Court of Appeal sitting in Kiambu has described murder of David Macharia by his relatives as a cold-hearted and chilling whose penalty must be death. The three judge-bench heard Macharia’s wife Anne Waithera and her five relatives hatched the plot to eliminate the businessman in June, 2004, for marrying a second wife.
Waithera’s sister Ruth Wanjiru Maina her son Joseph Macharia Maina, David Njoroge Kimotho, Joseph Kinyuru Kirumb and Eliud Kimani Mwai ambushed Macharia while milking his cow and slashed him around the neck. The court was also told upon killing him, they then wrapped the body in blankets, bundled body into two sacks before tying boulders around it and threw it at a waterfall inside a forest.
“When marriage and family become a mortal peril for spouses, and children kill their parents without blinking, something of our humanity is lost and the law must be deployed and enforced to express our collective horror, revulsion and outrage,” observed the judges. The judges noted it was a case of a dark mix of jealousy and pure hatred compounded to turn the marital space into a deadly trap and to convert filial fealty into a grossly cruel patricide.