Police officers in Kenya. Photo / Getty Images
He is, if the police are to be believed, the most prolific serial killer in Kenya’s history, butchering and dismembering 42 women over two blood-soaked years, the most recent just last month.
For many Kenyans, it is a big “if”. So mistrusted are the police that when the suspect accused of the killings vanished from his cell, few seemed surprised.
On paper at least, the case against Collins Jumaisi Khalusha, a 33-year-old itinerant Sim-card peddler, looks like a textbook police operation.
Within 72 hours of the first of several corpses being found in a disused Nairobi quarry on July 12, the police had identified their man, arrested him and purportedly extracted a full confession.
At a triumphant press conference three days later, Mohamed Amin, who heads the directorate of criminal investigations, praised the brilliance of his team in hunting down a “vampire” who had “a weakness for beautiful women”.
Not everyone is convinced. Kenya’s police force has a reputation for corruption, brutality and ineptitude.
High-profile murders, including those of several British nationals, have remained unsolved for decades.
This kind of speedy efficiency in the Khalusha investigation therefore raised eyebrows.
It also spawned conspiracy theories. At the same time as female corpses were being pulled out of the quarry in Mukuru, a slum in Nairobi’s southeast, the Kenyan capital was reeling from violently suppressed anti-government demonstrations that had erupted the previous month.
Scores of protesters had been killed by the police. Others had disappeared.
There were unsubstantiated rumours that demonstrators had been massacred in Githurai, a suburb 10 miles north of Mukuru, and their bodies hidden by the police.
The suspect’s disappearance has only served to fuel such theories.
Having retracted his confession in court, which his lawyer said had been obtained under torture, Khalusha was being held at a police station in Gigiri, Nairobi’s diplomatic district.
He had been due to enter a plea in September.
But on Tuesday morning, warders discovered Khalusha had disappeared from a communal cell overnight along with 12 Eritreans being held on suspicion of immigration offences.
Four men arrested for being drunk and disorderly the previous night remained in the cell.
Eight officers at the police station were subsequently suspended, five of whom have been charged with helping Khalusha escape for financial gain.
Troubling questions surrounding his disappearance remain unanswered.
Why, for instance, was the man accused of being Kenya’s worst serial killer being held in the same cell as revellers picked up after a rowdy night out?
Khalusha gave every appearance of living a life of absolute penury, inhabiting a single-room 10-by-10-foot hovel in a squalid tenement block for which, according to neighbours, he paid £12 a month in rent.
“This guy is a poor boy from a poor family,” says Vincent Okwero, a fellow Mukuru resident who has known Khalusha for the past two years.
“He eked out a living selling Sim cards on the streets, for which he earned tiny commissions. Where would he have got the money to bribe the police and mastermind an escape like this?”
How, too, did Khalusha escape? Contradictory accounts from the police have emerged, with one saying he and his fellow fugitives cut through a mesh window and another that his cell door was simply unlocked.
It is unclear what light, if any, has been shed on the matter by Khalusha’s four drunk and disorderly cellmates.
Gigiri is also home to numerous diplomatic missions including the American embassy and regional headquarters of the United Nations.
Yet so far, no CCTV footage of 13 men creeping furtively through the night has emerged, while security guards stationed near the police station say they saw nothing untoward on the night in question.
Bungling is not an impossible answer to these questions.
Suspects have certainly escaped police custody before, among them Kevin Kangethe, who allegedly left the body of his murdered girlfriend in the boot of his car at Boston’s Logan Airport last year before fleeing to Kenya.
Kangethe disappeared from another police station while he was meeting his lawyer in January - the same lawyer, by coincidence, who is representing Khalusha.
Kangethe was later recaptured. A judge ordered his extradition to the United States this month.
It is not surprising, given the low confidence many Kenyans have in the police, that there are those who suspect something more sinister.
For them, it is entirely possible Khalusha was a dupe, framed by the police or persuaded to confess in the promise of monetary compensation, escape and a new identity.
Some fear that, having served his purpose, Khalusha may even be at risk of his life.
“The truth in Kenya can never come out,” said Dixon Babu, a Mukuru acquaintance of Khalusha.
“We are lied to about everything. We know he didn’t escape. He was abducted and that will probably be the last time he is heard of again.”
So pervasive is the mistrust in the police that it is virtually impossible to find anyone in the Kwa Njenga area of Mukuru where Khalusha lived who believes he is guilty.
Khalusha’s dwelling is at the end of a narrow corridor in a ramshackle building. Most of the flats in it are separated by partitions of aluminium sheeting.
It is a place, residents say, where every argument is heard, every secret known.
“In the ghetto, there is no such thing as privacy,” said Joel Tyson, a resident.
“We knew everything about his daily routine. There is no way he could have killed 42 women and we didn’t know.”
Neighbour Janae Aketch described Khalusha as a shy man who, over the two years he lived in the area, had certainly brought a number of women home.
“But the thing is, I always saw them leave again,” the hairdresser said.
“I never heard any screams. I never heard anything - and I can tell you, I would have heard.”
There is mystery too surrounding where the bodies of most of the 42 women Khalusha allegedly killed are.
Police say he dumped all his victims in the water-filled quarry which has long served as a rubbish dump.
Since most of the corpses recovered from the quarry had been cut into at least three parts and divided into nylon sacks, police say they do not know how many bodies they have collected so far - although they are unlikely to be more than nine.
“We have collected 17 body parts in total,” said Resila Onyango, a police spokesman.
“The bodies were dismembered and have decomposed at different levels of decomposition, making identification a challenge.”
Those who eke out a precarious living scavenging rubbish in the quarry and who helped recover the bodies say it is impossible they have not located all the corpses.
The quarry is a popular suicide spot, but corpses all return to the surface within days because of the churn of the water, according to Enoch Kimanzi, one of the scavengers.
“I can assure you we have searched everywhere,” he said. “There are no more bodies here.”
It is a view shared by the local area chief, Evans Munene, who also points out only one woman was registered as missing in the Mukuru area.
What then, has happened to the remaining corpses? Or did Khalusha, for reasons known to himself, confess to killing more people than he did?
Yet if there are troubling questions about the case, the suggestion that the police killed the victims seems equally implausible, given that all the victims - unlike most of the dead protesters - were women and none bore gunshot wounds.
It is more likely, activists and protest organisers suggest, that if there was a conspiracy, the police framed Khalusha because they were under government pressure to solve the case quickly in order not to fan protesters’ anger further.
During the recovery of the bodies, police had to fire into the air to ward off protesters around the quarry and a nearby police station.
“There are at least two other theories that need to be considered,” says Eric Ambuche, a community activist in Mukuru.
“The way the bodies were dismembered could point either to cult killings or to organ-harvesting gangs. Such things are not unknown in Nairobi slums and should be investigated.
“This is Kenya, though. I fear we will never learn the answer.”
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