Local investigators need to up their game

By John Gerezani

As one Keriako Tobiko was being subjected to scathing questioning by the CIOC panel, l was hooked to a riveting drama unfolding in a courtroom miles away in Obamaland. As I watched this, I was ardently praying that our lazy "my mboyz shot a ndead ngangsta ndead" top cops would be watching how professional investigations should be done in a sane society.

“You don’t negotiate with an armed criminal” is a cliché that has been used over time to justify extra-judicial executions, but how come the crime figures have not gone down even as the human rights bodies shout themselves lame over the high body count turnover of suspected criminals being picked from thickets and the roadsides?

The Casey Anthony murder trial is a showcase of how loose ends in a case purely based on circumstantial evidence can be patiently tied up to profile a crime and the criminal behind it. Caylee, Casey’s three-year-old daughter had apparently gone missing in June 2008, and nobody could have suspected her beautiful single mum of having anything to do with the disappearance. It’s now emerging that the toi stood in Casey’s hard partying ways and had to go. 

The case is being built around evidence gleaned from Casey’s computer which has shown that she had Googled “chloroform”, “neck-breaking” and “drowning” a couple of times around the very time Caylee had gone missing.

Her web of deceit and pathological lies to her brother, the cops and friends is being used against her with devastating effect and one can surmise that the jury has already made up its mind half-way through the trial. 

Mehmet Ali Agca was a bored Turk who decided to shoot Pope John Paul II for sport.

Instead of being mowed down in a hail of bullets as Kenyan police would have been delighted in doing, the chap was nabbed, debriefed and tried in court.

Unmasking dark forces

The info he gave his interlocutors unmasked the dark forces behind the heinous plot and also formed the basis of up-grading Papal security.

Ronald Reagan also escaped death by a whisker after some loony called John Hinckley Jnr put him in the cross-hairs. Subsequent interrogation revealed that the sod had put the nation on tenterhooks just to impress an object of his infatuation, the actress Jodie Foster.

I have given these three examples which show how selfless and tireless investigators working in concert with robust prosecutorial teams can do wonders for the criminal justice system as it addresses the resolution of the crime menace as opposed to sporadic management practices which only gives a pyrrhic sense of deja vù.

The closest we have come locally is in the Lawrence Magondu murder case in which a former powerful Lands commish, his wifey, two in-laws and a couple of chaps faced the rap.

That the Court of Appeal recently upheld the superior court ruling about some suspects is testimony to the impeccable investigations done by a team led by the then SSP Narwenyi, CIP Kamau and the others. I have been poring over that voluminous file for the past week and l can say without rancour that the Narwenyi team deserves to sit at the apex of any training programme for our crime busters.

Without torture, but employing guile and simple mind games, these sleuths pried open an otherwise complex case in twelve hours and within 24hrs, all the suspects were in custody with statements to boot. Nothing comes better than this. Eric Kiraithe umesikia! 

LASTWORD: How did a suspect in the Magondu case get pregnant while behind bars three years after arrest? The riddle has not been solved ages after Justice Mbogholi ordered a probe into the matter. So before someone is docked for contempt of court, could the neti department give us the results of their probe?