Inside the Chilling Crimes of ‘Bloodthirsty Vampire’ Masten Wanjala

Masten Wanjala’s penchant for murder started early.

He was in his teens when he killed his first victim — a 12-year-old girl he abducted in Machakos County, east of Nairobi, Kenya — in 2016, AFP reported.

He lured his victims by claiming he was a coach, and then taking them to remote areas where he would strangle them or hit them on the head with a blunt object, according to the BBC.  

He would sometimes drug them, and he even drank the blood of some victims, per the BBC.

Their remains were often dumped in thickets or submerged in sewer lines around Nairobi, police said, per AFP.

His killing spree lasted five years before he was caught on July 14, 2021, in connection with the deaths of two boys ages 12 and 13, The Washington Post reported.  

He soon confessed to killing at least 10 children, “sometimes through sucking blood from their veins before executing them,” the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) said at the time, per AFP.

He took police to some of his kill sites.

On October 13, three months after the 20-year-old child killer who police called a “bloodthirsty vampire” was taken into custody, he escaped from the Jogoo Road police station, setting off a frenzy around Nairobi and a massive manhunt.

Wanjala’s father, Robert Wanjala, told a local Kenya News channel he was “surprised” his son escaped. “I have not seen him,” the father said, per the station, the Post reported. “And I’m not interested in seeing him.”

On October 15, he was spotted by schoolchildren in his hometown of Bungoma, about 250 miles from Nairobi, AFP reported.

“He comes from this area and so the children saw him and knew it was him, and that is when information spread around and locals started pursuing him,” area administrator Bonface Ndiema said, per AFP. “In the end he ran into a neighbor’s house, but he was flushed out and lynched.” 

Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up for PEOPLE‘s free True Crime newsletter for breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.

He was strangled to death by an angry mob, a witness told The Standard newspaper, the BBC reported.

“The law of the jungles as applied by irate villages prevailed,” the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations wrote in a post on X, then Twitter, after his death, according to the BBC.

After Wanjala’s death, Grace Adhiambo, the mother of teenage victim Brian Omondi, told the BBC that she wanted to know why he killed her son.

“I would have loved to see him in court, so that I get to know why he did this — why he brutally killed our children and left us with pain,” she said.