A child sex abuser evaded justice in Kenya. Then an ‘ordinary woman’ took matters into her own hands.

NAIROBI — Some coincidences are unattainable to disregard.

Margaret Ruto, a Pennsylvania nurse in her mid-30s, thought she was returning to the rolling inexperienced hills of Kenya’s tea-growing area to take care of her dying mother-in-law.

Instead, a fluke of destiny awaited her: A man who lived simply 10 minutes from her dwelling in the United States had opened an orphanage not 10 minutes from her ancestral village in Kenya — and youngsters had been saying they’d been sexually abused there.

It was the summer time of 2018, and he or she discovered the village in uproar. Two ladies, 12 and 14, had just lately escaped and shared horror tales of sexual abuse by the hands of the orphanage’s director, Gregory Dow.

Ruto was led to a rumpled patch of earth behind the orphanage. Former workers stated a 9-month-old boy buried there had died a couple of years earlier after choking on one thing whereas he’d been left unsupervised.

Standing over the grave, she felt dizzy. It was a second that will divide her life into a earlier than and an after: a change from an “ordinary woman” into a detective.

Dow, whom she would spend the subsequent 12 months chasing, had already fled again to Pennsylvania after members of the group confronted him and alerted authorities. Kenyan police say they missed catching him on the airport by just some hours.

Locals informed Ruto they feared that this entitled, White foreigner claiming to be a religious Christian was going to evade justice.

“I was meant to know about this,” she remembered considering. “And I was meant to do something about it.”

Turmoil lay forward that Ruto, a twin U.S.-Kenyan citizen, may scarcely have imagined: sleuthing on two continents, always wanting over her shoulder, working via the trauma of child sex abuse survivors, and sobbing uncontrollably in her automotive, all whereas compiling a surprising investigation that will ultimately make it into the palms of FBI brokers, splash throughout the entrance pages of each Kenyan newspaper and dramatically alter Kenya’s child providers insurance policies.

The solely trace of her involvement till now has been an official acknowledgment that the FBI was “acting on a tip.”

After agreeing to a plea deal, Gregory Dow, now 61, was sentenced Thursday in a U.S. federal court docket to 188 months in jail on 4 counts of “engaging in illicit sexual conduct in foreign places.” Dow might be practically 80 years outdated if he makes it to the tip of his sentence.

Dow’s plea deal acknowledges guilt on all costs introduced towards him. His attorneys didn’t make Dow obtainable to reply to the allegations of deaths on the orphanage, saying solely that he had by no means publicly addressed these claims. A particular clause in the U.S. penal code permits for prosecution of child abuse circumstances dedicated by Americans abroad.

During the sentencing listening to Thursday, Dow apologized “for the pain that I’ve caused.” Judge Edward G. Smith referred to as him “a missionary from hell.”

Ruto is coming ahead with her story as a result of she — and the FBI and the U.S. legal professional’s workplace that prosecuted Dow — hope it’s going to encourage related sleuthing instincts in others.

“Ultimately, Ms. Ruto’s information found its way to a team of dedicated FBI agents, who … gathered the evidence required to charge Dow and hold him accountable for the monstrous abuse he perpetrated on his victims,” William M. McSwain, the U.S. legal professional on the time in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, stated in a press release to The Washington Post. “This case is a textbook example of the ways in which the public can assist law enforcement in bringing sexual predators like Dow, and other criminals, to justice.”

Separately, Kenyan police exhumed and autopsied the physique of the 9-month-old, James Kipkirui, as a part of an ongoing investigation into the circumstances of his demise, in accordance with Johansen Oduor, the federal government’s chief forensic pathologist.

Three summers in the past, Ruto made a silent, solemn promise that nothing would cease her — not corrupt authorities in Kenya and never sticky-slow forms in the United States — from pursuing justice for the kids on the orphanage.

“I’m just an ordinary woman, a nurse, a mother,” she recalled just lately. “I had no idea what I was getting into.”

The foremost constructing of the previous Dow Family Children’s Home, the place Gregory Dow carried out acts of sexual abuse. He pleaded responsible to 4 costs of illicit sexual conduct and was sentenced Thursday.

‘Will someone believe me?’

Kenya has an unlimited array of missionary-run establishments, together with nursing properties, faculties and orphanages. Often, impoverished households keep away from further monetary burden by sending their youngsters and aged to dwell at these charitable establishments.

When the Dow Family Children’s Home opened in 2008, foreigners weren’t required to undergo background checks. It is feasible that nobody in Kenya was conscious Dow had been a registered sex offender in the United States till 2006.

Dow’s case was the newest abuse scandal linked to White missionaries in Kenya. In 2016, as an illustration, a 21-year-old Oklahoma man named Matthew Durham was sentenced in a U.S. federal court docket to 40 years in prison for molesting eight youngsters at a Nairobi orphanage. Years earlier, a outstanding Italian Catholic priest was accused of molesting boys in his care, and whereas Kenyan authorities dropped costs for a scarcity of proof, suspicion nonetheless lingers.

At least 83 youngsters ages 9 months to 18 years lived in Dow’s dwelling earlier than it was closed in 2017, after two ladies escaped and their mother and father filed circumstances with the police.

Those tip-offs and others led to the arrest of Dow’s spouse, Mary Rose, who ran the orphanage with him, on child abuse costs. Dow, nonetheless, “managed to escape” to the United States, the place he insisted on his and his spouse’s innocence, in accordance with Simon Chelugui, Kenya’s minister of labor and social providers. Kenyan authorities stated that they knowledgeable Interpol, the worldwide policing physique, of the allegations towards Dow, however that he remained free in Pennsylvania, the place he continued to disclaim any wrongdoing.

A repossession discover hangs in a window on the former Dow Family Children’s Home.

In an e mail to his funders and supporters in September 2017, Dow defined his spouse’s arrest and his determination to flee Kenya as ensuing from “an orchestrated effort by a number of disgruntled youth, dysfunctional family members, a former employee and some family members” who had “fanned a fire of rebellion and hatred over the locals and authorities.”

On her journey again to Kenya, Ruto took inventory of the group’s anger. She gained the belief of the abused ladies and their mother and father and took down their gut-wrenching model of occasions in notepads and movies on her cellphone.

Twelve- and 14-year-old ladies informed her about being taken by Mary Rose to a clinic to have “matchsticks” put in their higher arms. Recognizing them because the birth-control implant Norplant, Ruto started to know the extent of the crimes that the husband and spouse who ran the house might need dedicated.

Kenyan and U.S. investigators would later affirm Ruto’s hunch, with McSwain describing the process as a means for Dow to “perpetrate his crimes without fear of impregnating his victims” in a Department of Justice information launch on the case.

“The girls would tell me how Dow would take the older ones, a different one each time, and force them to have sex with him,” she stated on a visit again to Kenya final 12 months. The ladies spoke of being pressured to drink alcohol or eat cleaning soap in the event that they disobeyed any advances Dow made. Court paperwork in the U.S. trial towards Dow in addition to the Kenyan trial for Mary Rose embody testimony from ladies relaying the identical experiences.

Mary Rose was discovered responsible in January 2018 on 4 counts of child abuse, however was launched after paying a fantastic of about $500 in lieu of two years’ imprisonment. During the trial, in which she pleaded not responsible, she informed a Kenyan court docket that she took ladies to get birth-control implants as a result of they had been “promiscuous.” (Mary Rose has since left Kenya. She didn’t reply to a request for remark, and U.S. legislation enforcement authorities wouldn’t say why she wasn’t charged alongside her husband.)

That identical 12 months, from her dwelling simply down the highway from Dow’s in Pennsylvania, Ruto sought what info she may about him, utilizing his public Facebook web page to contact individuals in his community. She even knocked on Dow’s door, however he didn’t open it. She enlisted a Facebook group referred to as KWITU — Kenyan Women in the United States — to assist elevate public outcry in Pennsylvania.

When Ruto approached the police in Lancaster, they referred her to the district legal professional’s workplace, which handed her to the State Department and finally the U.S. Embassy in Kenya.

“I hit a wall there. Nobody would commit to following it up,” she stated. “For the longest time, I wondered, will someone hear me, will someone believe me? Dow had been saying Kenyans are volatile people, jealous people — that people made this all up to try and take his land. I was afraid people were going to believe that.”

After a number of months of making an attempt, Ruto modified course and took her investigation to the LNP, a newspaper in Lancaster. She believes that’s what it took to get U.S. authorities extra severely concerned. Just days after the LNP piece revealed, she received a name from the FBI requesting a gathering. Dow was arrested months later after the FBI concluded its own investigation.

Davis Bett, 45, seems at a photograph of himself with Dow throughout his time working on the Dow Family Children’s Home.

Coping with the trauma

To cooperate with that investigation, Ruto stored her involvement principally to herself on the request of legislation enforcement officers.

But locals who dwell in the world across the orphanage say they knew of her involvement and admired her determination to assist as an alternative of simply returning dwelling to the United States. In Kenya, it typically takes cash or standing to spur the police to file circumstances or in any other case pursue justice. She had affect in a means few in the village did.

“If it were not for Maggie’s extreme efforts, everybody and everything would have been in darkness,” stated Davis Bett, who used to work as a gardener on the orphanage.

Bett and different workers had confronted Dow about his abusive conduct and in addition tried to alert native social providers officers, however say they had been rebuffed.

“At one point, I reached out to the children’s department and one of the officials told me that the home was ‘a small America in the village’ and that I should leave Gregory alone,” Bett stated.

Ruto, Bett and others say that, based mostly on their conversations with ladies from the house, Dow sexually abused greater than the 4 in whose circumstances he was convicted. They additionally say Kenyan authorities have been gradual to analyze the deaths of kids on the dwelling like 9-month-old James.

Local officers say that James’s physique was exhumed and that an post-mortem was carried out in June 2019. But no explanation for demise was decided and the physique was not returned to his relations, who say they’re nonetheless ready for communication from the federal government.

The shallow grave the place James Kipkirui was buried after his demise underneath uncommon circumstances on the Dow Family Children’s Home.

“I allowed my daughter to take her children to the White man because of poverty,” stated Lucia Langat, 50, James’s grandmother. “I do not think any person in this village can ever give their children out to a White man again.”

After the orphanage closed, the kids had been despatched to different properties or again to folks who had left them there as infants and toddlers.

Since then, Kenya has imposed a moratorium on foreigners opening orphanages, and requires more-stringent background checks to be carried out in the course of the processing of missionary visas. Locals supported these strikes and had been happy that Dow will doubtlessly spend the remainder of his life in jail, however they expressed bitterness at being left alone to deal with the trauma.

Dow “deserved a life sentence. These children called him ‘Dad.’ That was a deep betrayal,” stated Mary Rotich, Langat’s neighbor. “What can ease the suffering of these families is compensation to make their lives better.”

Ruto, too, is haunted by the circumstances the FBI was finally unable to corroborate. It is a part of what spurred her to enroll this 12 months in an on-line felony justice course, which she attends in between grueling shifts caring for coronavirus sufferers at a Lancaster nursing dwelling.

“It was not just four girls,” Ruto stated. “The rest of the victims and their families deserve so much better. You can’t say that justice has been fully done yet.”

Sharon, 16, outdoors the house the place she lives with her mom and siblings. She was taken to the Dow Family Children’s Home when she was 7, however ran away at 12. She stated she spoke to the FBI throughout its investigation and describes her time on the orphanage as “horrible and disgusting.” Sharon and her mom agreed for her to be photographed on the situation that solely her first title be used to establish her.