God saved me from the wrath of serial killer, says former girlfriend

Judith Atieno was the well-known girlfriend of suspected serial killer Harrison Okumu from Miguye Village, Kisumu County.

According to Ms Atieno, Mr Okumu would have married her were it not for her sister coming in between them. She links the misfortune-turned-fortune to Mr Okumu’s “habit of having so many girlfriends at the same time”.

Ms Atieno and Mr Okumu met at the Rockers Pub located next to his home, where he frequented. “I was working at the pub as a waitress and he would come alone and sit at a particular corner. No one served him apart from me,” she says.

One day he told the woman that he wanted to introduce her to his parents the next day. “I asked for time to think about his request. At the time, I had no suspicions about him because he was a very quiet man,” says Ms Atieno,23.

The next day, Ms Atieno had an answer to Mr Okumu’s request, and it was in the affirmative. “That was the first time I saw him smile, which was unusual of him, and I believed he had welcomed the idea of us being together.”

Ms Atieno, a mother of two, says after their affair picked steam, they started going out. “I would visit him at his house every evening, spent there and return to my house the following morning.”

During the night, she recalls, the host’s moods would change within seconds without any provocation. She says she tried as much as possible avoid doing anything that could provoke him and send him into fits of anger.

“I knew Boyi (Okumu's nickname) as someone who was short-tempered. I remember there was a day we had an exchange of words and he beat me up,” she recalls.

Apart from his fits of anger, Ms Atieno suspected nothing more but wondered over a woman’s handbag that the suspect hung on his bedroom wall and did not allow her to touch.

Curiosity got the better part of her one day. Mr Okumu had left his house to get food from his parents when he came back and found her having climbed on the bed to reach the handbag.

INSTANT BEATING

“I just wanted to find out what he kept in the handbag, which he guarded very much,” she says.

That earned her an instant beating. The suspect allegedly took a piece of wood and hit her on her back.

Even after the incident, their love affair still flourished but soon afterwards it was rocked from within when the suspect began dating the woman’s sister. “I could not share a man with my sister so I decided to leave him for her. But my sister soon left him because of his usual habit of having many girlfriends at the same time,” says Ms Atieno.

When the word spread that Mr Okumu could be a serial killer after human remains were discovered around his house, the heavily guarded handbag came back to her mind. “I wondered whether the owner of the handbag could have been one of his victims,” she said at the weekend.

Even then, she insists she would have married Mr Okumu had it not been for her sister coming in between them.

“Despite his short temper, he was loving and provided for me. He made me believe he was serious about our relationship and I began seeing him as a potential husband. I would walk to his house at midnight and he would welcome me.”

Ms Atieno now thinks the man was trying to lure her to her death and thanks God for saving her life. “Maybe I would have been one of his victims had we kept on with our relationship,” she says.