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The woman who was said to have been the spouse of the suspected Kware serial killer and who was his first victim had not been seen by her family since 2021.

The family said they only learnt of her marriage to Collins Jumaisi after he claimed to have married her before killing her in June 2022.

The missing woman’s mother, Josephine Adisa, said her daughter Imelda Akinyi Karenya dropped out of school and left for their rural home in Moi’s Bridge, Uasin Gishu County, before she disappeared never to be seen again.

“She would occasionally chat with some of her friends and siblings on social media, but since mid-2022, all her accounts went off and they never heard from her,” Adisa told reporters at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations headquarters in Nairobi on Monday night.

Adisa, a domestic worker in Fedha estate in Nairobi, said her second-born daughter disappeared in 2021. “She dropped out of school and travelled to Nairobi without my knowledge,” she said.

At one time before she disappeared, Adisa said, her daughter received a phone call from someone who claimed to be her husband. Again in early 2022, Karenya received another call from a different man who claimed to be a pastor and was living with her daughter in Nairobi’s Sinai slums.

“He never called again and I never received any call from my daughter,” she added.

She recalls being in constant communication with her daughter for several years but that no family member had heard from her since early 2022.