thursday, the situation had not changed. Alarmed that something may have befallen his wife, he reached out to his friends in Muhoroni to help find out if she was okay. They even went to hospital in a desperate search.

At about 3pm, the call he dreaded the most came in. But the caller did not want to tell him on the phone what had happened.

Anxious and distraught, he asked a taxi driver to brave torrential rains that pounded Kisumu that evening to take him to Muhoroni.

On arriving, the signs were ominous. A huge crowd of curious onlookers had already milled around his house. In a daze, he walked in. The door to their bedroom was locked from outside. Inside, his wife and son lay lifeless.

“My wife was in a pool of blood on the floor of the bedroom and the infant boy on the bed,” he says. Police preliminary accounts of the incident were that the maid, who is on the run, is the prime suspect in the murder of the two.

“We suspect she killed the child and later attacked the woman and overpowered her before stabbing and strangling her,” said County Police Commander John Kamau. He said a rope was found wound several times around Achieng’s neck. Kamau said they are pursuing the suspect.

The suspect had disappeared hours earlier, walking out of the compound and past concerned neighbours before the bodies were discovered as if she was taking a shot trip to the market. She left with none of her belongings, leaving behind the gruesome results of her devious plan.

Dorcas Akoth, Achieng’s elder sister and mother of the baby Jacky spared, described the maid as “callously rude when she was not in the mood”. Akoth, who also lives with Achieng, was away on a work trip in Bondo.

Mr Okoth said the maid had been brought to her wife by a friend from their Bondo native home. Whoever brought her was from Alego and is believed to know her well.