My husband paid hitmen GH¢145,000 to kill me, but I talked them out of it

Last year, on November 16, Lucy Njeri Muhami, 48, got ready for her usual trip to Kenya by packing three suitcases and a small leather bag.

She was going to stop in Nairobi on her way from Canada, where she has lived for more than a decade, to Embu, where her husband would join her for the Christmas celebrations.

The next day, she said goodbye to her husband Nelson Ndereba Njeru at the Toronto airport, where he walked her to her flight to Amsterdam. From there, she would connect to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA).

I got a job offer for Sh100,000 (GH¢145,000), but it turned out to be a murder plot.

Hitmen kill a couple over a land dispute worth Sh200m.


"When we said goodbye, as usual, he gave me a hug," the athlete says.

The man has been an athlete for more than 20 years, and the woman for 10 years. Between them, they have won dozens of middle- and long-distance races. During their careers, they have won money that they have used to buy homes.

In 2002, the couple from Embu got married the old way. At the time, Njeri had been running for two years, and she was best at middle-distance races both at home and abroad.

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Her partner had been running for almost a decade, mostly in marathons at home and in other countries like Korea, Germany, and China.

Worldathletics.org says that Ndereba won the Beijing Marathon for the second time in 2000, taking home $20,000 in prize money.

As their relationship grew, Ndereba signed a letter on August 27, 2006, giving Njeri permission to make property deals on his behalf.

In the letter, which was attached to a copy of his national ID card, he called Njeri "my common-law partner, or wife, since February 2002."

When they left Kenya, they lived apart for a while. Njeri lived in Mexico and Ndereba lived in Canada. Since the two of them moved in together in Toronto in 2010, this was Njeri's first time traveling alone to their annual vacation home.

"Since I was traveling alone, I suggested that my brother Ben pick me up from JKIA, but he (Ndereba) offered to hire a taxi to pick me up from the airport and drive me around Nairobi for two days before taking me to our home in Embu," she says. She was excited to come back because she hadn't been here since 2019.

At 10pm on November 17, her plane landed at JKIA. She was let out of immigration at midnight, and she went outside to find her taxi driver.

"Thank goodness he was there waving a sign with my name on it... "The car was black and I think it was a Toyota van, which was strange because my husband told me he had rented a Prado," she says.

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As she got into the car, she saw that the driver was with a man she thought was his coworker. Then, they left the airport and drove to the Embassy hotel, where she had booked a room for her two-day stay in the city. After that, she was going to be driven to the couple's home in Dallas, Embu.

But she says that when they got to the airport's exit pay point, she saw something strange.

She says, "The driver didn't seem to know what to do," which surprised her.

She also noticed something strange: the driver of the car behind them in the line to pay came to the front and helped her driver pay the parking fee.

"I was happy to be surprised, so I asked him if he was usually so kind. "The last time I was there was in 2019, and I could see that a lot had changed, so I thought of asking them," she says.

From the airport's main entrance, they went to Mombasa road. She can remember that the car was moving slowly. She says that before long, the person she thought was the driver's coworker jumped into the back seat and started to choke her.

The bombshell was dropped at that point. She says that the man told her that her husband had paid them Sh1.5 million to kill her and put her body in the Karura forest.

"The instructions were so clear that they knew I had copies of the documents for my properties with me, which they also asked for as instructed. "I begged them to let me live, and they said they would if I paid them Sh2 million," she says.

She says that the man stopped strangling her at this point and played an audio recording of how the murder was supposedly planned. She says that the group listened to a recording of a conference call where they were told how to carry out the execution.

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"They said they would finish their job if I didn't work with them," she remembers.

The man then took her leather bag and told her to give him the Sh1.1 million in US dollars, her three phones, and copies of their property documents that she was carrying in it.

She talks about a later WhatsApp call in which she heard the hitmen and the man on the other end talking about how to kill her and get rid of her body.

In the recording, the hit men can be heard being told how to let the planners know when Njeri has landed and when her body has been dumped.

She took $10,000 (Sh1.25 million) out of her bag, gave it to the group, and begged them not to kill her.

She says that the driver stopped the car in the middle of nowhere and got out to talk to the people in the car that was following them.

She says she was able to tell that the car belonged to the man who had offered to pay her driver's parking fee and that she was dealing with a bigger group.

"They said something in the dark, and then they went back to the car. I begged them not to leave me on the road and pushed them to save my life, promising to pay them more than they had been paid, which I did the next morning," she says.

Njeri says she didn't know where they were, but the hit men agreed not to kill her if she paid them more money.

"They then drove to a hotel in Mwiki based on a sign I had seen in the dark. They booked two rooms and put me in one of them so they could keep an eye on me. I did what they asked, and the next morning I had breakfast with them before they drove me to Thika to set up a new M-Pesa line so I could withdraw money. I then went to Kenol, where I took Sh200,000 out of my Equity ATM and gave it to them in cash," she says.

A cash withdrawal slip seen by the Nation shows that she took out the Sh200,000 in cash at the Equity branch in Kenol at 10:57 a.m. on November 18, 2022. She says that they drove her to her home in Embu and then left because they thought she would give them more money.

"Thank goodness I didn't die," she says, explaining that she became friends with the people who wanted to kill her. She says she became friends with them to find out more about the plan to kill someone, and she would then meet them in different places. At some point, she took the two with her to Mombasa to clear some goods she had brought in. She also met the two suspects with her two brothers in Karatina.

"By that time, we had swapped phone numbers, and I knew they were from Embu. I also wanted the videos they had of the plan to kill, so I stayed in touch with them and was able to get them to testify for me," she says.

"I also went to Ndereba's mother's house to see if she knew anything. While I was there, he called her and asked her if she had heard anything about me. She told him she was with me."

Njeri says that she then asked to talk to him and asked if he was glad to hear her voice. "As his mother and sister looked on and wondered what was going on, he said he was happy."

Njeri says that her husband then called her and asked if the taxi he had booked for her had picked her up. She told him that she had to find another way to get home because the taxi wasn't at the airport.

After about a week, on November 28, Njeri went to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations headquarters and filed a report with the OB number DCI/C/GEN/COMP/6/11/2022 about the alleged plan to kill her.

When this reporter asked Ndereba on January 12 what he thought about the claim that he paid hit men to kill his wife, he said, "Talk to my lawyers." When asked to share the lawyers' contact information quickly, he asked, "Quick for whom?"

The Nation got in touch with Ndereba again on January 14 to remind him to give them the contact information for his lawyers. The WhatsApp message didn't get any replies. Yesterday, you didn't answer when you were reminded again. No one picked up the phone when it was called. We made sure that Nelson Njeru is the one who owns the phone number.

Njeri has spent most of her life as a professional athlete. She ran in races in different countries, like the Ottawa Marathon and the Waterfront Marathon in Canada in 2010.

After the Waterfront marathon, Njeri decided to move to Canada to be with her husband.

Part of her stay and the process of becoming a citizen were paid for by her husband.

The couple, who were both American and Kenyan, didn't have any children, and Njeri suggested in 2019 that they split their property in half so that each family can benefit from their wealth after they die.

"I asked him again after the pandemic, and I even asked if we could adopt his son from a previous marriage and bring him to live with us in Canada, and he said yes. Before the end of the year, the boy was supposed to go on a trip," she says. Njeri says she has filed for a divorce and gotten a restraining order against Ndereba so that the two hit men can testify in her favor.

Michael Sang, head of the Serious Crimes Unit, told the Nation, "The investigation is underway, and we will talk to everyone, including the suspects, before coming to a conclusion about what happened." "Right now, there are too many holes in the case that need to be filled," he said.

The police are also looking at Njeri's phone records to find out who she talked to before, during, and after the crime.

Also, they want to know how she could have been put in a different room at the hotel in Mwiki, waited until morning, and then joined her captors for breakfast without anyone noticing. They also want to find out if the accusations are related to the divorce case.

Credit: Nation Africa /Photo credit: Francis Nderitu | Nation Media Group