‘Naivasha Vampire’ is free in spite of public confession to crimes

Geoffrey Njoroge Matheri’s eyes and his story are a cut from the 2008 horror movie Midnight Meat Train, in which night-time commuters are ambushed by a subway butcher until discovered by a photographer.

Despite a public admission of eerie escapades that earned him the nickname “Naivasha Vampire” back in 2008, he was acquitted because of prosecutors' failure to prove that he murdered the people he claimed to have killed.

“The prosecution’s case lacked cogency and failed to prove the charge of murder as required by the standard of law,” Justice Maureen Odero ruled on Friday.

“The accused is to be set at liberty forthwith unless he is otherwise lawfully held.”

Things moved quite fast for Matheri, better known as Fongo. After his release, he went to his childhood village in Kinangop, where he was beaten up by a mob.

He remains unwanted because the public knows his past stinks.

At Naivasha Sub-County Referral Hospital, where he was admitted with a broken leg, he tried to evade news cameras.

But he could not run: His right leg was plastered, his cracked head stitched, his lips dry and his eyes bloodshot.

He was without emotion. Then he wore a plastic smile as he struggled on wooden crutches out of the hospital gates, a crowd milling around to catch a glimpse of a man who is feared to the bone.

When he was arrested, Matheri told detectives that he abducted, raped and sucked blood from his victims.

In 2011, he was sentenced to four years in prison for kidnapping, but the court found no evidence of rape.

SUPER POWERS

And on Wednesday, five days after his acquittal of murder charges, he repeated the claims. He told the Nation after half an hour of hesitation: “I don’t know how I did all those things."

“I had supernatural powers. I could pull them; some were women, others men. I killed some but I had sympathy for others; I let them go, maybe a thousand of them.”

He repeated his claim that a pastor gave him a ring to wear on his left index finger, which he would use to pull victims.

“He wanted blood, so he told me the ring had powers to attract those I would get blood from,” Matheri claimed.

“In turn, he would pay me Sh200,000 for every two pints of blood I delivered.”

On Wednesday, he did not have the ring, claiming to have handed it back to the pastor through his son.

But Matheri was not always a vampire. Interviews with his former friends and relatives reveal he was a well-behaved child but with a troubled parentage.

According to his uncle, Peter Matheri, the confessed bloodsucker was born in Kiambu 31 years ago, the second son in a family of five — three boys and two girls.

They were staunch Anglicans. When his parents separated, his mother moved out with him. She died in 1999 in Nairobi after leaving the boy with his grandmother.

“He was a good boy who respected the elders, even as he grew up in poverty. One day, he ran away from home when he was in Standard Two,” his uncle, who saw him grow up in Kinangop, told the Nation. “His coming to Naivasha was not expected.

“We were poor. And his grandmother struggled to raise his four other siblings and five cousins under her care. But the boy fled after his mother died and dropped out of school.”

RECRUITMENT
Matheri joined the teeming numbers of street children who sniffed glue, begged for food and slept in culverts. 

“The pastor showed up one day and asked us if we would want to make some money,” recalled Matheri, saying they were five.

“The man gave us food and clothes but my friends later went back to the streets.”

It is then that he got inducted into the "hall of horror". A man who used to hawk household items in the streets of Naivasha, but who is now a leader of a church, said it was difficult to know if he was a vampire until he made a public confession.

“I used to see him, sometimes in a gang just roaming the streets,” recalled Pastor Daniel Mugo.

One day he saw Matheri walking with a woman in the dark. They were chatting but then had a struggle, after which he walked away.

“I thought I had saved the woman from a mugging because Matheri saw me and left,” said Pastor Mugo. “It was only after he said he had intended to ‘finish’ her that I began noticing something strange.”