IN the morning of July 3, 2012, Rispa Ondigo followed her usual routine.
She stopped by her employer’s house to collect the M-Pesa phone, float, airtime cards, and ledger books she needed to run the kiosk that day. She never arrived.
Hours turned into days. Her absence was first a concern, then a mystery, then a wound. Her employer, Joseph Odero, sounded the alarm. The community searched. Her family waited—clinging to hope. For two months, they endured the cruel uncertainty of not knowing. Then, that silence was broken.Her body was discovered in September 2012, buried in a shallow grave in a banana farm near her workplace. The decomposing remains were identified by her clothing. A postmortem revealed a deep cut to her neck—clear, intentional, final.
The man who led police to the grave was someone they knew—William Masika, Rispa's workmate. The killer will now serve 30 years, instead of a death sentence.
Masika had fled and was arrested in Webuye later that month. He had Rispa’s phone and 16 new iron sheets. Authorities believed bought them with the money he stole from her.
On September 4, 2012, Masika was charged. Nearly four years later, on August 9, 2016, High Court Judge David Majanja convicted and sentenced him to death.
But the law changed. In 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that the mandatory death sentence was unconstitutional.
Eight years into his sentence, Masika appealed—arguing that the mandatory death penalty robbed him of a chance to be heard in mitigation. On February 5, 2025, his appeal came before the Court of Appeal. His lawyer urged the judges to consider that he had been only 24 at the time of the offence, a first-time offender and a young father. She asked for 15 years, counting time served.
The Court of Appeal agreed that change was necessary but could not ignore the horror of Rispa's murder .“The attack was vicious. It had all the hallmarks of a gender-based violence… The appellant went beyond ending her life and buried her in a pit to conceal his heinous deed.”
Masika’s sentence was reduced to 30 years in prison, backdated to August 9, 2016.
“Weighing the mitigating factors against the aggravating factors… the appellant, though not deserving of the death sentence, ought to be incarcerated for a long period of time to allow him to reflect on his crime and hopefully reform," the judges said.
