Mr Ezekiel Nakola before a Kigumo court on March 24, 2017.
After waiting for seven years, the family of Bishop Pius Muiru of the Maximum Miracle Centre finally got justice for the murder of their matriarch, Grace Wangari.
Mr Ezekiel Nakola, 44, was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for murder by the Murang'a High Court on October 25, 2024.
Among those who testified against him was his new girlfriend who had left her husband to move in with Mr Nakola. The convict had given her items he had stolen from the deceased's home.
In 2007, Bishop Muiru contested the presidency and received 9,667 votes in a disputed election won by Mwai Kibaki. A decade later, the bishop's family was plunged into mourning when their matriarch, then 75, was found murdered and buried in a shallow grave next to a cow carcass covered in dung.
In the ensuing investigation, Mr Nakola was arrested along with Mr Muiru's sister-in-law, Monicah Muthoni, then aged 40, as prime suspects.
They were charged with murdering Ms Wangari on March 20, 2017, at her home in Karega sub-location, Kigumo Constituency, Murang'a County.
Mr Nakola had claimed to the police that Ms Muthoni had recruited him to kill Ms Wangari for a fee of Sh10,000.
Bishop Muiru's wife, Lucy, identified in the case file as prosecution witness 10, further incriminated Ms Muthoni by testifying that "she had a strained relationship with our mother-in-law."
But Ms Muthoni was eventually acquitted by the court on June 9, 2022, for lack of evidence. Justice Kanyi Kimondo found Mr Nakola guilty of murder on July 30, 2024 in Criminal Case 15 of 2017.
The court had heard how the convict was hired as a farm hand for 10 years before he turned against his employer and murdered her.
On Friday, Justice Kimondo handed down the sentence, stating that on the fateful day, the convict strangled the victim and buried her behind the cowshed where the carcass of a cow had been buried a few days earlier.
Justice Kimondo ruled that the prosecution had proved the case beyond reasonable doubt, despite the absence of witnesses and a confession from the suspect.
During the seven-year trial, the prosecution called 12 witnesses, the first of whom was Mr Muiru's brother, Mr Mathew Waweru.
He testified that he lived a few metres from his mother's house and on March 20, 2017 at 6.30pm, he found her house locked from the outside. When he checked later at 8pm, the lights were on.
"The house was still locked the following day, [this] heightened my suspicions. Calls to my mother's cell phone went unanswered. When I enquired from Nakola about the strange situation, he said that the deceased left the previous day to an undisclosed mission," he testified.
It was on March 22, 2017 that Mr Waweru started asking around the nearby Kirere and Muthithi markets if anyone had seen his mother.
Together with another brother, identified in the case file as Felix Mwangi (Muthoni's husband), they broke into their mother's house after failing to gather any clues as to her whereabouts.
Failing to get her inside the house, they filed a missing person's report at Kigumo Police Station and began searching hospitals and mortuaries, but did not find her.
Since he was the last person seen with her, Mr Nakola was questioned by police. Officers later searched his house and recovered a phone, which Bishop Muiru's family identified as that of their missing matriarch.
Also recovered from his girlfriend's house were a TV decoder, a TV remote control and two gas cylinders belonging to the missing woman. The girlfriend, identified as Ms Elizabeth Nyambura, testified as prosecution witness number nine and said that her boyfriend Mr Nakola had given her the items.
The investigating officer in the case testified that after his arrest, the suspect was interrogated until midnight when he confessed to killing Ms Wangari and burying her remains.
The body was exhumed on March 26, 2017, from the shallow grave measuring approximately three feet by five feet, and taken to Lee Funeral Home in Nairobi.
A post-mortem report by Dr Johansen Oduor concluded that the deceased died of "asphyxia due to ligature strangulation".
Ms Felista Wambui Irungu, a prosecution witness who ran an M-Pesa shop at Karega shopping centre, testified that on March 21, 2017, Mr Nakola withdrew Sh1,050 from the missing woman's mobile wallet at her shop.
"Mr Nakola was well known to me as a customer since Bishop Muiru's mother would occasionally send him to my shop to withdraw money from her mobile wallet hence I read no oddity in this particular transaction," Ms Irungu testified.
When the accused was put on the defence, he said he was innocent.
"I never showed the police where the deceased was buried... I showed them where I suspected she might have been," he said.
Under cross-examination, the suspect said the incriminating evidence against him was recovered from Bishop Muiru's house and not from his (accused) girlfriend's rented house as claimed.
In his judgment, Judge Kimondo ruled: "I find that there are a number of incriminating pieces of evidence linking the accused to the murder. The first piece is that on the day the deceased went missing, the accused was living with her in the compound. He also withdrew Sh1,050 from the deceased's mobile phone purse at a time when it was proved that she had since been murdered and buried".
The accused had also received airtime worth Sh95 from the deceased's mobile phone when the woman was long dead.
"The totality of the circumstantial evidence is thus overwhelming. When I juxtapose it against the testimony of the accused, I readily find that the defence is a sham and completely evasive. The chain is complete and the accused is the only one who strangled the deceased and buried her remains behind the cowshed," Justice Kimondo ruled.
He added that the accused had tried to cover up the crime while continuing to steal from the deceased's mobile phone wallet and taking various household items to his girlfriend’s house.
"For all those reasons, I find that the conduct of the accused is inconsistent with his plea of innocence. From the set of circumstances that I have highlighted, the accused had malice aforethought as defined in section 206 of the Penal Code. The deceased died as a direct consequence of his conduct," he said.
Justice Kimondo added that "the entire corpus of circumstantial evidence points irresistibly and exclusively to the guilt of the accused. I find no defence or hypothesis that exonerates him”.
