What drives people to join religious cults?

Saturday, December 6, 2014
A picture of the late lawyer Paul Magu who is alleged to have killed his wife Lydia Wangui Magu and their three children before committing suicide. Detectives suspect that Mr Magu may have been pushed by the ripples of a religious cult to kill his wife and ensure too, that there was no lineage after him. PHOTO | BILLY MUTAI |  NATION MEDIA GROUP

In Summary

• Detectives suspect Mr Magu may have killed his wife and children before throwing himself in front of a bus that was heading to Nairobi from Garissa.
• His area of practice was described as;  commercial law (50 per cent), property, conveyancing, land, landlord and tenant law (20 per cent), criminal law – general (20 per cent), and constitutional and human rights law (10 per cent).
• Then in 2007 he met a female pastor who introduced him to a church based in Nigeria where he started visiting together with the pastor.
• He then drove away to his rural home in Kiambu, where he kept silent. Wednesday morning, he dropped his phone in a pond and set off for Ngoliba, where a bus knocked him down.

 

By STELLA CHERONO

“The storm is rolling in and a man, quite ill, boards his boat planning on suicide. As he sets the scene to make his death look like an accident another man appears from below with a letter in one hand, a knife in the other.

‘…….Dr Lucy Trask is accustomed to finding dead bodies at her work as a medical examiner, but a serial killer has targeted her and is hand delivering bodies to her.”

This is an extract from Karen Rose’s novel, You Belong to me.

The novel might have passed for an ordinary fictional reading until Wednesday, November 26, when detectives found a copy at the bedside drawer of the man suspected to have killed his family before committing suicide in Kiambu.

The 512-page novel whose author is known world over for weaving psychological scares is probably the last book lawyer Paul Magu was reading as detectives found a book mark in between its pages.

And like the tale in the novel, the tale of mystery, brutal murders, destruction of corpses to harden identification, the desperation of detectives to find clear answers and the chilling details of what transpired moments before every murder, did Mr Magu’s story unfold.

Detectives suspect Mr Magu may have killed his wife and children before throwing himself in front of a bus that was heading to Nairobi from Garissa.

They also suspect that Mr Magu may have been pushed by the ripples of a religious cult to kill his wife and ensure too, that there was no lineage after him.

FLASHY LIFESTYLE

The tale of the murders of Mrs Lydia Magu, and their three children, Allen, Ryan and Tiffany, pumped doses of fear into the veins of Kenyans as a deranged killer managed to stay a step ahead of the police, relatives and neighbours to execute what seems like a well-crafted, if evil, plan.

Magu had lived a flashy lifestyle as a young lawyer and had everything a man of his age would wish for – a beautiful wife, three children, cars and a five-bedroom house in a nice, quiet neighbourhood.

He graduated from the University of Nairobi in 2001. He was one of the 113 students who graduated with a bachelors degree in law. Some of his former classmates are lawyers Kethi Kilonzo, Philip Nyachoti and Catherine Nyambura Njuguna.

Before starting his law firm, he worked with Nyambura Njuguna and Company Advocates that was located at the ground floor of the Runda Evergreen Centre, Kiambu Road.

His area of practice was described as;  commercial law (50 per cent), property, conveyancing, land, landlord and tenant law (20 per cent), criminal law – general (20 per cent), and constitutional and human rights law (10 per cent).

KNOCKED DOWN
His brother Andrew Magu, said the lawyer had been a staunch evangelical Christian.

Then in 2007 he met a female pastor who introduced him to a church based in Nigeria where he started visiting together with the pastor.

In 2009, he stopped working as a lawyer to “concentrate on spirituality” and his ABA status was indicated as “Archived”. He also stayed away from his relatives and friends and did not allow his children to mingle with the neighbours’.

On the day he died, detectives had also identified the body of his wife at the City Mortuary. The body had a deep cut at the back of the neck and it had been burnt and dropped in a bush near Paradise Lost getaway.

It is believed he had killed her during the day on Sunday while the maid and children were away.

Come Tuesday, he asked the maid to prepare the children and drove away with them, then came back two hours later without them.

He then drove away to his rural home in Kiambu, where he kept silent. Wednesday morning, he dropped his phone in a pond and set off for Ngoliba, where a bus knocked him down.

Besides the novel, detectives discovered several religious DVDs and written materials in the house. Among them were compact disks describing curses and how to live in martyrdom. 

BRAINWASHED

One of the CDs had a cover with the drawing of a man under lock and key, covered in chains with his whole face smeared with blood as he wails.

Mr Magu is said to have been spending more than three hours a day in the shrine with Pastor Wanyoro who, according to police records, spent four days at Magu’s house, prior to the first murder.

She was arrested by police on December 1, and is currently detained at Muthaiga police station.

Records found in Magu’s phone indicated he had been in constant communication with the pastor before, during and after the murders of his family.

Magu’s family and friends believe he may have been brainwashed by cultist ideologies since preliminary investigations showed he had asked a neighbour whether he was willing to take care of his children in case he died.

Religious leaders believe Magu may have been involved in a form of extreme doctrinal brainwashing that demanded sacrifice with a promise of a better life after death.

“Most doctrinal cults barrage on people who are vulnerable to their beliefs. Their prey are usually the poor, the oppressed, the spiritually weak and people who cannot fit in a certain class that they would want to,” the Rev Dr Timothy Njoya, a retired minister at the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, told Sunday Nation.

EASY VICTIMS
Cult leaders, he said, are manipulative and they study their target well before attacking them at their weakest point. They are usually patient with their target.

“If someone preaches to you with too much emphasis on a certain doctrine other than what is in the scriptures, you should be careful,” he said, adding that there was need for people to read their religious books and understand them well so they cannot be brainwashed into believing in any other thing other than what is written there.

“Religion should not be based on self-interests... If someone tells you that you have to sacrifice your family so that you will go straight to heaven, that person is asking you to be selfish,” he said.

The Rev Canon Peter Karanja, the General Secretary of the National Council of Churches in Kenya (NCCK), says some people get into cultism innocently, as they do not know any other religion.

“People who did not have a good religious foundation since early childhood are easily swayed into believing in cultist doctrines and they are very hard to be convinced back to the true religion,” he said.

He said the desire for prosperity, fame and psychological disposition may also be the reason why people fall into cults.

GET-RICH-QUICK
And like the Rev Njoya, the NCCK boss said the surest way to beat cultist beliefs is in reading and understanding the scriptures well and challenging and resisting other teachings.

Nairobi-based psychologist Mbutu Kariuki says most sect leaders display a concoction of personality instabilities such as psychopathy.

“They are amoral, they do not know how to love no matter how much they shout themselves hoarse about love, and they are highly selfish. Some exhibit high levels of sadism, and are pathological liars. They use fear to manipulate their flock,” Prof Kariuki said.

He said greed is a defining feature of both the rogue preachers and their followers. The get-rich-quick culture combined with laziness and zero respect for creativity and hard work are only likely to make matters worse