Masten Wanjala went on a five-year killing spree which saw him drink the blood of some of his young victims. He later escaped from prison – before meeting his own gruesome end
A man known to the police as a “bloodthirsty vampire” confessed to killing at least 10 children before suffering his own brutal death.
Masten Wanjala lured his young victims by claiming he was a coach, before taking them to remote areas where he would brutally strangle them or hit them over the head with a blunt object.
The serial killer would sometimes drug the children, and even drank the blood of some victims, according to the BBC. Their remains were often dumped in thickets or submerged in sewer lines around Nairobi, police said.
Wanjala was still in his teens when he killed his first victim, a 12-year-old girl he abducted in Machakos County, east of Nairobi, Kenya in 2016, AFP reports.
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He was finally caught on July 14, 2021, in connection with the deaths of two boys ages 12 and 13.
Wanjala later confessed to killing at least 10 children, “sometimes through sucking blood from their veins before executing them,” the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) said at the time. He also showed police the location of some of his victims.
Then, three months after his arrest, on 13 October 2021, the 20-year-old escaped from the Jogoo Road police station, sparking a huge manhunt around Nairobi.
The man’s father told a local Kenya News channel at the time he was “surprised” his son had escaped. “I have not seen him,” Robert Wanjala said. “And I’m not interested in seeing him.”
On 15 October, Wanjala was spotted by schoolchildren in his hometown of Bungoma, about 250 miles from Nairobi.
“He comes from this area and so the children saw him and knew it was him, and that is when information spread around and locals started pursuing him,” area administrator Bonface Ndiema said, per AFP. “In the end he ran into a neighbour’s house, but he was flushed out and lynched.”
Wanjala was then strangled to death by an angry mob, a witness said. “The law of the jungles as applied by irate villages prevailed,” the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations wrote in a post on X after Wanjala’s death.
Grace Adhiambo, the mother of one of Wanjala’s teenage victims Brian Omondi, told the BBC that she desperately wanted to know why he killed her son.
“I would have loved to see him in court, so that I get to know why he did this — why he brutally killed our children and left us with pain,” she said.