Jacinta Muthoni, 62, gained popularity and adoration from the locals over her 26 years of selling sugarcane in Murang’a town.
Since she gave up her attempt to become a Catholic nun in the early 1980s, her clients affectionately referred to her as the “nun.”
She wore a headscarf as a sign of her faith throughout, though, and never took it off.
When news came out on April 11 that she had been attacked, apparently gang raped, and murdered in her house, there was anger and disbelief.
“We are issuing a two-day ultimatum to police to either shoot dead or arrest the culprits, failing which we will gang up as Murang’a residents and look for them,” said Michael Njoroge, who chairs the Kiharu East Young Hustlers Association.
The police retrieved her body from her Muthigiriri village house.
“The victim had attack injuries on her face, neck, and arms. She appeared sexually assaulted,” reads the incident report by the scene of crime detectives.
According to the report, the rooms were looted and the seats were ripped, indicating that the attacker or attackers were seeking for something. Additionally, it stated that the woman appeared to have been subjected to severe torture, including being forced to drink salty water, “possibly in an effort to force her to disclose what was being sought in the ransacking.”
Stanley Githoo, her firstborn child, broke the news of his mother’s passing.
Mr. Githoo described how he grew concerned after she failed to open her sugarcane kiosk in Murang’a town as normal in his police statement.
“As a boda boda operator in the town, I would see my mother countless times as I rode on the town’s roads. I called her mobile number, and it was not going through,” he said.
Mr Githoo added that he called the bodaboda operators who were known to take her to shambas to buy sugarcane for sale, but all said they had not seen her.
“I called my younger sister and directed her to proceed home in the evening and see whether she was around,” he says.
Mr Githoo revealed that his mother had a strict routine of getting home before 6.30pm, preparing her meals up to 7.30pm and locking herself inside the house since she lived alone and in an isolated area.
“She had given spare keys to her two married daughters just in case they quarrelled with their husbands and needed to return to her care. She argued that there would be no need to get to their mother’s home and wait outside,” he said.
When her last-born daughter arrived to check on her as directed by Mr Githoo and found the door locked from the outside, she used the spare keys to access the house. “It hit me like a thunderbolt. All indications were that all was not well. Signs of violence were all over. The ransacked house and ugali and sukuma [wiki] dish not taken,” she wrote in her police statement.
She added that she went into the bedroom and the find of her mother sprawled, naked, and with visible injuries, which made her retreat to the outside and called her brother.
“It was around 8pm when I arrived, and after confirming what my hysterical sister had told me on the phone, I went to Kambirwa police station to report,” he said.
Officers who accompanied him back to the residence determined that it was a crime scene, so they called in investigators from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, and the body was taken to the mortuary of Murang’a Level Five Hospital at around 2am.
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