Chief Government Pathologist Johansen Oduor has expressed shock over the horrific killing of Rita Waeni, the 20-year-old university student whose mutilated remains were discovered at an apartment in Roysambu on Sunday last week.
Addressing journalists in Nairobi on Friday after conducting a post-mortem on Rita’s body, Dr Oduor said he had never encountered such a case during his long stint as a pathologist.
“This is the first time I have come across such an incident. I have never come across such in my forensic life,” said Dr Oduor.
He went on to state, “The killer looked like he knew what he was doing because when you look at the skin it looks like it was cut by a sharp object but when you look at the bone it was sawed off with what looked like a hacksaw.”
The Chief Government pathologist further revealed that Waeni’s killer tried to extract her fingernails in a bid to eliminate traces of his DNA from the victim’s body.
According to Oduor, such violent crimes are characterized by a struggle between the victim and perpetrator, leading to a likely exchange of biological material between them.
“Another thing that we noticed is that the killer tried to clip off her fingernails for reasons which I may not be able to know and as a scientist when we see this we think that the person was trying to hide evidence so that we are unable to get his DNA from his victim,” said the Chief Pathologist.
Oduor however noted that he was able to collect samples from some of Waeni’s fingernails that were not damaged by her killer, further adding that the samples have been sent for further forensics analysis.
“So we have taken samples for further analysis so that police can continue with investigations. We might get remnants of the perpetrator’s DNA,” said Oduor.
While noting that the deceased’s head remains missing, Dr Oduor said “there was also a desecration of the body whereby someone cut the femur clean off so that the legs were apart from the trunk. She also lost a lot of blood but this could have been after death.”