Sixteen years after a Kenyan woman and her two daughters were brutally murdered in their home in Atlanta, Georgia on August 1, 2007, local detectives are still groping in the dark, trying to piece together exactly what happenedThe attack, which killed Jane Kuria, 47, and her daughters Isabella Kuria, 19, and Annabel Kuria, 16, also left her son Jeremy Kuria, 7, and his (Jeremy’s) cousin Peter Thande, 10, seriously injured and unconscious.
On that fateful Wednesday, the bodies of the single mother and her daughters were discovered by her sister-in-law, Pauline Thande, and niece, Diana Maina, who went to check on them after Jane failed to answer their calls
What they found were four separate crime scenes, all horrific and gruesome.
Some 16 years later, the cold case has been taken up by Investigation Discovery, an American pay-TV network specialising in true crime documentaries, to search for missing clues to solve the cases and give the family some closure.
In the documentary, now-retired Cobb County Cold Case Unit Detective John Dawes describes the crime scene as “one of the most vicious I had ever seen, it was completely shocking evil that a person would do that”.
When Diana and Pauline arrived at the home, one decided to check the front door and the other the back.
“The first thing I saw was blood. There was blood on the floor and the walls,” Diana says in the documentary.
Decided to call 911
She is referring to the first thing she saw after opening the door to her slain aunt’s house. The two decided to call 911.
According to local news outlets, Jane was found in the kitchen, Isabella near the front door entrance and Annabel in her bedroom.
Jeremy was found unconscious, laying in his bed and Peter Thande, who is Pauline Thande’s son, was found unconscious next to a couch in the living room. Jeremy and Peter survived the ordeal.
No murder weapon or other usable DNA was left behind, but an acquaintance of Jane emerged as a “person of interest”. The boys eventually recovered but have no memory of their assault.
For nearly 16 years now, the police have not made any arrests even as the family calls for action by the authorities.
Homicide investigators in the past indicated they had gone over reams of evidence in search of a motive, but said they have no idea who committed the crime and why.
The late Jane and her children moved to the US in 2001 from Kenya after the death of her husband. In 2002, she moved to the suburb of Powder Springs.
Until she met her death, she was working at a local hospital and nursing home. Isabella was a college student while Annabel was in high school.
According to GAFollowers a local news site, it was pointed out by Jane’s immigration lawyer that she and her daughters had applied for asylum because of their opposition to female genital mutilation in Kenya.
Their lives were in danger
Jane said that their lives were in danger if they returned to their native country, Kenya. The asylum was denied and Jane was in the process of appealing when she and her two daughters were murdered.
The two survivors of the massacre have moved on with their lives, but cannot help but look back at the crime that changed everything, knowing that their family’s killer is still out there somewhere.
It has taken Jeremy, now 18, time to heal—both physically and mentally, after losing his entire family to the unknown assailant.
