Two police officers in their 20s, who were reportedly married to each other with two children, died on January 23 of gunshot wounds, both shot behind locked doors at a police station in Trans Nzoia County.
This was the undisputed account as told by witnesses in multiple stories in the media. But how the couple died is now open to debate, after the storytelling left confusion, not clarity.
The story broke on KBC, in the Star and the Daily Nation, that a policewoman, Dorcas Chebet, had the previous Sunday morning killed her husband, Abel Ondari, before turning the gun on herself.
Murder, then suicide. An open and shut case. Or so it seemed.
KBC ran with this heading online: “Police woman kills cop husband, commits suicide in Trans Nzioa” (January 23). The Star went with a winding header: “Love triangle linked to murder-suicide case of police couple in Trans Nzoia” (January 24).
Yeah, when a couple dies violently, the poor “triangle” is always scapegoated, isn’t it? Even when nobody can pinpoint all three sides of the triangle! Anyway, The Star said that Chebet shot Ondari, then herself.
The Nation did a double. First, their January 24 heading said, “Police officer ‘kills’ husband, herself in alleged murder-suicide.” The next day, the author of the same story, Gerald Bwisa, expounded the narrative under the heading, “Revealed: last moments of Kiminini murder-suicide couple.”
This story, citing police reports, still maintained that it’s the woman who killed her husband.
Then, suddenly, on the same January 25, the Nation sprang an “oops” story by the same author: the husband was the perpetrator, not the victim.
It’s the Nation that botched this story the most, notably with this heading in the latter account: “Autopsy now shows policeman killed wife.”
Dear Nation, an autopsy is forensic science whose outcome should show how a person died, not who killed whom.
The latter is not science. It’s interpretation. Interpretations, which can be as many as the number of “experts” and lawyers on the case, are usually argued out in a court of law or at an inquest. And the courts, not pathologists, usually declare the verdict as to who killed whom.
Maybe if the heading for your “oops” story had said, “Police now say policeman killed wife,” with the change citing the autopsy, journalism would still be alive.
