Court declares late catholic priest's secret son heir after decade-long estate battle

Now, a decade after his death, a High Court ruling in Eldoret has lifted the veil on the distinguished Catholic priest Joseph Kariuki Njino's hidden life, exposing revelations that stand in stark contrast to the vows of chastity he publicly preached. 

The judgment details how a "chaste" Catholic Father Njino secretly fathered a boy in 2003, kept him hidden behind Holy vows for over two decades, and how his Diocese fought his own flesh and blood before the court finally compelled the church to confront the child it had left off the estate.

Fr. Njino, once a respected cleric of the Catholic Diocese of Eldoret, died on July 22, 2015.

According to his Will, he left the administration of his estate to the incumbent Bishop of the Diocese, whom he named as sole executor.

He was laid to rest with full pomp befitting a man of God, vigil service, funeral mass, priestly vestments, the whole nine yards.

But according to a High Court ruling seen by The Nairobian, the man in the coffin was hiding a secret that would take a decade, three bishops and one determined mother to bring to light.

The main protagonist in the succession saga was Nancy Jepketer Rutto. She was Fr Njino’s clandestine lover and together, the duo sired the boy born on July 4, 2003, and known in court papers only as DK.

According to Jepketer 's own sworn testimony before Justice Reuben Nyakundi, the romance began slowly in 1993, when Fr. Njino was teaching at Moi University's Kesses campus and she was a young woman navigating life's hurdles.

"Over time, we developed a close relationship in which he mentored and supported me in various aspects of my life, including education, career and personal welfare," Jepketer told the court.

Sneaking around

But mentorship, it seems, blossomed into something far more intimate.

"Over time, our relationship became more intimate, though due to the nature of his status, we maintained discretion and established boundaries," she said, a diplomatic way of admitting a priest and a woman were sneaking around Eldoret.

Jepketer testified that Fr. Njino paid her school fees at St. Luke's North Kinangop Nursing School, helped her land a job at a research project in Kericho, and, most damning of all, "ensured that his name appeared on our son's birth certificate."

She didn't stop there.  Jepketer told the court the priest personally visited when their son was hospitalised with pneumonia, and that even after she relocated abroad in 2012, they remained in communication through emails and phone calls.

When the priest fell seriously ill, she says she sent him money for medication through her siblings.

Her account was backed up in court by a second witness, Esther Jepchumba Barno, who says she watched the affair unfold from the front row.

"Nancy J. Ruto (the objector) confided in me regarding her romantic relationship with the late Father Njino, which resulted in the birth of a male child, DK, born on July 4, 2003," Barno testified.

Predictably, the Diocese was not about to let its late priest's reputation, or its estate, go down without a fight.

Branded outsiders

When Jepketer and her now-grown son filed their objection, the family and church-appointed administrators came out swinging, branding them outsiders with zero legitimate claim.

"The objector Nancy Jepketer Rutto and the minor are strangers to the family of the late Father Joseph Kariuki Njino," the administrators Michael Njuguna and Milcah Wamboi Njino told the court, insisting the pair could not be included in the written Will.

They went further, painting Jepketer and her witness as opportunists cashing in on a dead man's generosity.

"Therefore Jepketer, her son and her witness were strangers to the family... mere busy-bodies and or inter-meddlers," Njino family informed the court.

Counsel for the family went further, offering an alternative explanation for a decade of school fees, rent payments and hospital visits.

“That the priest was simply a philanthropist who would give assistance and support to the less privileged, and that Jepketer may have benefited from his generosity without it being anything more," said Njino’s lawyer in the court papers.

The Diocese also leaned hard on the celibacy card, insisting Fr. Njino had taken a vow of chastity which is a promise to remain celibate meaning to abstain from sexual intercourse and any sexual activity, and reminded the court he was accorded full Catholic funeral rites for a priest with the Deceased's body vested in priestly vestments.

Bishop Cornelius Kipng'eno Korir was granted letters of administration on July 22, 2016, exactly a year after the priest's death. Before the estate could be confirmed, Korir himself died, on October 30, 2017.

His successor, Rev. Maurice Anthony Crowley, applied to step into the role in 2018.

But before that substitution could even be formalised with amended letters of administration, a new Bishop, Dominic Kimengich, had taken the Diocese's seat, and by 2022 was asking the court to let him renounce the executorship altogether, citing, among other things, an unresolved paternity claim he said he could not address himself on adequately.

In his own sworn affidavit, Kimengich admitted the estate had sat unconfirmed for years, delayed and or pending due to other factors other than the change of circumstances.

He conceded plainly: "I do not have knowledge of the minor's claim of being the son to the deceased and it is therefore necessary that the issue be determined by this honourable court."

In other words, the church's own appointed custodians of the estate spent years tossing the paternity question along like an unwanted parcel rather than answering it. 

Paternity question

That's three Bishops in under a decade, each one seemingly happy to pass the paternity hot potato to the next successor rather than deal with it.

By September 2023, the grant finally landed with lay administrators, Michael Njuguna and Milcah Wamboi Njino, described in court papers as beneficiaries and family of the deceased priest.

It took a decade, three successive Bishops, two deaths in office, one renunciation, a birth certificate the church never disputed, and a mother's decade-long fight through Eldoret's High Court before Justice  Nyakundi finally ruled that DK is the priest's legitimate son and dependant, entitled to a share of the estate.

What tipped the case, according to the ruling, was less the mother's testimony than the documents she was able to produce and the Church never rebutted.

The judge noted that there was overwhelming evidence that indeed duo had a relation which was proved through intimate email exchanges correspondence between the priest and Jepketer dated 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2014 and a stash of photographs showing the boy alongside both his parents.

Most strikingly is what her lawyers described as an agreement in which the priest's own family allegedly acknowledged the affair and proposed handing the boy a plot of land, parcel number Nyandarua/Kirima/1163, in a bid to make the whole scandal quietly disappear.

Not one of these documents was disowned by the administrators.

Crucially, the boy's birth certificate, dated March 12, 2008, clearly bearing the name Joseph Njino Kariuki as father, went completely unchallenged by the church throughout the entire case.

Justice Nyakundi did not mince words in his ruling. He acknowledged the awkward optics of a celibate priest secretly fathering a child, but reminded the church that vows do not erase biology, or constitutional rights.

"Children born from such continuum relationships like DK in our case are legitimate and are entitled to inherit their parents' property both movable and immovable," the judge ruled,

"No written Will of the deceased should be as a shield by the executor or administrators to defeat the existence of those rights," he added.

The judge went further, ordering the estate's administrators, current bishop of Eldoret Joseph Obanyi to set aside a share for DK within 60 days from the court's ruling, warning that in default the probate grant of representation shall stand revoked and the proceedings of confirmation to commence a fresh.

Justice Nyakundi pointed out that the family's own witnesses never addressed the one piece of documentary evidence that mattered most - the birth certificate, which was never controverted by the Executor and the beneficiaries to the estate.

"Nor did they produce any evidence of "non-access" between Jepketer and the priest, the one thing capable of legally rebutting presumed paternity," justice Nyakundi noted.

DNA testing

Even as it ruled against the church's decade of resistance, the court refused the woman's request to exhume Fr. Njino's body from the Catholic Diocese of Eldoret cemetery at Turbo Parish for DNA testing.

She had asked the court to allow DNA testing on the priest's remains to put any doubt to rest once and for all.

Justice Nyakundi declined. “The application for exhumation fails the proportionality test," he ruled.

"Once a body is buried it should not be disturbed unless a strong and new compelling evidence that disinterment is in the direct interest of justice, which the court finds it is not the case in this succession cause," Justice Nyakundi explained.

A vow of celibacy, a decade-long cover-up, three Bishops passing the buck, and a mother who refused to let her son be erased from his father's lineage - this is the story the Catholic Diocese of Eldoret hoped would stay buried with Fr. Njino.

Instead, it's now etched permanently into Kenya's legal records, a cautionary tale of what happens when the church's silence meets a paper trail it cannot outrun.