Case study: The Sunday Times investigation of the murder of Agnes Wanjiru

In this essay I am going to conduct a case study of The Sunday Times multi-award-winning investigation of the murder of Kenyan sex worker Agnes Wanjiru, written in two parts titled, “I believe British soldiers killed my sister. Now I want the truth” and “I’ve killed her: the moment a British soldier ‘confessed’ to dumping a mother’s body into a septic tank”. The authors of this investigation are David Collins and Hannah Al-Othman. Collins, Deputy editor of The Sunday Times’s Insight team, is known for his previous work investigating the murder of Milly Dowler, for which he was named News Reporter of the Year at the Press Awards, the youngest person to have received that award. After receiving leaked documents related to the Agnes Wanjiru murder, he employed one of the paper’s news reporters, Al-Othman, a former political correspondent for Buzzfeed News, to work with him.

The focus of the investigation is an incident on March 2012 at a hotel bar in Nanyuki, Kenya, where heavily drunk and rampant British soldiers danced with local women. Sex worker Agnes Wanjiru was brutally beaten and left wounded in a septic tank just meters from the room where she had been seen with a soldier earlier that night. Her body was discovered two months later. The Sunday Times journalists’ objectives are to establish the details of Wanjiru’s murder and present strong evidence pointing to who might have killed her. They also uncover a culture of sexual exploitation within the regiment that created the context for the incident, and they explore the failures by Kenyan and British authorities in the original investigation, which concluded without a single individual being charged for the crime.

After obtaining leaked documents that listed the soldiers of a Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment stationed in Nanyuki on the night of the murder, Collins and Al-Othman began their investigation by knocking on doors and putting letters through letterboxes in towns across North West England.

The journalists approached the man who had long been rumoured to have murdered Wanjiru. They were given the individual’s name, who they called Soldier X, by another soldier and explored his social media before requesting an interview. Keeble (2007:80) points out that: “An uninformed reporter becomes the pawn in the hand of the source”. In a talk organised by The Centre for Investigative Journalism (2022), Al-Othman revealed that the MoD (Ministry of Defence) advised them against naming Soldier X in the story to avoid legal implications, given he had not been charged with a crime. When presented with rumours that he murdered Wanjiru, Soldier X said he was “not surprised”, claiming they were a result of bullying by peers that he had fallen out with at the time. The suspect might have seen the interview as an opportunity to attest his innocence.

A critical voice in the unveiling of Soldier X as the murderer was that of a former member of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment that the journalists named Soldier Y. When Collins and Al-Othman knocked on the source’s door, he was eager to talk, describing in detail how Soldier X admitted, “I’ve killed her”, in the hotel’s bar and brought him, along with some other soldiers, to the septic tank where the victim was. Soldier Y claimed that he "told everyone”, including soldiers and senior officers, but no action was taken. The investigation offers no verification of Soldier Y’s allegations and he himself is rumoured to have helped move the body (CIJ, 2022), which may have motivated him to project any blame from himself onto his former comrade. Waisbord (quoted by Wahl-Jorgensen and Hunt, 2012) says that information can come “from connivers, accomplices, and turncoats who give information on the condition they remain anonymous”.

One of Soldier Y’s claims, that "everybody” at the military base knew about Wanjiru’s murder, was supported by the accounts of an interview with a source identified as Soldier Z. He informed Collins and Al-Othman that senior officers had heard about the rumours and even described Soldier X as “the one who murdered that woman in Kenya”. The journalists gained access to a hotel log book listing the names of nine soldiers who stayed at the hotel that night. Confidential documents from 2012 seen by Collins and Al-Othman show that a request for DNA testing and questioning of these soldiers was sent by Mohammed Jerumani, chief inspector at Nanyuki police station, to British Royal Military Police officers. Soon after, Jerumani was transferred and two of the soldiers told the journalists they were never contacted. An MoD spokesperson later claimed to have never received the request. They identified further failings in the original investigation, such as a two-year delay to develop crime-scene photographs and documents being passed across departments.

The writers already faced a significant challenge in establishing the reliability of individual accounts of events that took place ten years before. “Allegations made by a plausible witness require the same evidential scrutiny as the denials by the criminal” (Burgh, Hugo, 2008:143). They obtained official documents, such as the 25-page report written by Judge Njeri Thuki, and carried out more interviews to corroborate initial reports. Some sources could not be contacted at all, such as lead detective Corporal Ramadhan Jabali, who had died. The night guard at the Lions Court Hotel, who told the authorities he had seen broken glass, blood and soldiers' belongings left in the room of the murder, had been fired from the hotel weeks after the body was found and could not be tracked. This source has since come forward to Kenyan newspaper Nation (Komu and Mwende, 2022), stating that he was never questioned as a witness by the police. Collins and Al-Othman could not obtain more than a mere press statement from British authorities, who refused to comment. To further support their point, the writers quote Kenyan authorities who claimed to be “concerned” about the standard of the original investigation and support an inquiry into the cover up from commanding officers, military police or the MoD. This evidence demonstrates disdain for the victim and a mishandling of the case in both Kenya and the UK.

A former infantryman, who was the first to talk to the journalists, provided a candid insight into the British soldiers’ relations with prostitutes. An unnamed sex worker confirmed she had many “quick British customers. The infantryman informed them of rumours circulating among soldiers about the murder of Wanjiru and identified the full names and Facebook profiles from the journalists’ list of initials and partial names. This open source provided them with "easily accessible data material” that allowed the investigation to move forward (Müller, N and Wiik, J, 2021). Al-Othman (CIJ, 2022) revealed that she was asked by the infantryman not to record the interview and had to rely on accurately writing down every crucial detail.

Since the soldiers who had been in Nanyuki in March 2021 had by then all returned to the UK, Collins and Al-Othman were able to continue interviewing key witnesses without the need to travel abroad. However, attempts to contact official Kenyan sources were blocked and their requests for information rejected. The journalists sent a Kenyan freelancer, who is not named in the investigation, to collect information and accounts from Agnes’s family and witnesses in the area. As, Lehrman and Wagner (2019: 160) have noticed, “cultural knowledge is best acquired through “immersion journalism” – that is, the practice in which journalists embed themselves deep within the communities they are writing about”. Accounts from Nanyuki residents and police reports confirmed the infantryman’s descriptions of soldiers’ violent behaviour and contacts with prostitutes.

Unlike the local and British authorities involved in Wanjiru’s murder, the authors strived to humanise the victim by interviewing her sister Rose and including photos of her daughter. The accounts from her family do do not provide clues about the circumstances of the murder or the person who did it, but they do emphasise how it was “overlooked” by the Kenyan police and British authorities who have failed to bring the case to a close.

Collins and Al-Othman were awarded The Private Eye Paul Foot Award for Investigative and Campaigning Journalism in 2022, won a special prize from the Orwell Foundation, and were ‘highly commended’ as Investigation of the Year National at the Society of Editors MFA Awards. In the month after the story was published, a protest was held in the UK pushing for justice against violence towards sex workers and, in July this year, a ban was introduced by the MoD on the British armed forces’ use of sex workers abroad.

Despite this success, the case has barely touched social media platforms and a Kenyan press article reported that the murderer is still “walking free” in June this year (Osen, G, 2022). A petition called “Shut down British Training Camp in Nanyuki” was started two weeks after the publishing of the article, shared with the hashtag #justiceforAgnesWanjiru on Twitter, but received a mere 269 signatures. This investigation went far in achieving this form of journalism’s recognised internal goods of “comprehensiveness, vividness, reporting on matters of public importance, truth-telling, originality, and impact. They contrast with external goods, which... include money, fame, social power, and prestige” (Aucoin, James L, 2006:98).

In conclusion, Collins and Al-Othman succeeded in clarifying the circumstances of Wanjiru’s murder and presented convincing witness accounts pointing to the culprit. They also unveiled strong evidence, using documents and interviews, of the negligence of the British and Kenyan authorities who conducted the initial investigation. This is an excellent example of investigative journalism because the journalists identified that the research they did had not been done before, leading to there being no prosecution for the murder.

Bibliography

Burgh, H (2008) Investigative journalism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge

Aucoin, J (2006) The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism. University of Missouri Press. DOI: 10.1080/08821127.2006.10678028

Lehrman, S, & Wagner, V (2019) Reporting Inequality: Tools and Methods for Covering Race and Ethnicity. New York: Taylor & Francis Group, Milton.

Keeble, R. and Wheeler, S. (2007) The journalistic imagination: literary journalists from Defoe to Capote and Carter. London: Routledge.

Wahl-Jorgensen, K and Hunt, J. (2012). Journalism, accountability and the possibilities for structural critique: A case study of coverage of whistleblowing. Sage Journals, 13(4), 399–416.

Müller, N and Wiik, J (2021) From Gatekeeper to Gate-opener: Open-Source Spaces in Investigative Journalism, Journalism Practice, DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2021.1919543

CIJ (2022) #CIJSummer: Investigating the British Army: The Murder of Agnes Wanjiru [YouTube]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxctLjJNXt8 (Accessed: 30 November 2022).

Osen, G (2022) UK soldier in Agnes Wanjiru murder still walking free – London press. The Star. Available at: https://www.the-star.co.ke/print/news-page-two/2022-06-20-uk-soldier-in-agnes-wanjiru-murder-still-walking-free-london-press/ (Accessed: 30 November 2022)

Komu, N and Mwende, M (2022) Agnes Wanjiru murder: Lion’s Court aided violations by British soldiers, ex-guard claims. Nation. Available at: https://nation.africa/kenya/news/agnes-wanjiru-murder-lion-s-court-aided-violations-by-british-soldiers-ex-guard-claims-3874898 (Accessed: 30 November 2022)