Francis Ng'ang'a

 VICTIMS: 3

All the information I have comes from the Online edition of The Kenya Daily Nation newspaper, so while being rather brief, it is still pretty interesting, if only for the fact that the guy was Kenyan.

As all this information is taken from newspaper reports we know we little about Francis Ng'ang'a. But what we do know that he lived at Lower Matasia, Ngong, he was 31-years old and he was a matatu driver. He was also separated from his wife, Rhoda Gathoni, 29. She had custody of his three daughters, Carol Nasirian (10), Wairimu (?) and Naisenya (7). And from the following descriptions I think it may be a fair assumption that Francis wasn’t too happy about that.

So, where did it all go wrong for Francis?

On Saturday, November 20, 1999, Francis Ng'ang'a, picked up his children from their mother's custody in Kayole, Nairobi. While picking up the kids he also tried to persuade his wife to return to his house with him, but she wasn’t interested. Francis got a little violent when she turned him down but luckily for her Ngige Mutua, her father, was on hand to dish out a little punishment on Francis. I guess it just wasn’t his day.

Francis returned home with his daughters, which is where his mother takes up the story:

“When he got home, at 5pm, he informed me that he had finally brought his children back. He said he was no longer interested in his wife and would never want to see her at their matrimonial home.”

“When I asked him why he looked unhappy, he said his father-in-law had beaten him up. He then went back to his house as the children went out to play with the rest,” the old woman explained.

Later in the evening, she invited her son for dinner with the children but he declined, saying they had already fed on food his mother had prepared.

From here on we don’t really know exactly what happened but sometime during the night Francis set about solving his problems. He had the three girls a drink each. This drink contained (or was pure) Cooper Triatix, a chemical that seemed to do the job fairly well as the girls died pretty quickly.

Once they were dead, Francis put all three bodies in the sitting room. They were dressed in neat tunics and bare-feet, and were placed on their stomachs on one sofa seat. Bizarrely he arranged them in order of their age. He then covered them with a blanket.

Francis then hung himself from the roof, right beside the three corpses, with a black cable. Maybe his own suicide had something to do with the clothes he was wearing (a green denim jeans suit, a purple T-shirt, a woollen hat and brown socks. I mean, who would be seen alive in this ensemble?)

The corpses were found at 9am on Sunday morning by relatives who broke into the house when Francis and the kids didn’t show up at his mums for breakfast.

And as an amusing postscript, the mother of the children didn't find out about their deaths until a few days later because the girls younger brother (it was never said that he was her son also, so I'm assuming he was a step son) was sent to relay the bad news to her. Not surprisingly he never made it. He was later "found to be too shocked and confused to carry out the mission”.
 

MY OPINION

I know that many of you will find this story pretty boring, but I personally am pretty fascinated by it. I’ve never actually heard of a Kenyan family massacre of this sort before, and for that reason alone it got me interested. The other point that really fascinates me is how he arranged the corpses, if it wasn’t an accident it’s pretty weird to lay them out in order of age. All in all, while not the most striking of cases, it seems to have captured my attention in a much bigger way than the US press. What a shame they weren’t white, maybe then we would know a lot more about these people. Oh, and what about sending the surviving brother to relay the news. That’s pretty hard on the poor kid isn’t it?