We have dads and deadbeat fathers, and then we have beasts. 75-year-old Simon Wakape from Naitiri, Bungoma County could easily fit into the latter description. That is if what he did to his daughter is anything to go by.
A Webuye court last week sentenced Wakape to life imprisonment after establishing that indeed he locked up his daughter, Judy for eight weeks, defiled and impregnated her in a case that has dragged on for seven years.
After getting pregnant, the then 17-year-old girl bitterly resisted sex, but her father kept forcing her to sleep with him, even as she begged for time to recover from the early weeks’ vagaries of teenage pregnancy. “He always beat me up, demanding for more sex,” she told the court.
It was at this point that Judy escaped to live at a neighbour’s home, where she laid bare the gory details of what her father had been subjecting her to for months.
She had only lived with her father for two months after he demanded she moves there from an uncle’s place in Kakamega County whose wife had taken her in together with her brother, following the death of their mother (Wakape’s wife) when they were much younger.
Claiming that Judy was now a big girl who could comfortably live with him without needing the attention of a mother figure and the promise of admitting her in a better school, Wakape managed to convince Gitari to hand over Judy’s custody to him.
Upon arriving in Naitiri, an elated Judy cooked and served her father dinner, oblivious of the horror that awaited her that night. When it was time to retire to bed her father insisted that they share a bed with her because “after all I am your father and nothing sinister can happen”.
Strange as the suggestion sounded, Judy gave in, consoling herself that after all Wakape was her father and there was no way he would have been planning to do something sinister to her at night.
She was, however, perturbed when her father began caressing and fondling her privates, even as she resisted and begged him to let her sleep in peace.
They woke up the following morning and Wakape went about with his business as if nothing had happened, leaving a traumatised Judy trying to warp her mind around what had become of her father.
“The following evening, he came back and took me to the bedroom, demanding more sex. I tried to resist, but he overpowered and beat me up before forcefully having his way with me.
Whenever I tried to move away to the sitting room he pulled me back to the bedroom for more sex,” testified Judy, who told the court that she was a virgin when she visited her father.
While all this was going on, Judy’s brother, Caleb, was away in a boarding school.
Before sneaking to the neighbour’s home, Judy’s pleas to move back to her uncles place bore no fruit.
“He (Wakape) kept locking me in the house after I demanded to return to Kakamega and was vomiting until when I sneaked out ... “ she told the court.
It was the neighbour who had taken her in who took up the matter and reported it to the authorities, even after Wakape, upon discovering the whereabouts of her daughter, stormed the neighbour’s home, demanding they produce her.
Wakape turned dramatic and even rushed to Kapchange police station where he reported the neighbour and his wife for “abduction”, a claim police realised was false.
The police summoned Judy who had moved back to Kakamega and she made the revelation she had told the village elder. This consequently led to the arrest and prosecution of Wakape over incest and sex-slave allegations.
Father's defence
In his defence, Wakape disowned Judy, claiming: “I came in contact with her in 1992 when she was six months old. I befriended her mother then while she worked at my hotel and bar premise in Kitale.
I regularly hosted them at my Kitale farm for parties and that is how Judy grew knowing me to be her father,” he testified in his defence against the incest charge.
This even as Wakape’s relatives testified that Judy’s mother got married to him (Wakape) and they had two children, Judy and a son.
Wakape further disowned the child born of the incest, saying: “The child belongs to one Levy Musungu of Kakamega town who was a boyfriend to Judy. Musungu and Judy’s uncle conspired to fix me.”
Defence challenged
This defence was, however, thwarted by a state witness and a DNA analyst, Anne Wangechi who in 2013 made a report, testifying: “I received (blood) samples from a police constable Joseph Mwanza for tests to determine paternity.
Based on my DNA findings on the blood samples of the accused (Wakape), the complainant (Judy) and the child, there are 99.9 percent chances that Simon Kituyi Wakape is the biological father of the child born by the complainant.”
Yet there was another twist on the blood samples when Wakape, having a case to answer, opted to present a defence witness who said blood samples taken from the three parties in the case never left Webuye hospital.
Lab technologist Hesbon Kutiri then of Webuye district hospital said: “The investigating officer (Joseph Mwanza) asked me to draw blood samples from the complainant (Judy), from the accused Simon Wakape and a child supposedly born of them. I stored the sample in a refrigerator and waited for him to come pick it but he never came. I waited for three months, one year then disposed them.”
Verdict
Chrispine Oruo the presiding Magistrate found the lab technologist’s evidence misleading. He was also not convinced by his body language.
“The said samples were evidence to be used in investigations and if they could have been destroyed there could have been records especially from the health institution and more so from the laboratory which Kutiri headed,” reads the nine-page judgment. “His evidence is meant to hoodwink the court.”
Before sentencing, Wakape was allowed to mitigate where he pleaded: “I am an elderly man of 75 years who was framed up on this charge. My age could not allow me to do such a thing. I ask for leniency.”
The court noted his mitigation and subsequently handed him a life sentence with fourteen-day window for appeal.
