Watch out for murderous house helps

By Sunmola Olowokere
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Following closely on the heels of the cold blooded murder of an Ondo business mongul, Opeyemi Bademosi by his house help, a Lagos High Court in Igbosere sentenced a 25-year-old houseboy, Leudjou Koyemen Joel to death by hanging for killing his employer.

 The house help  got the death penalty after he was found guilty of the murder of his boss, Dayo Enioluwa Adeleke.

Justice Adedayo Akintoye convicted Joel, after a two-year trial which followed his “not guilty” plea to a one-count charge of murder.

The defendant, a refugee from Cameroon, had claimed in his defense that Adeleke mistakenly stabbed herself after she fell while pursuing him with a kitchen knife.

In his judgement, the trial judge Justice Akintoye held: “All the evidence points to the defendant. I find merit in the prosecution’s case.”

The prosecution had it that the defendant committed the offence on December 20 at about 9:30pm.

Joel asked for a two-week salary advance, but the late Adeleke turned him down twice.

He got angry and stabbed Adeleke in the neck and heart.

He was apprehended at the gate of the deceased’s Park View Estate, Ikoyi, Lagos while attempting to flee.

The  victim was found lying on the floor of her living room in a pool of blood. A kitchen knife was found stuck in the left side of her chest. She was taken to St. Nicholas Hospital on Lagos Island, where a doctor confirmed her dead.

Adeleke was killed seven months after Joel was employed and three months after her engagement to her fiancé.

Joel confirmed the prosecution’s findings that before the incident, he approached his boss twice to pay him part of his salary as his child was ill in Cameroon and he needed money for hospital bills.

He said the first time he asked for part payment of his salary was on December 16, the second time was December 18, two days before Adeleke was killed.

He stated that on the day of the incident, after cleaning her apartment, he knelt and pleaded with her to give him a loan, “but she became upset and started shouting and screaming at me. So I thought it was the situation in her office that was making her to shout.”

He said  that Adeleke suddenly stood up and began to speak a language he did not understand.

The defendant claimed that his employer pushed him and he fell. She started bitting  him on the  head, so he closed his eyes.

He said: “I was perceiving smell of alcohol. When I opened my eyes, I saw her with a knife, then I tried to run away. But she was rushing towards me.

“When I got to the entrance door, I noticed that she was no longer running after me but kept screaming. When I turned, I saw that she fell on the floor, with the knife in her chest.”

Even to the average unlearned ears, the tale sounded false. The Judge too who did not swallow his story had sentenced him accordingly.

Some months prior to this conviction, Chief Opeyemi Bademosi, an illustrious son of Ondo kingdom faced the same fate; stabbed to death by his  house help also.

The victim aged 67 years was killed at his No.3B, Onikoyi Lane, Parkview Estate, Ikoyi, Lagos,

According to the Police, the middle aged man was attacked by his house help who was discovered trying to rob the family of their valuables on Wednesday, October 31, 2018.

He had allegedly stabbed Opeyemi Bademosi on the chest thrice and later took to his heels with the valuables but was tracked to Ondo where he was arrested. The journey that eventually ended the life of Mr. Bademosi began on October 28 when he employed a 22-year-old Togolese as cook.

On October 31, three days after assuming duty, the suspect, with the intention to rob the deceased, made his way to his boss’ bedroom through the kitchen to the lobby and then to the room, which was the scene of the crime when he observed that the wife had left home for a transaction in a neighbourhood bank.

 The suspect had told the deceased that he was not there to kill him but to get money while armed with a knife.The deceased said he had no money in the house. At this point, the suspect said he tied him up with a cloth and put him on the floor.

The accused person went further to claim that the deceased, while still on the floor, kicked him, causing the knife he tucked inside his pants to fall off.

He added that the deceased crawled to pick the knife, but he (the suspect) was faster, and that, as he struggled with him, the knife accidentally pierced the deceased.

With the police claims and the accused person’s counter.claims, one truth is constant. It is that a gentleman and one of the pillars in our society is no more. His life had been snuffed out of him.

The innuendos and the insinuations that trailed his murder could be described as unprintable at best. The police had explored all the available options and the case is now before a high court judge for determination.

Ironically, there are some points of similarities between the two murders. Both villains had greed as their motive. While Adeleke’s murderer was demanding for a  condition that was not probably in his rules of engagement, Bademosi’s alleged killer probably ingrained himself into the family in order to carry out his scheme.

The two murders were orchestrated by foreign house helps; one, a Togolese, the other, a Cameroonian. However, both of them had one thing in common; they are from French speaking areas.

They are both fearless men who could killed in cold blood as they both used knives on their victims almost in the same region and stabbed them more than once. The stabbing goes beyond a mistake. It portrayed a premeditated plan to kill.

Nigerians need to take these unfortunate incidences as a warning and take several steps as precautionary measures which should ensure their safety.

At the risk of sounding like an old maid, people would do well and stay away from foreign house helps for their own benefit.

Two days ago, the same High Court sentenced a Beninese house help, Christian Yavine to death for killing  his employer’s aged mother,  Mariam Abiola.

The Beninese had severely the  78 -year- old woman’s head while she slept.

Apart from this, some mothers have tales of woe to recount on how.house helps maltreated their children. Recently, a video of a house help traumatizing a baby trended on the social media.

It was a horrible scene to behold as the mother suspecting a foul play had installed a CCTV inside the house and got to her little baby being tortured by a house help who claimed that she was angry with her and hence took out her anger on the baby.

This is just one out of the experience people have regarding house helps. While the woman above was able to rescue her baby from the clutches of the evil housemaid, others were not so lucky. Some would collude with kidnappers to kidnap the child placed in their care for pecuniary reasons.

Prof. Ilemobade’s murder.was planned and executed by his house helps. Though the two murderers were sentenced to death by hanging yet it did not undo the wrong they did.

They killed the old man, poured engine oil on him as preservation, hide   him in his own garage and made away with his vehicle. The case was initially treated as a kidnap case until the two men were apprehended in a neighbouring state.

Then, the police men changed their scope of investigation and upon interrogation of the murderers, they led the police to where Baba’s decomposing body was kept. Some house helps are deadly.

How well do you know your house help? Desperate times call for desperate measures. Parents need to watch vigilantly. House helps need to be closely and covertly monitored so that the masters get to know what kind of people they have hired.

Being security conscious would help a lot in safeguarding families from this menace.