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After 23 years, the mystery of Father John Kaiser’s death lingers on
Father John Kaiser.
Twenty-three years ago this week, American priest, Father John Kaiser, was found dead at the Morendat junction in Naivasha. His shotgun was lying beside him, while his pickup truck was about 10 meters away in a ditch. Either Fr Kaiser killed himself, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, or he was murdered, according to the Catholic Church leadership and faithful.
Fr Kaiser’s death was one case the FBI was accused of covering up. Ever since the murder of Foreign Affairs Minister Robert Ouko in February 1990 and the initial report of suicide by government pathologist Jackson Kaviti, the police and FBI’s conclusion that the priest committed suicide did not sway people’s opinion.
Shortly after Fr Kaiser’s body was found, US Ambassador Johnnie Carson told his staff that the death might “change the normal orbit of US-Kenya bilateral relations”. That is according to the book You Will See Fire, written by Christopher Goffard. Whether this led the FBI to pursue the “manic depression” lead has never been known.
According to the author, the US did not want to take on Moi after all – Kenya “remained the only country on the continent with which the United States had a military-access agreement”. More than that, Kenya (read Moi) had “been helpful in several other high-value terrorist renditions”. Unlike his predecessor, Smith Hempstone, who was the darling of the opposition, Ambassador Carson, according to Goffard, was “poles apart”. “Some in Kenya’s pro-democracy crowd considered Carson unduly cozy with Moi, but Carson believed that his approach gave him access to the top when he needed it,” Goffard wrote.
On August 24, a day after the priest was found dead, Carson went to Sheria House and met with Attorney-General Amos Wako. He was accompanied by the FBI’s legal attaché William Colbert. “Let the FBI help investigate,” Carson urged. Wako promised to get back after consulting (President Moi). And that evening, as Carson was flying out to Washington, a letter was quickly dispatched approving his request. According to Goffard, “(Corbett) chased the ambassador to the airport, onto the tarmac, and onto the plane to hand him the envelope. Carson was pleased. He reasoned that whatever the truth proved to be, the FBI’s involvement would allay suspicions of a cover-up”. He was wrong.
The spot where Father John Kaiser's body was found.
On August 27, the FBI team led by Thomas Graney arrived in Nairobi. Part of the problem was that the man at the center of the controversy, Julius Sunkuli, was also in charge of internal security. The police were under him and were accompanying the FBI. According to Goffard, “This presented an obvious problem. Who would risk telling the Americans anything on the presence of Kenyan cops, for decades an integral part of Moi’s apparatus of fear?” Thus, the two teams that were investigating had something to protect. The image of President Moi’s leadership and the geo-politics. The Americans did not want to ruffle the feathers.
Kaiser was an outspoken critic of President Moi and had lived in Kenya for 36 years. He had written a manuscript about his life in Kenya, published after his death with the title, If I Die. One statement in that book was revealing: “I have no intention of leaving this parish voluntarily or going underground. Since I have been threatened before by the Rift Valley Provincial Commissioner, I want all to know that if I disappear from the scene, because the bush is vast and hyenas many, I am not planning any accident, nor, God forbid, any self-destruction.”
Powerful Kanu politicians
In the Rift Valley, Kaiser was known for his crusading human rights work and had accused some powerful Kanu politicians of being responsible for the political violence in 1991-92 that was carried under the guise of tribal fighting. Kaiser was a thorn. Thus, when the FBI returned a verdict of suicide, many were shocked.
Top Catholic leaders, among them Giovanni Tonucci, the Pope’s appointed representative in Kenya, felt disappointed that the FBI did not uncover the truth. He said: “When the dead body of Fr Kaiser was found in that remote spot of Naivasha, the outrage was general… the strong intervention of the American Embassy brought the acceptance of the FBI’s intervention on the matter, and many of us had the vain hope that light would at last be made to shine on this dark episode. Sadly, ours was a manifestation of naivety: when the sentence was revealed, in the form of the famous – or infamous – FBI Report, we realised that Fr Kaiser had been murdered a second time, this time in his credibility.”
Tonucci did not hide his disappointment with the American investigators for painting Fr Kaiser as a “sick man, unbalanced, prone to depression, and, of course, with the tendency to commit suicide”. In the US, the Minnesota Senator, Paul Wellstone, who had been pushing for a thorough probe, said the FBI report was compiled in a climate of fear. “We express our shock and our outrage – our quite outrage – but we are determined to carry on.” What he did not know was that geopolitics could also have contributed to that.
The FBI report was handed to the State Department and Congress. If the US hoped the report would silence the Catholic church, they were wrong. The church and human rights organisations continued to put pressure on the Kenyan government to make a public inquiry. In 2003, after Kanu was out of power, Mwai Kibaki’s government allowed the public inquiry to proceed following sustained public pressure. A statement on April 2, 2003, “directed that the investigation file be placed before the Chief Magistrate with a view of holding a public inquest”. President Kibaki was a devout Catholic and had interacted with Fr Kaiser before. This inquest was personal.
After months of taking in new information, the inquest was revealing and set free two people: The first was Fr Kaiser, alleged to have committed suicide. The second was the man who had carried the burden of Kaiser’s death, Cabinet minister Julius Sunkuli. The minister had fallen out with Fr Kaiser after the latter sought to help two girls – Ann Suwayo and Florence Mpayei – who had allegedly been impregnated, or molested, by the minister. Mpayei, with the help of Fida, took the minister to court over rape allegations but withdrew the case after Kaiser’s death.
After the inquest, Chief Magistrate Maureen Odero said she found no reason why Sunkuli should target Kaiser: “If Sunkuli wanted to eliminate a person because of these allegations, then in the court’s view, he would have targeted the girls themselves or his named political detractors and not Fr Kaiser who was not the source of the allegations… It is probably true that Sunkuli may have been unhappy that Fr Kaiser supported these girls but then many other people offered support to the two girls, including the officials at Fida who filed cases on behalf of the girls. Why would he target Fr Kaiser whose role in the whole thing was peripheral?” the court posed.
Father John Kaiser.
The inquest concluded that Fr Kaiser was murdered and pointed fingers at some Kenya Wildlife rangers and a Catholic catechist. The court did not spare the FBI over its findings and dismissed its report as “replete with loopholes… On the whole, this court finds the FBI report to be seriously flawed, superficial and lopsided”.
The ruling surprised the US embassy, and in a cable back home, released by Wikileaks, the then US Ambassador Michael Ranneberger said the FBI legal attaché would not pursue the matter further, nor comment. “LEGAT (legal attache) believes that issuing a rebuttal would only bring more attention to the matter without changing minds. The Public Affairs Office also has no plans to issue a public statement regarding the ruling for the same reason.”
It was one of the rare occasions that the US kept silent on one of its citizens killed abroad and was opting to keep off the media. “As expected, the Court’s finding was well received by many in the Catholic and local communities… Despite the reduced amount of press, we do expect the case to continue to receive attention by groups in the US as well as in Kenya. However, it seems unlikely that the government will open a new investigation seven years after death,” wrote the ambassador. He was right.
Manic depression
In the book You Will See Fire, Kaiser’s lawyer, Mbuthi Gathenji, is emphatic that the priest was murdered. “To Gathenji, Kaiser’s death had the feel of a classic state-sanctioned hit, carried out by a cadre of professional assassins. It was the work of what he called ‘Murder, Inc’”, says Christopher Goffard, the author.
Kaiser was well known in the American circles in Nairobi. The FBI’s discovery of Fr Kaiser’s manic depression appears to have clouded their findings and they used that effectively. But there were no supporting records, according to Goffard. The autopsy found no traces of lithium – meaning that Fr Kaiser was not under medication. But the FBI and Kenyan investigators enlisted the services of Frank Njenga to perform a “psychological autopsy” on him. According to the author, Njenga concluded that Fr Kaiser “had been suffering from acute adjustment disorder, in addition to physical ailments, and that suicide was a possibility”.
When the family realised that the FBI focused on his mental state as the lead, the Kaiser family became “increasingly uncomfortable” and did not help the FBI pursue that angle. Thus, when the Chief Magistrate ruled that Kaiser was murdered, it settled part of the mystery and opened the other. Who wanted Fr Kaiser dead?
To Kaiser’s family, they had been vindicated by the magistrate, and the suicide tag had been removed. Colbert called the verdict “fanciful”. According to him, manic depression was the culprit and not an assassin. “He died of a disease. It’s not something that everyone is comfortable talking about.” Twenty-three years later, the jury is still out.
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