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Perhaps the Kenyan market town of Nanyuki’s greatest claim to fame was that it straddles the equator. But now it has become synonymous with something darker. It was here where Agnes Wanjiru was born and lived and where she was brutally killed.
Her family searched for her for months before her body was found stuffed into a septic tank at the same hotel where she had last been seen alive.
Agnes was raised by her mother, Lydiah Wanjiku Kimotho, who did what her family affectionately referred to as “side hustle jobs” such as farming while bringing up her five children.
The eldest child, Rose Wanyua Wanjiku, was followed by a brother, James Mwangi, then Cecilia Muthoni, and Francinsca Njoki. Agnes was the youngest.
Agnes lived in Nanyuki for all of her 21 years, and if she ever travelled it was only to visit her sister Cecilia, who lived several hours away.
She started her primary education at a school in Nanyuki, DEB primary, and later joined Gakawa secondary school. She enjoyed lessons and her favourite subject was literature. She also loved music; she would often be caught singing or dancing.
She enjoyed busying herself in the kitchen and spending her spare time with her extended family. As a sister, daughter and aunt, Agnes was dependable and kind, her family said, and she was also funny.
“She was always joking, smiling,” said her niece Esther Njoki. “We were always laughing because of her jokes.”
Growing up, Agnes would look after her younger nieces, spending time braiding their hair. Later, she turned her hobby into her career; she began training to be hairdresser in 2010. She finished her course in August 2011. Just a few months later, before she had had a chance to properly start out in her new career, she was dead.
While she completed her studies, Agnes was also heavily pregnant. Her daughter Stacey was born on 20 October that year. “Agnes’s feelings about becoming a mum was [that it was] the best feeling ever,” Esther Njoki said.
She loved her baby daughter but struggled to provide for her, and like many young women in Nanyuki, Agnes would make extra money from selling sex. Batuk, the British army training base nearby, provided a steady flow of custom.
Soldiers would come into Nanyuki to drink and socialise and many would pay for sex with local women, often several in one night, paying them as little as the equivalent of £1 a time.
Agnes would go to bars in the town to meet her friends, and dance. The night she disappeared, 31 March 2012, started like many others. She went to the Lion’s Court hotel, a favourite haunt of British soldiers, to meet her friends Florence Nyaguthii and Susan Nyambura.
They remembered her joining them at about 11pm and the three women dancing together. Agnes was drinking a beer that she told her friends had been bought for her by a British soldier.
Instead of returning home to her sister, her daughter and her niece as she had every other night, Agnes disappeared. The next morning, her friends and family had not heard from her. They went to the hotel where she had last been seen, and spent weeks searching for Agnes, until her body was discovered two months later.
Agnes’s death has had a lasting effect on her family. Stacey was five months old when she lost her mother and will not remember her but has been deeply affected after learning how she died.
“We have been having moments where she sees something about her mum and she breaks down,” Njoki said, “and that’s because of trauma.”
Njoki and her mother, Rose, have carried the heavy burden of Agnes’s death for 13 years. “You just keep on thinking about Agnes, about the case, and you just feel bad,” she said.
“It’s really traumatising, for sure, and saddening, and our hearts [are broken].”
