Four reasons why your wife plans to kill you

 Bamburi residents view the scene where a middle aged man was killed by his wife at Bamburi in Mombasa.

If you are a married man reading this, you should be happy. Reason? Your wife has, obviously, not killed you! However, don’t get too excited and start celebrating because chances are you are toast anyway, and the plan to kill you could be in the works.

There have been several reported cases of botched murders in which wives attempted to kill their husbands. For instance, two weeks ago, Monica Kalondu Wambua was arraigned in a Nairobi court charged with plotting to kill her husband Eric Njiiri Murigu.

Similar charges were proffered against Bilha Njoki at the Makadara law courts in Nairobi. The accused had been taken to court for paying Sh100,000 as down payment to would-be assassins. The target? Her husband Joseph Muraya Mwangi.

These are just a few cases, many more have been reported in the past. Like the most memorable one in 2013 in which Faith Wairimu, a mother of two, admitted to hiring hit men for Sh200,000 to murder her husband John Muthee.

Anger wives harbour against husbands

Wairimu’s malice, however, worked against her as it turned out that the men she hired were law-abiding policemen. Muthee, surprisingly, forgave her and asked the court to drop the charges. It was reported that the couple got back together. 

Experts believe this is just a tip of the iceberg.

“Save for these few botched ones that the media has highlighted, it is possible that there are many of such cases, which have gone unreported,” says Allan Kwoba, a city-based counselling-psychologist.

“How about the many successful ones in which husbands have been killed without wives who planned them being discovered?” he asks.

Kwoba says these recent events have brought to the fore the hatred that many Kenyan wives may be secretly harbouring against their husbands.

“In these cases we see wives fed up with their husbands for one reason or another. And these are just the extremes. How about the mild ones, which force spouses to live together, but rather grudgingly? Many spouses, especially women, much as they live together, they have a lot of hate for one another,” says Kwoba.

The expert says it has gotten to a point where crying till tear wells dry up is no longer the ideal choice for wives to deal with anger occasioned by husbands. It has emerged that more women want nothing short of a one-way ticket to hell for husbands they have fell out with.

Crazy Monday hit the streets of Nairobi and, if what some women said is anything to go by, then many husbands are dead men walking, because the countdown to their death could as well be on.

1. Hell women go through

Would Cherono, for instance, ever think of meting death on her husband? “I would,” she says, “especially if he was the type who would take me for granted.” Love, Cherono, says, is something akin to dynamite. Its explosion can result to good or bad.

“We women love deeply. We fall in love hook, line and sinker. We love deep and steady. When that one man that our hearts stops for hurts us, we hate them with passion. The only way to atone for such deep pain is to stop him from existing.”

According to her, women are fed up with men’s inadequacies. Cherono is not married, but has a three-year-old son. The result of a relationship that left her feeling high and dry. She confesses to wishing the father of her son unending pain and suffering, “or even death,” she says.

“He made me suffer. After making me pregnant he conned me of my money and went ahead to start a new relationship with a girl around the block,” she says. That is how all the love that once made her heart beat with desire turned into a bloodcurdling antipathy.

2. Outstanding dowry payment

One would ask: Couldn’t she simply pick herself up, dust off and forge ahead with life. Cherono says few men are able to stir longing in a woman. “There is a way a woman loves a man that is invaluable. If that man breaks her heart, he deserves to die,” she says.

Now, if you thought that Cherono is playing tomfoolery, then that is probably because you haven’t met Gladys. Gladys once found herself in a tiff regarding dowry. The man who had supposedly married her as a second wife is yet to flog a herd of cows into her parents’ homestead as he did for the first wife.

“He does not value me and I gave him a son; something he really wanted, which his first wife was unable to do,” she says. “It irritates me even more that he is planning to pay dowry for a new girl that he plans marry as a third wife. How am I supposed to put up with such disrespect?”

“I hate him for not making any effort,” she says. Gladys considers him her husband because they have been together for a while now and so much has happened, but if she could reverse time, she would never marry him again.

3. Stress-induced mental instability

Meanwhile, one in every four outpatient cases in Kenya is likely an underlying mental condition, says Julia Kagunda, a counselling-psychologist at Elim Trust.

According to Julia, the country is teeming with mental health cases attributable to psycho-social pressures. A patient only needs a slight nudge to go over the cliff and start entertaining wild ideas such as killing a spouse.

While Mwambori from Taita Taveta strongly believes wealth is at the core of every murder orchestrated by a jilted wife, Julia says she wouldn’t be quick to make such conclusions. Mwambori is adamant though. It is probably because he escaped death by a whisker. A death, he believes, was planned by his ex-wife.

“She had been asking me to include her name in the ownership of my property. She wanted land and the money I had in my accounts. She probably believed she would automatically own the wealth if I died. That is why she hired a man to run me over,” he says.

But according to Julia, sometimes women are oppressed for so long that they overreact in retaliation. “That is not a justification,” she says. “It is still wrong to plan another human beings’ death. It should be known though that such culmination is instigated by many contributing factors.”

Jealousy. Money. Cruelty. Mental instability. Pain. Anger. All are factors that individually – or in varied combinations – provoke wives to think of killing a husband, Julia says.

Before leaving the man she had been cohabiting with for seven years, Wanjiku’s patience had tapered off to a halt. The man, she says, seemed to be failing in every possible department. She says: “He stopped bothering and catering for me. What’s more, he began making overtures at another woman in the neighbourhood.”

Wanjiku does not describe what she wished for her man as ‘death’, but says she couldn’t stand the sight of him and needed him to cease existing in her life. But she salivated for his wealth; the money he seemed to lock tightly in his fist.

4. Financial mismanagement by men

Dr Lincoln Khasakhala, a clinical psychologist at CAPRE Kenya, says jealousy is a factor that cannot be ignored in love triangle murders. Psychiatry terms the condition where a spouse is constantly jealous of their partner as Othello Syndrome. Othello syndrome, derived from a Shakespearean character, who killed his wife Desdemona after suspecting infidelity, is rifer among men than women.

In Lincoln’s opinion, “dysfunction in the family and failing interpersonal relationships is contributing to a lot of intimate-partner violence.” He further cites financial mismanagement as another spark that sets everything ablaze as people who initially trusted and loved each other shove each other’s necks into the guillotine.

And if a wife is able to pull off a perfect crime, killing her husband without provoking even a whiff of suspicion, then she stands to ‘gain’ from it. Rose Mbanya, a family law specialist, says property that is co-owned in marriage belongs to the surviving spouse in the event of the demise of one of them.

“I am not aware of any law that asks for that wealth to be handed over to any other person but the spouse. Even if the murderous spouse was found guilty, according to the law, the property still belongs to them,” she says.