Kenya’s National Police announced Monday that they had apprehended a 33-year-old man they described as a “psychopathic serial killer with no respect for human life.” They stated the suspect, Collins Jumaisi Khalusha, admitted to murdering 42 women, including his wife, whom he identified as his first victim.
According to Mohammed Amin, chief of Kenya’s National Directorate of Criminal Investigations, Khalusha murdered several victims as recently as four days before being arrested, but his claimed killing spree began in 2022.
Amin delivered the statement during a news conference at DCI headquarters in Nairobi on Monday, and the agency publicized it on social media, along with a photo of Khalusha in jail. The police stated that they had been tracing Jumaisha’s cell phone signal.
“The suspect was tracked down by detectives after a mobile money transfer using Josephine Owino’s phone number,” Amin added, referring to one of the victims. Khalusha was arrested on Monday morning outside a bar where he had gone to watch Sunday’s European soccer championship final. According to investigators, Khalusha confessed to “having lured, killed, and disposed of 42 female bodies,” including those of his wife and Owino.
The suspect lived in a one-room rented house roughly 300 feet from the Kware dump, an abandoned quarry now filled with garbage where the bodies of some of the victims had already been discovered, according to authorities.
Khalusha was allegedly attempting to entice another victim, a woman identified only as Susan when he was apprehended.
“We have a second suspect who was caught with one of the victims’ handsets,” Amin continued, without revealing any other details about the second suspect’s identity or how they were believed to be linked to the murders.
At the news conference, police displayed some items they said Khalusha had in his possession, including 10 cell phones and 24 SIM cards, six men’s ID cards and two women’s ID cards, one pair of rubber gloves, 12 nylon sacks, ropes, gloves, and a machete, which they believe was used to dismember some of the victims.
Last week, officials began unearthing the mangled remains of women aged 18 to 30 put into sacks near the Kware dump, prompting villagers and authorities to worry about the possibility of a cult or a serial killer in the area.
As the bones of the killed ladies were discovered last week, the leader of a doomsday cult was put on trial in the country on terrorism charges for the deaths of more than 400 of his followers in an unconnected case that shook the nation.
Owino’s sister claimed she vanished on June 26 from Nairobi’s huge Mukuru slums and that her body was among those discovered mutilated at the dump.
The police said autopsies would be performed on the nine mangled bodies discovered so far at the Kware landfill, and that additional officers had been dispatched to continue scouring the area.