Bank camera captures suspect in slain employer’s ATM transactions

A gardener whose employer’s body was found in a septic tank last year had been withdrawing money from the dead man’s bank account.

Ingrid Anna Vander Goes told the court how she discovered that John Ochieng had withdrawn Sh300,000 from Equity Bank in Mombasa and Kericho using her dead father’s ATM cards.

Jacobus Vander Goes’ body was retrieved from a septic tank after a five-month search. A postmortem report revealed the cause of death as “cremio cerebral damage” following severe blunt trauma.

“I asked the bank to get photos of the person who had been withdrawing money from my father’s account, and from the pictures, it was not my father but John, the gardener,” said Ms Goes.

Mr Ochieng, Joseph Ogolla and Stephen Okoth were charged, with others not before the court, with killing Mr Goes in Nyali Estate between January 4 and 6, 2016.

Police believe Goes, who was a Kenyan citizen and had lived in the country for over 25 years, was hacked to death and his body dumped in the tank behind his house on January 5, 2016.

His daughter Ingrid said she got concerned when the number she was calling her father through was no longer in service and when she realised that the last time he was on phone  was on January 15, 2016.

“I called John and he informed me that my father had been in Nairobi for a month. I was surprised because my father could not drive,” she told the court.

She said she arrived in Mombasa on January 12, 2016, and went straight to Nyali Police Station because she was afraid her father’s lifeless body might be lying in his house.

But she added that when she asked Ochieng for the date of her father’s trip to Nairobi, he did not answer. She said homicide detectives discovered her father’s remains stashed in a mattress and hidden in the pit near his residence.

“My husband and our family doctor were present when the body was retrieved.”

Asked by Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions Alexander Muteti why her father lived alone, she said he was a strong man and had always lived alone after he divorced his second wife, Agnes William.