The waitress whose body was mutilated and stuffed in a suitcase in Ruiru, Kiambu county, was strangled and hit with a blunt object.
Esther Wambui, 18, worked at a local eatery where she was paid Sh. 300. Her body was found on the roadside on Monday, January 17.
The woman was identified by among others her boyfriend cum husband who she had been with for eight months and who she had been living with in the area, through her clothes.
The postmortem exercise was conducted at the City Mortuary, Nairobi on Friday in the presence of the parents, police and other witnesses.
Pathologist Simon Omwok oversaw the exercise which now confirmed the woman was murdered.
The family is now free to prepare for her burial. She had head injuries, the autopsy said.
Further analysis will be conducted on her body after samples were picked up.
There were speculations that she might have been raped before being killed. Vaginal swabs were taken for further analysis to establish whether she was sexually abused,
Wambui’s boyfriend, Joseph Ngige, and her father, Samuel Mbugua, were present during the autopsy.
Police investigating the incident said no arrest has been made. No motive so far has been known over the murder.
But the team said they are pursuing good leads. Wambui had lived in the area for only two weeks.
She dropped out of school in Form 2 and did not have a mobile phone at the time of her murder, the family and police said. Wambui went missing on Monday.
Her hands and legs were tied, her left breast was severed. A nylon rope was tied around her neck.
The body parts were wrapped in nylon and placed in a suitcase. The suitcase was found outside the GSU Recce Squad base in Ruiru, Kiambu County.
Police said the woman was waylaid and killed as she walked to her workplace in the morning on January 17. She had worked there for less than two weeks.
On the day she died, her boyfriend had escorted her to a junction, about a kilometre away from her workplace.
Ngige told police he works at a local petrol station and had escorted her and said goodbye, hoping to see her in the evening as usual.
They both come from Nakuru and lived in a single-room house in an informal settlement in Ruiru town.
He told the police he does not know why his girlfriend was brutally killed, and her body stashed in a suitcase.
Detectives handling the case said they suspect the woman was confronted by her killers, who probably raped her and decided to kill her.
“We believe the messages written on her body was meant to distract investigations,” an officer aware of the matter said.
Detectives from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations in Ruiru have visited the house where the woman lived and the scene where the body was found.
Ruiru head of DCI Justus Ombati said the woman might have been killed elsewhere and dumped alongside the perimeter wall of the heavily guarded GSU Recce Squad station.
Such incidents are common in the region. Some are linked to love triangles and others to property disputes.
