From secret affair to murder charge: Obado's long trial over Sharon death

For six years, courtroom 4 at Milimani Law Courts has been the stage for a legal battle that has consumed careers and left a family broken.

Forty-two witnesses have testified. Eighty-one exhibits have been produced. A journalist who was abducted alongside Sharon Otieno has relived his terror on the stand.

A former governor has gripped the rail of the witness box as he described a relationship he insists he never wanted the world to know about.

At the heart of the case is a blunt accusation. The prosecution says it already knows: three men planned it, one of them a then sitting governor, all of them acting to silence a woman whose pregnancy had become a political liability.

The defence says that is a story built on suspicion, planted witnesses, and a police investigation that, they say, never uncovered the real killers.

Now, at last, Justice Cecilia Githua is expected in the coming weeks to decide if former Migori Governor Zacharia Okoth Obado, his personal assistant Michael Oyamo, and former county clerk Casper Ojwang Obiero murdered Sharon Otieno.

The verdict will be the final legal word on a case that has come to represent something larger than the fate of three men, a reckoning with power, silence, the price of secrets, and what happens to young women who refuse to stay quietly out of sight.

To understand how Sharon ended up dead in a forest in Homa Bay County, you have to understand what she had and what she decided to do with it.

Sharon Otieno was 26 years old, a student at Rongo University, and seven months pregnant with the child of one of Kenya’s governors.

She had been in a relationship with Obado since late 2017. She had kept quiet, taken the money, accepted the intermediaries, and endured the secrecy.

But by mid-2018, Sharon had made her calculations. She knew what she was carrying. And she had decided that her silence was worth far more than the governor had been paying for it.

Through former Kanyandoto MCA Lawrence Mula (now deceased), the man who served as go-between for the two, and later through a journalist referred to in court only as XYZ, Sharon began to make her position clear.  

She wanted a house worth Sh20 million and Sh5 million for her upkeep. In exchange, she would stay silent. If her demands were not met, the journalist had a story ready to publish about the affair.

For a governor serving his final term and managing the political optics of a pregnancy by a university student thirty years his junior, the exposure threatened everything, his marriage, his legacy, his standing in his ODM party.

Sharon was, in the prosecution’s framing, an escalating problem that had gone beyond management.

“The scandal was unfolding in real time and the accused persons engaged in joint criminal enterprise driven by one overriding motive: to protect the political career and reputation of Zacharia Okoth Obado,” Prosecutor Gikui Gichuhi told the court.

The prosecution argues that Obado did not pull a trigger or wield a knife. He did not need to.

As a governor surrounded by trusted operatives, the prosecution argues, he had the means, the motive, and the people to do what needed to be done, and the evidence shows they did it.

“This was not an act of chance.It was the culmination of prior management and containment through money and logistics, escalation once containment failed, execution through trusted aides, and systematic concealment after the fact.”

The mechanics of what followed were assembled, the DPP argues, over several months.

Sharon’s welfare had been managed through a chain of intermediaries, Oyamo, Obado’s PA, and MCA Mula, with money flowing through this chain regularly.

When Sharon demanded more, enlisted XYZ, and threatened exposure, the prosecution says the response was not negotiation. It was elimination.

XYZ, the journalist and a protected witness, testified that when Sharon was abducted he, by his own account, barely escaped with his life.

XYZ said that he and Sharon were lured to Graca Hotel in Rongo town on the evening of September 3, 2018.

The meeting, arranged by Oyamo, was ostensibly to resolve ongoing disputes about Sharon’s welfare money. What followed, he told the court, was a trap.

After the meeting, they were led to a waiting dark-coloured vehicle at the parking lot. What began as a taxi ride ended in a nightmare.

According to XYZ, two men sandwiched him and Sharon in the back seat.

The co-driver communicated on a phone, nodding and repeating ‘yes, yes.’ Sharon was ordered to surrender her purse, and XYZ’s wallet, recorder and ID card were seized.

“Sharon, Oyamo and I sat at the back seat. The vehicle moved towards Rongo town and then turned to face Homa Bay direction. This is when two people boarded at the rear and Oyamo alighted.”

Strangers sandwiched them on the back seat. Phones were seized. Sharon’s purse was taken. XYZ’s wallet, press card and cash were taken from his pockets as the men searched him. The vehicle accelerated toward Homa Bay.

Sharon began to cry. She was pleading, speaking in Dholuo, asking for forgiveness.

Crying loudly

“Sharon was crying loudly… the person seated next to Sharon was putting one hand behind her back and the other hand was placed between Sharon’s thighs. She was pleading not to be harmed. She asked for forgiveness,” XYZ testified

In Dholuo, the men told her to stop crying, she was being taken to the Migori Governor.

Near Nyangweso, XYZ managed to open the car door and jumped out of the moving vehicle. Sharon’s scream, louder and more desperate, was the last sound he heard from her.

He fled to a nearby home and reported to Kadel Police Station. Sharon was never seen alive again.

Her body was found by a stranger. Moses Onduti Oguta came across her body in a thicket near the Owade River bridge in Homa Bay County on September 4, 2018 afternoon, stabbed, strangled and abandoned in the forest.

He reported what he found to Oyugis Police Station, and within hours, the name Sharon Otieno was known across Kenya.

Chief Government Pathologist Dr. Johansen Oduor testified that Sharon died from severe haemorrhage due to penetrating force trauma and multiple stab wounds, with additional signs of manual strangulation.

Two used condoms found at the scene were subjected to DNA analysis, the results showed unknown male origin.

Separately, DNA testing on the foetus confirmed to 99.9 per cent certainty that Obado was the father of the child Sharon had been carrying.

Central to the prosecution’s case is motor vehicle KCL 481K, a Toyota Wish registered to Olivia Adhiambo, wife of the third accused Caspar Obiero, which it alleges was used in the abduction.

Taxi driver Jackson Otieno Gombe testified that he drove this vehicle on the evening of September 3, ferrying Obado’s PA Oyamo and others from Uriri to Graca Hotel and then departing with Sharon, XYZ and two other men aboard.

His testimony placed Oyamo at Graca Hotel coordinating the abduction and described what he witnessed inside the vehicle.

The vehicle’s tracking system registered no movement data during the material period.

The investigating officer, Chief Inspector Nicholas Ole Sena, told the court that the tracker was disconnected at 10:33am on September 3 and reconnected at 9:59am the following day.

The prosecution submits this was deliberate, a calculated step to ensure the vehicle’s movements could not be traced on the night Sharon died.

Beyond the witness testimonies, the prosecution’s case leaned heavily on what it characterised as a systematic cover-up, a series of actions in the days around the murder that, it argued, amounted to consciousness of guilt.

A key exhibit was an Airtel SIM card acquired by Obado’s PA Oyamo just days before Sharon’s murder.

The prosecution told the court that Oyamo did not use his own identity card to acquire the Airtel SIM line, he used someone else’s without his knowledge.

The owner of that ID testified that he had reported it lost long before the line was registered, making the acquisition not just suspicious but fraudulent obtained.

It was used, the prosecution showed, exclusively to communicate with Sharon, XYZ and Mula in the lead-up to her death.

Further evidence of a cover-up came through testimony that Oyamo and Obiero visited Migori Hospital the morning after the murder and procured false medical records, fabricating a story about being robbed of travel money.

 Oyamo then filed a false police report at Uriri Police Station, claiming his “girlfriend” Sharon had been abducted and his money stolen.

On August 17, 2018, 16 days before she was killed, Sharon sent Obado a text message: “Thank you, I have received the Sh100,000 you sent me. We will arrange how to pay the house tomorrow.”

Obado produced that message himself during his defence testimony, arguing it proved his ongoing commitment to Sharon’s welfare and that he had no reason to want her dead.

The prosecution reads it differently. Sharon was still alive. The house negotiation was still unresolved. The Sh5 million had not been agreed. XYZ was still circling. The governor, the DPP argued, was not a man at peace, he was buying time, keeping a dangerous woman calm while something else was being arranged.

There was no tomorrow. Seventeen days after that message, Sharon’s body was found in the forest.

The prosecution’s case was supported by three crucial witnesses whose testimony illuminated the private world surrounding the murder.

MCA Mula, who served as go-between for Obado and Sharon, spent three full days on the stand.

He tendered damning evidence about the love affair, the money he ferried from the governor to the student, the escalating demands and the meetings in Nairobi and Migori he had facilitated.

He described a final arrangement in which Obado had agreed to build Sharon a three-bedroom house worth Sh4 million.

 “When I communicated to the Governor that Sharon had accepted his proposal, I saw from his face that he was happy,” MCA Mula told the court week’s before he died.

Sharon’s mother, Melinda Auma Rangili, testified about her daughter’s final weeks.

Sharon had called her, excited: the governor had agreed to the house, the upkeep, the future.

“The Governor gave her Sh100,000 for her upkeep and he was going to buy her a plot and construct a house for her, “ she said.

Then on the morning of September 4, the phone rang again. It was someone calling to say her daughter was missing.She would never speak to Sharon again.

The three accused all gave sworn testimony. Their defence lawyers, Senior Counsel Kioko Kilukumi for Obado, and separate counsel for Oyamo and Obiero, mounted a vigorous challenge to the prosecution’s case.

In Obado’s final submissions, Kilukumi argued that no direct evidence links his client to the murder.

“The prosecution has miserably failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the 1st accused, in any manner whatsoever, participated in the killing of Sharon,” he submitted.

In its final submissions filed in January 2026, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions asked Justice Githua to find all three accused guilty of the murder of Sharon Otieno under Sections 203 and 204 of the Penal Code, charges that carry the death penalty.

“The prosecution has proved its case beyond reasonable doubt. This Court is urged to find that the prosecution has discharged its burden and to enter convictions against all the accused persons,” the DPP submitted.

Justice Githua placed the three on their defence in January 2025, finding that a prima facie case had been established.

She acquitted all three on the second count, the murder of the unborn baby, ruling that under the “born alive” principle, the charge could not be sustained in law.

For Sharon’s family, nearly seven years of court appearances, grief and relentless pursuit of accountability now culminate in this verdict.

Melinda waits for a judge to tell her that her daughter’s death meant something. That someone will answer for it. That the system, which she has watched grind slowly through six years of adjournments, did not in the end fail Sharon the way everything else did.

“Who really killed Sharon, and why?” is the question that has hung over Kenya since that dark September night in 2018.