Nairobi — Former Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) officer Major Peter Mugure has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the 2019 murders of his estranged wife and their two young children, ending nearly seven years of criminal proceedings in one of Kenya's most shocking family murder cases.
Delivering the sentence on Tuesday, High Court Judge Martin Muya described the killings as "barbaric" and ruled that the gravity and calculated nature of the crime warranted life imprisonment.
"I find that the acts committed were barbaric. Bearing in mind that the accused has been in custody, I sentence him to life imprisonment," Justice Muya ruled.
The court noted that Mugure had spent several years in remand custody awaiting the conclusion of his trial but found that the brutality of the offences far outweighed any mitigating factors presented by the defence.
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Mugure, who was convicted of murdering his estranged wife, Joyce Syombua, 31, and their two children aged ten and five, told the court he disagreed with the verdict. The judge informed him of his constitutional right to appeal.
The case dates back to October 25, 2019, when Syombua and the two children travelled from Nairobi to visit Mugure at the Laikipia Air Base in Nanyuki before mysteriously disappearing.
Three weeks later, detectives from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) recovered their bodies from a shallow grave at a cemetery in Thingithu, near the military installation.
Investigators said the victims' bodies had been stacked on top of one another before being hastily buried.
Mugure had been arrested on November 15, 2019, a day before the bodies were discovered.
A breakthrough came after Collins Pamba, then a 21-year-old employee at the senior officers' mess at the air base, led detectives to the burial site.
During the trial, the prosecution relied heavily on testimony from a co-accused who said Mugure enlisted his help to dispose of the bodies before threatening to kill him if he disclosed what had happened.
The witness further testified that Mugure promised to help him secure a place in a future KDF recruitment exercise in exchange for his silence.
"He told me not to be shocked... He said if he ever heard anything, he would also kill me," the witness testified.
The testimony became a central pillar of the prosecution's case linking Mugure to the killings and the concealment of the bodies.
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Earlier in the proceedings, the High Court denied Mugure bail after finding there was a real risk he could interfere with witnesses.
Justice Jairus Ngaah ruled in February 2020 that Mugure had allegedly sent his sister to persuade one of the co-accused to withdraw a statement given to investigators, reinforcing concerns over witness interference.
Court documents further showed that before the killings, Mugure had been ordered to provide maintenance for the couple's two children after DNA tests confirmed his paternity.
The prosecution maintained that Syombua and the children travelled to the Laikipia Air Base to see Mugure but never returned home.
