LA Times, part 3 of 3

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-kaiser10-2009feb10,0,3103290.story

From the Los Angeles Times

A Kenyan lawyer takes on a coldly familiar case

Mbuthi Gathenji focuses on the pieces that don't fit in the case of Father John Kaiser's violent death.

By Christopher Goffard
Last Of Three Parts

February 10, 2009

Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya — The deeper the lawyer probed, the more the case resembled a hall of mirrors, a maze of ambiguous characters and unknowable motives. There were hints of conspiracies, trap doors, scaffoldings of fact that vaporized into fiction. The trail was nearly three years old by the spring of 2003, when the lawyer's investigator headed deep into the countryside, working at night for protection, searching for witnesses.

The goal: to upend what had become the official narrative of Father John Kaiser's death. Embraced by the FBI and the Kenyan government, the story held that the 67-year-old American missionary had turned his long-barreled shotgun on himself along a dark road 50 miles from Nairobi.

The lawyer, Mbuthi Gathenji, had been enlisted by Kaiser's family and the Catholic Church to reexamine the case. He was in his early 50s, with graying hair and an air of wary circumspection informed by decades on the wrong side of a police state.

Poring over the FBI report, he saw what he considered a patchwork of bad inferences and tunnel-vision analysis, an eagerness to distort the meaning of Kaiser's behavior to fit its conclusion. As the agency portrayed it, Kaiser's conduct in his last days -- bouts of tears, erratic movements, displays of anxiety and fear -- reflected a mental unraveling.

To Gathenji, it seemed the behavior of a man who believed with good reason that killers were hunting him. One of the country's loudest dissidents, Kaiser had called for President Daniel Arap Moi to be tried at The Hague for inciting ethnic carnage and had accused a top minister of rape. He had ignored his church's pleas to leave the country and had received repeated death threats.

Despite his history of manic-depression, nothing in his final letters suggested derangement. He had never been known to attempt suicide. He left no note.

As Gathenji saw it, something crucial was missing from the scene where Kaiser's body was discovered: the pellets and wadding that his shotgun would have discharged when he was killed. They weren't found in the remains of his cranium or, despite searches over a wide radius, in the surrounding dirt and shrubs.

To many Kenyans, the case had a coldly familiar feel. It looked like a classic state-sanctioned hit, with a venerable foreign law enforcement agency called in to lend legitimacy to the investigation. It brought to mind Robert Ouko, the Kenyan foreign minister who attacked high-level corruption and turned up in a ravine in 1990, a gun beside his charred, mutilated body. Police called it suicide. To quell public clamor, Moi invited New Scotland Yard to investigate, then curtailed the probe when it pointed to members of his inner circle.

The case felt familiar to Gathenji in another, more personal way. His father had been the victim of an unpunished, politically charged slaying in September 1969, dragged from his home by fellow Kikuyus for refusing to swear an oath of tribal loyalty. Gathenji, 20 at the time, believed the attack was sanctioned by elements of the Kikuyu-dominated government of Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta.

"We knew that nothing would be done," Gathenji said. "That is exactly why I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to do something to find out the truth."

He represented Kenyans swept up in mass arrests and championed refugees uprooted in ethnic violence. Police once raided Gathenji's house and imprisoned him for five days. For years, he had watched his rearview mirror for the white cars of the secret police.

His legal battles and pro-democracy work had brought him into contact with Kaiser. He remembered the priest dropping by his office, always on a crusade, always in dusty shoes.

Now, studying photographs of the crime scene, Gathenji noticed how carefully a set of bedding had been arranged on the ground near Kaiser's body, as if the priest had been planning to sleep there. The neatness of the bedding seemed to reflect a Kenyan's conception of a punctilious Englishman. It didn't look like the handiwork of the priest he knew as "essentially a cowboy."

"It was arranged by someone with very foreign ideas about Father Kaiser," he said.

Preparing for the long-delayed inquest in the death, he unearthed a piece of evidence that never made the FBI's report. It was a firearms registry kept by rangers at the Masai Mara Game Reserve, an hour's drive from Kaiser's parish in the country's remote southwest corner.

The registry showed that a warden had checked out a big-game rifle on Aug. 15, 2000 -- eight days before the priest's death -- that was never returned. The warden, an illiterate Masai with two wives, was an in-law and fellow tribesman of Julius Sunkuli, the Cabinet minister the priest had accused of rape and corruption.

A source too frightened to go on the record told Gathenji's investigator that on the morning of Aug. 21, when Kaiser left his parish for his final drive to Nairobi, he had narrowly missed an ambush laid by three park wardens.

d

In the summer of 2003, as the inquest began in a courthouse outside Nairobi, the priest's older brother left his home in Santa Rosa, Calif., and boarded a flight to Kenya. Francis Kaiser, 72, would be among the first to testify.

The brothers had grown up on a dirt farm in Ottertail County, Minn., wandering the woods together and sleeping in the same bed. Francis remembered his brother as a "totally fearless" boy who did not hesitate to climb a windmill or plunge into a frozen pond to retrieve ducks they'd shot.

In a way, each brother had led the life the other had imagined for himself. John was the priest Francis thought he might be. Francis had the "good wife and cabinful of kids" John once spoke of wanting.

Francis thought of his brother as the John Wayne of priests, a cowboy of the cloth who possessed a certainty of the afterlife: "He didn't have the fear of death that the normal person has."

From the witness box, Francis insisted that suicide made little sense. His brother's shotgun had two barrels, but when it was found near his body, only the left one contained a spent shell. That was the barrel activated by squeezing the rear trigger. The right barrel, with the easier-to-reach front trigger, was empty, even though the priest had a live 12-gauge shell in the breast pocket of his jacket.

He knew his brother's habits with firearms. If he had two shells, Francis reasoned, he would have loaded both barrels, so he had a chance to fire twice. And if by some chance he had time to load just one, the shell would go in the right. Why load only the left?

"This was abnormal not only for John, but for anybody using the shotgun," he told the court.

Francis had brought the last letter he received from his brother. It was dated Aug. 17, 2000, six days before his death, and did not seem to reflect suicidal despair.

"I'm sitting on a veranda watching the world turn green again," the priest had written. "We have had a rather severe drought and the grass gone brown and short and cattle hungry. Then a great blessing and two inches of rain in the past two days so the birds are singing and lots of cows were dancing in the rain."

The letter reflected an aging man soberly confronting his mortality, wondering which of his family members "will be the first to finish it up here below." He wrote, "But at least I hope we can all meet again and have a fishing trip up in the border waters of Northern Minnesota, canoe country."

d

Nothing embodied the case's shifting, indecipherable quality more than a gaunt, soft- spoken young Masai named Francis Kantai. He had been Kaiser's close companion, a live-in catechist who served as a cultural bridge to the nomadic cattle herders of Masailand.

To puzzle out his ultimate loyalties, however, was to enter a mare's-nest. Over and over, people told Kaiser that Kantai could not be trusted. They suspected that he was a spy for Sunkuli. Those suspicions were stoked when, according to the parish housekeeper, Kantai let Sunkuli's men into the parish house, where the priest kept his papers.

Fanning suspicions further was Kantai's admission that he had led Sunkuli's men to a safe house where two women who had accused Sunkuli of rape were hiding. Kantai insisted that the men had held him at gunpoint, and that among them was a secret police agent named Ebu who had hounded him for years over Kaiser's activities.

Why did Kaiser, who was so wary of his enemies, keep Kantai so close? Did he fear pushing a man with intimate knowledge of his habits deeper into Sunkuli's arms? There was a further complication in their relationship: One of Kaiser's cousins had fallen for Kantai during an extended visit to the parish in 2000. They were married, and Kantai was soon to travel to Nebraska to live with her. They had a baby son named after the priest.

After Kaiser's death, Kantai told investigators that Sunkuli had once urged him to poison the priest. But at the inquest, he said, "I wish to confess to court that I lied." He had been angry with Sunkuli, he explained. Believing him responsible for Kaiser's death, he made up the story.

And he offered another story, one he claimed he had forgotten in previous interviews. Not long before Kaiser's death, he said, he came upon Kaiser watching a video of a priest shooting himself. Kaiser seemed fixated by the spectacle, replaying it over and over.

Kantai did not know the video's title, and it could not be found. Gathenji believed it a fabrication.

Gathenji confronted Kantai with an informant's allegation: that he had tried to lure the priest into an ambush in the Masai Mara reserve. To the lawyer, Kantai looked like a man in anguish, about to surrender to tears.

No, Kantai said. He loved the priest. "He was like a father. I had not thought of life without him. I felt as if some part of me had left me."

d

Zeroing in on what had happened in the Masai Mara, Gathenji summoned Anne Sawoyo, one of the two women who had accused Sunkuli of rape. She said that in July 2000, a month before his death, Kaiser tracked her down at an isolated lodge at the game reserve after learning that Sunkuli's men were holding her captive there.

The priest hoped to smuggle her out in his truck, but she was too afraid, and he left without her. Later that day, she said, she overheard Samuel Kortom, the senior warden who had checked out the rifle that went missing, discuss the priest's visit with another warden, saying, "He is lucky -- today would have been his day."

It was "an open secret" at the lodge, she said, that rangers planned to kill Kaiser and plant a dead animal beside him so it would appear that he had met his death as a poacher. Douglas Sikawa, a senior warden, confirmed that there were rumors afloat in the Mara that three rangers loyal to Sunkuli were plotting an ambush.

How did it add up? Kaiser's body was found more than 100 miles east of that area. To Gathenji, the evidence suggested that multiple murder plots had been in play.

Gathenji tried to find Florence Mpayei, Sunkuli's other accuser. A women's rights activist said Mpayei had called her from Sunkuli's house in Nairobi, not long before the priest's death, to relay that Sunkuli's men were talking about Kaiser and seemed to be planning something. That made Mpayei a potentially explosive witness, perhaps the key to the whole case, but Gathenji and his investigator could not find her.

One by one, the rangers walked to the witness box and denied everything. Finally, Sunkuli entered, his stout frame filling out a sharp suit. He denied that he had any motive for killing the priest. He did not even have a grudge against him. Yes, he had recently lost his parliamentary seat, but he could always run again. Still, Sunkuli acknowledged that he had been worried enough about the priest's role in the rape charges to complain to Kaiser's bishop about it.

Gathenji asked when he had learned of Kaiser's death. Sunkuli said it was at 10 that morning, about the time everyone else did.

Gathenji responded, "You knew of the death at 6 a.m. because you were involved in the arrangement."

"That is ridiculous," Sunkuli said.

d

More than three years had passed since the inquest began, and in early 2007 Gathenji wanted to put the FBI on the stand. He would ask the agents about the leads they had failed to pursue or had dismissed as irrelevant, the ones that led to the secret police, to the Mara rangers, to Kantai and Sunkuli.

He would ask them to acknowledge a conflict between their avowed aim to discover the truth and their wish to stay on friendly terms with the Kenyan government. Even as agents collaborated with Kenyan police on this case, after all, the FBI was depending on its Kenyan counterparts to prosecute what it regarded as its most important case: the 1998 terrorist bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.

He would ask why they ignored an unexplained thumbprint of Kaiser's blood on the door of his truck. He would ask how they had concluded that he died at the spot where his body was found.

In a letter, the U.S. Embassy said the government "fully supports" the FBI's presence at the inquest, promising that agents would be available in Nairobi on March 5. The FBI missed the date, citing the difficulty of getting agents who were scattered on different assignments to Kenya at the same time.

Later, FBI agent Bill Corbett offered another explanation, one the court said it never received. He said the FBI planned to attend until it became clear that Kaiser's family would not release his psychiatric records. Without them, Corbett said, the FBI "would be handcuffed and not be able to tell the whole story."

A new date was set; the FBI did not appear. And another; still the FBI did not show.

d

In Gathenji's mind, there were two plausible theories of how Kaiser met his death. Someone might have lured him to that dark road for an ambush. Perhaps he'd received a call -- someone pleading for help, playing on his gallantry -- that drew him from the safety of his bishop's house near Nairobi, where he had planned to sleep that night. But he'd told no one about it.

Or what if the priest had been captured or killed at the bishop's house? That would mean the security guard who reported seeing him leave in his truck -- supposedly one of the last people to have seen Kaiser alive -- was lying. The guard could not be found to question: He had vanished after Kaiser's death.

By this theory, Kaiser had never visited the remote homestead where villagers said they saw him standing on a knoll shortly before his death. Nor was it Kaiser who appeared that same night at a gas station in Naivasha, near where his body was found. Had that man been a double, a plant meant to conceal the fact that Kaiser had already been killed elsewhere?

One of the witnesses who placed Kaiser at the gas station was a warden at the local prison, but a pump attendant who knew him insisted that the warden had not been there that night.

"Someone was desperate to make sure Kaiser was put in Naivasha," Gathenji said. "That shows a very elaborate plan."

The warden could not be questioned either. He was dead, reportedly of a heart attack. So was an eminent Kenyan pathologist, killed in a car wreck before he could testify on his finding that Kaiser's gunshot wound pointed to murder. Dead, too, under vague circumstances, was Ebu, the special police agent said to have been following Kaiser.

d

Seven years to the month after the priest's death, on Aug. 1, 2007, Gathenji sat in the crowded courtroom to hear Magistrate Maureen Odero read her findings. She was adamant: It was murder.

Pointing to the absence of shotgun pellets or gunpowder residue on his hands, she determined that Kaiser had been killed elsewhere and placed beside the dark road. If he had died there, she reasoned, there would have been more blood at the scene, and the recovered brain matter should have been embedded with more dirt, grass and twigs.

Given that Kaiser's shotgun was 3 feet long, she found it a "physical impossibility" that an arthritic 67-year-old man could have reached the trigger with the muzzle placed behind his ear. It struck her as more plausible that he was forced to his knees and shot from behind.

As for the FBI report, she declared it "superficial" and "seriously flawed." Noting that the agency had failed to appear for the inquest, she said, "This court can only conclude the FBI did not consider their report one worth defending."

Neither the FBI nor the Kenyan police had supplied a ballistics report, which she described as "a crucial missing link." Without it, there was no proof that the priest's shotgun had killed him, nor even the "pretense at any serious or meaningful investigations."

She said there was no evidence implicating Sunkuli in the killing. But she was troubled by the "evasive and contradictory" testimony of Kantai, and she called for deeper investigation of him and of the Mara rangers.

That Kaiser was murdered, she concluded, was not a mystery. "The only mystery is why the police failed to investigate this matter with the seriousness and diligence that it deserved."

Back at his office, Gathenji fired an e-mail to Francis Kaiser: We won.

d

The reinvestigation demanded by Odero has been underway for more than a year, but there have been no arrests, and many who championed the inquest don't anticipate any.

"I expect the actual killers are probably dead," said Kaiser's sister, Carolita Mahoney.

Nor did it seem likely that Moi would be called to account, either for Kaiser's death or for the carnage that attended his 24 years in power. In 2002, voters swept his party from power, and he retired to his vast estates as one of Africa's richest men.

For the Kaiser family, the removal of the suicide verdict might have to be enough. Said Mary Mahoney Weaver, the priest's niece: "We feel vindicated. John's name is no longer marred."

The ruling did nothing, however, to budge the FBI agents who handled the case. Corbett called the magistrate's reasoning "fanciful" and maintained that untreated manic-depression, not an assassin, was the culprit.

"Ultimately, he died of a disease," the FBI agent said. "It's not something that everyone is comfortable talking about."

The inquest did little to untangle the psychological mysteries at the heart of the case.

"I always got the sense that John Kaiser was looking for martyrdom at a deep unconscious level," said Father Tom Keane, who lived with him in the year before he died. "John Kaiser kind of wanted to go with a bang."

Paul Boyle, one of the last priests to see Kaiser alive, at first thought suicide a real possibility. Looking into Kaiser's eyes, he had seen the despair of a man hunted and tormented beyond endurance. With the magistrate's ruling, Boyle had to reconsider. But there were riddles that taunted, such as: In an ambush, why didn't Kaiser, the former paratrooper, use his shotgun to defend himself?

Boyle recalled a night long ago in the Masai Mara when Kaiser leaned out the door of his moving truck and shot an impala in the distant bush. He thought about his final moments. He considered the scenarios.

"He's faced with the murderers, and he's got a choice. Kaiser has the gun. No one can shoot like Kaiser."

But ending the life of another man -- or several of them -- might have broken him. "Did he say, 'They've come to do what they've come to do?' Is that suicide? I don't know. It could be martyrdom."

He could see him handing over his shotgun and sinking to his knees in the darkness.

d

Even to those he baptized, to those who understood the nature of his vows, there remained something bewildering about the life he chose. Big families were a given, childlessness a calamity in the remote parishes he had served over 36 years in Kenya, and here was a man who would leave no offspring, no link to the earth walking upright when he left it. His legacy would be measured in other ways.

Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and a pioneer of Kenya's pro-democracy movement, said Kaiser represented "the people's voice in an era when ordinary people did not have a voice."

His importance grew after his death, she said, when he became a byword for the Moi regime's ruthlessness. The ditch where Kaiser's body was found became not just a memorial site but a place where the opposition mobilized. In the long campaign to oust Moi's government, she said, "he became a very powerful symbol."

His battle on behalf of Sunkuli's accusers was another element of his legacy. In a country where rape went widely unpunished and the rights of poor women were scant, the fact that a powerful minister was summoned to court to answer the charges represented a crack in a culture of impunity, even if Sunkuli ultimately avoided prosecution.

There were other measures, and one could be found in a story Francis Kaiser told.

When he and his wife went to Kenya in September 2003 for the inquest, they attended a Mass in his brother's honor in Nyangusu, a western town where the priest had spent many years. Francis was asked to stand and bless the crowd.

Afterward, a family brought their baby for him to hold, and the child was named John Kaiser. Francis learned that the church was full of young boys -- infants and toddlers and kids already running -- who had been named after his brother.

It was the same, he found, in village after village. There were hundreds across the countryside, maybe more.

His brother had disappeared into the red soil, perhaps along with the truth about his death, but you could travel anywhere now and find John Kaiser.

christopher.goffard@latimes.com

LA Times article, Part 2 of 3

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-kaiser9-2009feb09,0,1770768.story

From the Los Angeles Times

The demons of a troubled priest

John Kaiser was an obstinate man who clashed with his missionary bosses and stood up to Kenya's government. An FBI investigation of his death also turned up more personal problems.

By Christopher Goffard

February 9, 2009

REPORTING FROM NAIROBI, KENYA — Within the vaulted basilica where he lay in a glass-lid coffin, the transformation was already underway.

In life, Father John Kaiser had been a troublemaker, an obstinate and single-minded man who railed against church passivity and clashed with his bishops, his missionary bosses, his fellow priests. Now, it was possible to ignore the rough edges and complicated history. Now, Catholic leaders were declaring him a martyr to the faith, a man whose crusade against his adopted country's dictatorial regime had ended in his assassination.

Outside the basilica, thousands crammed the streets of Nairobi in mourning and in rage that day in August 2000. Among masses of Kenyans, Kaiser had become an instant byword for the cruelty of President Daniel Arap Moi's police state.

After 22 years of Moi's misrule, Kenyans were ready for such a symbol. The president's face stared from every shilling note in their pockets and the wall of every shop they entered, and they had no trouble envisioning his hand steering the American priest to his grave. On everyone's lips was a litany of political murders, unexplained car wrecks, implausible suicides.

After the funeral Mass, a church van carried Kaiser's body onto the bad roads that led through the grasslands and into the remote western parishes he had served for decades. Villagers streamed forth from their farms and mud-walled huts, waving verdant branches -- a sign of peace -- as they ran alongside the procession.

Finally, the coffin traveled to the priest's last home, to the hilly green country near the Serengeti Plain called Lolgorien, where Masai warriors in bright red wrappings leaned against their spears and watched as the hole was shoveled out, 12 feet deep to deter the beasts of the veldt. Children of the parish who used to swarm around the priest now climbed into a big ficus tree overhanging his grave, squeezing side by side until it seemed impossible that the branches could support so many of them, to see him sent into the clay.

***

For Johnnie Carson, U.S. ambassador to Kenya, the priest's death was a tinderbox. As he told his staff, it might "change the normal orbit of U.S. and Kenyan bilateral relations."

Carson prided himself on his patience and discretion. Though some in Kenya's pro- democracy crowd considered him unduly cozy with Moi, Carson believed that his approach gave him access to the top when he needed it.

Now was such a time. The dead man was an American citizen and a leading dissident -- a former U.S. Army paratrooper who lived without electricity in one of Kenya's poorest corners, survived on game meat and had come to regard himself, after 36 years on the continent, as an African. He had not only denounced Moi but had fought to bring rape charges against one of his top ministers, Julius Sunkuli.

And so late on the afternoon of Aug. 24, 2000, the day Kaiser's body was found, Carson marched into the stately Nairobi offices of Kenya's attorney general.

Let the FBI help investigate, Carson urged. The FBI had forensic expertise, he argued, and its presence would show that the Kenyan regime had nothing to hide.

The FBI's agent in Kenya, a former Marine pilot named Bill Corbett, was in the room that day and recalled Carson's words: "The bureau has to be able to follow the facts wherever they go."

The attorney general said he would need to consult. Of course, His Excellency the President would have to approve.

Soon, just as the ambassador was boarding a plane for Washington, Corbett received a letter on official Kenyan letterhead inviting the FBI's assistance. He chased the ambassador to the airport, onto the tarmac and onto the plane to hand him the envelope.

Carson was pleased. Whatever the truth proved to be, the FBI's involvement would allay suspicions of a coverup, he reasoned. In this, he was mistaken.

***

Three FBI agents joined Corbett in Nairobi and fanned out across the country, accompanied by plainclothesmen from the Kenyan police. It was to be a joint investigation. The Kenyans would translate the words of Swahili-speaking witnesses. They would provide helicopters to reach remote villages. They would sit close during interviews.

This presented an obvious problem. Who would risk telling the Americans anything in the presence of Kenyan cops, for decades an integral part of Moi's apparatus of fear? As Kenya's minister of internal security, Sunkuli himself oversaw the very police charged with investigating the case, including the rape allegations against him.

Back in the United States, in September and October 2000, both houses of Congress passed resolutions condemning Kaiser's "assassination." Paul Wellstone, the senator from Kaiser's home state of Minnesota, cited the slayings of five other Catholic clerics and human rights workers in Kenya.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright promised Congress that she would monitor the investigation. "Clearly, there are questions that we have about various aspects of how Kenya operates, but it is a country with which we deal," she said.

Her remark encapsulated the U.S. government's attitude toward Kenya. It was impossible to ignore Moi's reliance on brutality. And yet the country was the commercial hub of East Africa and was perceived as a key partner in the battle against Islamist terrorism. This point had assumed greater urgency after an Al Qaeda cell bombed the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in August 1998, killing more than 200 people, including 12 Americans.

The accused bombers were to stand trial in federal court in New York in a few months. An internal FBI memo described the Kenyan police as "vital partners in our aspirations to succeed with what the U.S. attorney general refers to as the most important DOJ [Department of Justice] prosecution of 2001."

***

At the nexus of the two cases stood Corbett, who had forged tight professional friendships with Kenyan police during the bombing investigation and was now central to the Kaiser probe.

A Catholic, Corbett admired the priest's willingness to give up a safe, soft life in the U.S. to ease the suffering of a troubled country. He had closely followed accounts of Kaiser's duel with the regime. Still, Corbett would say, his job was to remain at arm's length, dispassionate, guided only by the evidence.

It was crucial, first, to reconstruct Kaiser's last days -- the circuit that led the 67-year-old priest from his parish house in the bush to a ditch about 50 miles northwest of Nairobi, where he was found with the back of his head blown off.

In interviews with church associates, villagers and others, the jagged outlines of the story came into view.

On Aug. 19, 2000, Kaiser had been summoned to Nairobi to meet Giovanni Tonucci, the pope's representative in Kenya, on an unspecified but important matter. The priest, who had ignored repeated church pleas to leave the country for his safety, feared he would be ordered out of Kenya. He wept at Mass and asked for prayers.

On Aug. 21, he made the long drive from his parish house in Lolgorien to his bishop's compound just outside Nairobi. To some fellow churchmen, he seemed unhinged and fearful. He spoke of being followed. He said he hadn't slept in three days. He read in the newspaper that one of the women who had accused Sunkuli of rape -- a case Kaiser had been pushing for months -- was withdrawing her complaint.

On Aug. 22, over breakfast, Kaiser said he hadn't slept again. "Why do I feel so paranoid?" he asked. As a missionary brother drove him to his appointment with the papal nuncio, Kaiser slumped low in the back seat, his jacket covering his face. He told the brother he felt "close to a breakdown."

At their meeting, the nuncio asked for Kaiser's views on a successor to a retiring bishop. Contrary to his fears, Kaiser was not being exiled.

Relieved, he went to his missionary order's walled compound in Nairobi and socialized with friends and colleagues. He played a cheerful game of croquet. That night, a nun saw him in the chapel, bent on one knee, his head in his heads.

On Aug. 23, he dropped off a thin envelope with the nuncio -- its contents would never be made public -- and declined an offer to stay and chat. He left a note at a priest's quarters nearby, thanking him for teaching him Swahili six years earlier.

Over lunch at the missionary compound, he wept silently. A worried missionary brother, wanting to keep him close, took him to visit a church construction site. Kaiser buoyantly greeted every worker he saw. Later that day, Kaiser approached an old friend, Father Paul Boyle, and shook his hand, saying, "I don't know if I will be alive tomorrow."

Though he was expected to spend the night at the missionary compound, he left without explanation and drove to the bishop's house, arriving about 6 p.m. He was brusque. He asked for a room. He needed rest.

Another priest watched Kaiser head upstairs to a second-floor room, and, after a while, heard footsteps descend the stairs and Kaiser's truck rumble away into the darkness. He found Kaiser's room empty and the bedding stripped.

Retracing Kaiser's trail from there became increasingly tricky. Kaiser supposedly had been spotted at a remote homestead north of Nairobi. When the FBI and Kenyan investigators arrived with their notepads, villagers told a strange story.

It happened about 8:30 that night, they said. It was suppertime and solid dark. They heard a truck pull up and went out to look. They saw a white priest remove "a long gun" from the truck and carry it up a knoll, where he stared into the night. A villager asked whether there was any trouble. Hakuna shida, said the priest. No problem.

Then came the oddest part. As a village elder approached, the priest offered him the shotgun. Like a gift.

When the elder refused, the priest apologized in Swahili. Pole sana. He carried the gun back to his truck, pitched the vehicle into reverse, and backed past the house so hurriedly that he scraped a downspout and struck a hedge. Then he sped off "like he was trying to escape something."

What was Kaiser doing there? Why would he attempt to give away his gun? Did he sense himself spiraling into despair and worry that he would use it on himself? Or, Corbett wondered, did a delirious, sleep-deprived Kaiser think he was surrendering his gun to a pursuing assassin? "Maybe he's tired of running and thinks, 'They're here,' " he said.

Other witnesses added glimpses of Kaiser's last night. About 11:30, employees at a gas station in the Rift Valley town of Naivasha reported seeing him pull up in his pickup and hack off a loose mud guard with an ax.

At a pecan farm nearby, a few hundred yards from where Kaiser's body was found, a guard recalled hearing the rattling, thumping sound of a passing vehicle. The guard, fearing attack from one of the area's armed gangs, became hyper-vigilant. The vehicle passed again, and again. Then he heard a bang.

As Corbett recalled, the story had "the flavor" of truth.

The crucial part was what was missing. There had been no sound of a struggle. No voices. No cars in pursuit.

If assassins had targeted Kaiser, how would they have followed his erratic, hours-long route from Nairobi to Naivasha -- what Corbett called a "bumblebee trail" -- without being spotted?

"The real world doesn't work like that," Corbett said. "There wasn't a lot to suggest this was predator and prey. What there was to go on was his behavior."

In that behavior, FBI profilers discerned a "manic cycling from high to low," as Corbett put it, a mind unmoored. His fear that he'd be kicked out of Kenya had been a "life stressor," and the collapse of the rape charges against Sunkuli had been "a significant disappointment," according to the FBI's report on the case. His body was failing too -- prostate cancer, arthritis, bone spurs in his neck.

Agents saw an uncommonly tough man whose fortitude had nevertheless raveled out over too many hard years.

Interviewing those closest to Kaiser, they uncovered a side of him that few had known.

In 1969, the priest had been committed for psychiatric evaluation during a brief stint at the Albany, N.Y., quarters of his missionary society. As told by Kaiser's sister in Minnesota, Carolita Mahoney, he had argued with an older priest, who complained that Kaiser was mentally impaired and possessed a gun.

A Minnesota priest named Bill Vos told the FBI about a later episode. Kaiser was staying with Vos in St. Cloud in the early 1970s when he fell into a serious depression. At the dining table, Vos recalled, Kaiser sat with his head down, tears filling his eyes. Vos arranged for him to see a psychiatrist, and he was hospitalized again.

In the early 1980s, there was a third hospitalization, this time after a confrontation with his brother Joe during a visit to Minnesota. A doctor at St. Joseph's Hospital in St. Paul treated him with lithium.

Kaiser suffered from manic-depression, his sister told the FBI. The episodes began with sleeplessness, followed by a state of extreme agitation. He said he did not need his lithium in Africa.

Examining Kaiser's years in the U.S. Army, the agents learned that he had been demoted from sergeant in the 1950s. The military could not find the records to supply the details. As his brother Francis told it, Kaiser had refused to back down from racist townsfolk in Ft. Bragg, N.C., who had objected when black soldiers were assigned to guard a barracks housing white nurses.

Given Kaiser's refusal to duck confrontations, the scene where his body was found presented a riddle. If attacked, wouldn't the priest -- a former paratrooper and expert shot -- have put up a fight? Yet there were no signs of struggle. Sheets had been spread out on the ground, as if for a bed, and left undisturbed.

Two independent pathologists -- one enlisted by the church, the other by a human rights group -- studied the entry wound close-up. Their conclusion: The shot that obliterated the back of Kaiser's head had entered behind his right ear from a distance of at least 6 inches and as much as 3 feet. Since it seemed impossible for Kaiser to have pointed the long-barreled gun at himself from such a range, murder was the only explanation.

The FBI enlisted its own independent expert, Vincent DiMaio, based in Texas. He was an authority on gunshot wounds. Studying blurry photographs and an autopsy report, he found that the barrel could have been touching Kaiser's head when the shot was fired. DiMaio noted that there was blood spatter on the priest's knee and lower leg, but none on his lap. In his view, this suggested Kaiser had placed the shotgun butt on the ground, with the barrel angled behind his right ear, and had folded his body forward to reach the trigger, thereby shielding his lap when blood sprayed onto his legs.

In weighing the evidence, Corbett recalled what a prosecutor once told him about the nature of proof. Picture yourself at the edge of a precipice, with a 10-foot gap separating you from the other side. To get there, you need a plank at least 10 feet and 1 inch long. Two 5-foot planks won't do, nor will five 2-foot planks.

Murder theories abounded, but did the assembled evidence bridge the chasm? Maybe a simpler explanation would.

And so on April 19, 2001, FBI agents stood at a news conference at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi alongside Ambassador Carson, Kenyan police and the country's attorney general. The Americans praised the Kenyans for their cooperation and gave their verdict: An emotionally troubled Kaiser had killed himself.

The Kenyan government wasted no time declaring itself exonerated. A front-page story in the Kenya Times, the state mouthpiece, announced that the FBI's verdict "drove the final nail" into the coffin of "a sick man."

***

Whatever else people said about Kaiser, there was one point of consensus: His Catholicism was the "terribly old-fashioned" kind. Heaven and hell were not metaphors, but actual locations, and certain sins were inexpiable.

Kaiser liked to quote from G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy," a defense of classic Catholicism in which the author assesses suicide as "the ultimate and absolute evil."

"The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world," Chesterton wrote. "There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer."

By that logic, Kaiser had tumbled from martyr to suicide, from heaven to hell, at the stroke of the FBI's pen.

Few who knew him could bear the verdict. David Durenberger, a former Minnesota senator who went to high school with him, was in disbelief. "There's something about 'The FBI says,' 'The FBI declares' -- it's pretty hard to overcome that one," he said. "You can't change the gravestone once you've carved it."

The only apparent remedy lay in a vestige of British colonial law, which provided for an inquest -- an inquisitorial proceeding in open court -- in the case of mysterious deaths. To the church and Kaiser's family, it represented the best hope of casting light on evidence the FBI might have missed or ignored. But Moi's attorney general refused to grant one. Neither the Kenyan nor U.S. governments wanted the matter reopened.

As the 2002 Kenyan elections approached, there was fear that Moi would again use violence to preserve his rule. Then a shocking thing happened. After Kenyans jeered the aging president and trounced his party, he surrendered power peacefully.

Armed with more than 100,000 petition signatures, Catholic bishops met with the new president to urge an inquest into Kaiser's death. In April 2003, after two years of limbo, Kaiser's family and supporters received word: The inquest could proceed.

They had four months to prepare.

christopher.goffard@latimes.com

Los Angeles Times article, part 1 of 3

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-kaiser8-2009feb08,0,984334.story

From the Los Angeles Times

Priest's mission in Kenya went beyond church

John Kaiser was warned by other priests that his style in confronting the Moi government was too reckless. Kaiser knew he was in danger but kept speaking out -- until he could no longer do so.

By Christopher Goffard
First Of Three Parts

February 8, 2009

Reporting from Lolgorien, Kenya — Wherever he went, the man of God carried his shotgun. Like its owner, the double-barreled 12-gauge was old and broken in places, dusty from miles of hard African road. He kept the splintered stock bound together with a length of black rubber, and he believed it might be his only protection, save for the good Lord and his American name, in a country that had never felt more dangerous.

By day he ventured deep into the savanna to visit the scattered churches of his vast parish. The shotgun rested on the seat of his Toyota pickup, beside his rosary beads and Mass kit. His faithful arrived from the hills, bright in their tribal wrappings, to hear him speak in Swahili of the risen Savior, to receive a wafer on the tongue.

His red-brick parish house sat at the edge of an immense valley rolling away toward the Serengeti Plain, and at night the shotgun stayed with him as he double-checked the locks and walked down the hallway toward his bare room. Stayed with him as he climbed into his narrow metal-frame bed and slept fitfully, hyenas cackling and whooping in the dark outside his window.

Stayed with him that morning in February 1999 when he fixed his Roman collar, climbed into his truck and drove for hours on bad roads that played havoc with his arthritic neck. Finally, he arrived at a plain-looking government building called Nakuru County Hall.

This was the setting for the Akiwumi Commission, a tribunal created to probe the causes of tribal clashes that had cost more than 1,000 lives across Kenya in recent years. Its real purpose, many suspected, was to conceal the government's central role in the violence.

He entered the crowded room, a broad-shouldered, long-limbed man with work-worn hands and thinning white hair. Three judges loomed from the bench in powdered wigs, a vestige of British colonial justice. He took a seat before a microphone at a scuffed table.

As he began to talk, his voice steady and composed, it was impossible to tell that he had been living in a state of terror for weeks, afraid that he'd never be allowed to speak, afraid that once he started, he'd never live to finish.

Nor would anyone have predicted that this obscure, deeply eccentric American churchman would become a national hero to Kenyans, his name a rallying cry.

Apart from his church and the tribes he had served during 35 years in a green, malarial patch of East Africa, few had heard of John Kaiser, a missionary and former U.S. Army paratrooper from Minnesota. He had not yet been delivered from his aching body and messy humanity to abstraction, a clean and perfect symbol.

*****

He arrived in Kenya in December 1964, stepping off a boat into the harsh equatorial sunlight with an Army duffel bag under his arm. His missionary society, the London-based Mill Hill order, needed priests in Africa. He was 32 and just ordained.

Assigned to the fertile highlands of western Kenya, he built churches across the countryside, quick, crude structures of red earth and river-bottom sand. A stout 6-foot-2, the priest went up ladders with pockets stuffed with bricks and pulled roof beams after him by rope.

He learned to carry a bar of brown soap to patch cracks in his truck's engine, and he sat on a crate when the front seat fell apart. He learned to carry holy water in a Coke bottle, and when he forgot the communion wafers, he used a chapati, a doughy flatbread, to transform into the Savior's body.

He baptized and buried, heard confession in the shade of eucalyptus trees, watched AIDS and malaria carry away thousands. He chopped firewood for widows, built rough-hewn schools, waded swollen streams to reach the faithful. He administered the sacraments to a dying 18-year-old girl, who received them serenely, and he wrote, "At such times, I would not trade being a priest for any position."

He hauled bodies to ancestral burial plots deep in the brush, and prayed them into the earth.

The country, with its fierce light and impenetrable dark, its jumbo maize rows and seasons of starvation, was big enough to contain his clashing selves: the priest and the paratrooper, the healer and the hunter, the collar and the gun, the man of obedience who chafed at authority.

There had always been two John Kaisers, at times coexisting uneasily. Growing up on a Minnesota dirt farm, he lavished as much attention on the rifle sights in his war drawings as on the sheep's wool in a schoolhouse nativity scene.

During a peacetime stint with the 82nd Airborne at Ft. Bragg, N.C., he was the gung-ho soldier who mastered bayonet thrusts, leapt into the skies from a Flying Boxcar and knelt in the chapel wondering if he could take a life.

He was the jocular bush missionary who pumped every hand he could find and who retreated for hours to the solitude of the savanna.

He broke bones in motorcycle spills, survived typhoid and hepatitis and a roof beam crashing on his neck. A crack shot, he would vanish into the elephant grass with his shotgun, stalking wildebeests and impalas, wart hogs and zebras. He hacked up the meat with his ax and distributed it among the schools.

He whittled the stocks of his guns and made his own bullets. He shook in half-rounds to conserve gunpowder and to mute the noise when he hunted, in case a game warden was within earshot. Poaching had been outlawed since the late 1970s, but that was one of man's laws and therefore negotiable.

*****

Kaiser chronicled his life in letters to friends and family, tallying the animals he had killed, writing home for a crossbow, describing close brushes with lions. The letters also recorded his disenchantment with President Daniel Arap Moi, a man he had once regarded as a "great Christian prince."

Moi took power in 1978, succeeding independence hero Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, the country's largest ethnic group. Moi came from the smaller, weaker Kalenjin tribe and had none of Kenyatta's magnetism.

Yet he would become one of the continent's longest-reigning dictators. Moi gutted judicial independence, outlawed opposition parties and held enemies in torture chambers, naked in fetid water.

Tribal territories had been scrambled under the British and later Kenyatta, and Moi exploited the long-simmering resentments. He made a practice of wholesale land-stealing, rewarding allies and dispossessing rival groups.

In the late 1980s, Kaiser, then working in the Kisii diocese in western Kenya, watched thousands of peasant farmers streaming through the countryside with their belongings. Political bosses had unleashed Masai warriors to oust them from their land, he wrote, burning their homes and destroying their schools.

Kaiser brought the news to his bishop, Tiberius Mugendi, an aging Kenyan whom he regarded as a spiritual father. Impossible, Mugendi said. The involvement of government forces would mean the sanction of Moi, and Moi was the country's father.

"Like Pontius Pilate I washed my hands on the grounds that I had plenty of other work in a busy parish," Kaiser wrote. "In so doing I stored up more fuel for a long hot purgatory."

Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and an end to reflexive Western support for Moi, who had cast himself as a bulwark against Marxism. Donor nations insisted on free elections.

Moi grudgingly approved multiparty politics in late 1991, but the months that followed seemed to bear out his warning -- or, as many saw it, his threat -- that in a country of divided ethnic loyalties, democracy would lead to bloodshed. To ensure his party's supremacy, Moi launched militias into war against opposition strongholds.

As villages erupted in a pandemonium of flame, arrows and machetes, Kaiser spoke up in church meetings, questioning Mugendi's refusal to speak out forcefully. He also attacked the bishop's judgment in running the diocese, his choice of a school headmistress, his method of questioning catechists. Kaiser's conduct breached a deep-dyed cultural prohibition: An African bishop, like a president, was a father figure not to be challenged.

"My conscience is clear and I will not apologize for any of my statements or opinions. I can always admit & lament the fact that I am an undiplomatic clod, but for me that is not the point," Kaiser wrote a friend in June 1992.

Other priests warned Kaiser that his style was "too American," too confrontational. Undeterred, he put his complaints in a letter and distributed it around the church. The bishop sent word to Kaiser's missionary society: Remove this priest from my diocese.

Kaiser, who had spent decades with the Kisii people, was devastated. He would not leave without Mugendi's direct order. For hours he waited outside the bishop's house in Kisii, demanding to see him. Mugendi emerged and climbed into his car. He refused to acknowledge the priest.

"I want your blessing," Kaiser said, planting himself on his knees before the car. He stayed that way until the bishop relented, dismissing him with a quick wave, his hand tracing a cross in the air.

*****

That was how, exiled from Kisii, he found himself appointed chaplain of a starving hillside tent city 100 miles to the east. It was July 1994. He was 61. The place was called Maela, and Kaiser said he learned more about the Moi regime's cruelty in his six months there than in the preceding three decades.

Of Maela, people remembered the dust. They tasted it in their teeth and coughed it into their hands and slept with it in their blankets. It enveloped the polyethylene hovels where families huddled against the cold. It coated the wattle-and-daub shack where Kaiser lay at night, unable to sleep for the wailing that reached him.

Ghastly accidents were common in the cramped tents. Children jostled cooking pots and were scalded by boiling water. Infants were asphyxiated by charcoal smoke. Disease flourished. "This terrible place," he called it. "A wasteland."

The refugees, mostly from the Kikuyu tribe, a bastion of the opposition, had been chased from their farms by rangers, police officers and Masai warriors. When word of the conditions reached the international press, Moi decided to erase the camp. As government men razed it on Dec. 23, 1994, police restrained Kaiser. He watched as the tents blazed and refugees were beaten and herded onto trucks to be scattered unsheltered across the countryside.

Four days later, police officers came for Kaiser and several hundred people he was protecting in a church. He announced that he would not go peacefully. They overpowered him, cuffed his wrists behind his back and carried him to their Land Rover. The truck lurched through the night, police boots crushing Kaiser's limbs and head against the metal floor. Then they dumped him outside a church.

"A great grief," Kaiser called his removal from the refugees. Later, he would brag about how it took a pack of police to get an old man into their truck. The newspapers reported his arrest. He had become a spectacle, albeit still a minor one.

*****

That is what brought him, finally, to a far-flung brick house in the heart of Masailand. His new bishop had sent him all the way to the country's southwestern edge, to a lonely township called Lolgorien. "No doubt to protect me," Kaiser wrote.

It was a place where Masai herdsmen used thorned acacia branches to shield their mud-hut villages from lions at night. Even in his 60s, Kaiser was quick enough to kill a rabbit with a stone or a dik-dik with a thrown ax. Enlisting villagers, he built a plain red-brick church topped with corrugated metal, like many he'd thrown up across the countryside.

Maela haunted him. At his parish house, he wrote a short manuscript about his experiences there and sent it to everyone he could think of: friends, church leaders, his missionary society. He wrote to Paul Muite, an opposition politician who had befriended him, and asked for help getting it published. People warned him it could get him deported or killed.

"I want all to know that if I disappear from the scene, because the bush is vast and the hyenas many, that I am not planning any accident, nor, God forbid, any self-destruction," Kaiser wrote.

Crisscrossing the countryside, he amassed the ingredients of an indictment. He gathered land deeds from dispossessed farmers. He documented government calls for the purge of non-Masai from the Great Rift Valley. As villagers told him their sins, the ritual of confession became a window on the country's subterranean history, its narrative of land and blood.

His body was breaking down. He flew to the United States to undergo treatment for prostate cancer. He wore a neck brace to relieve the agony of crushed vertebrae and bone spurs. Against an osteopath's advice, he roamed the hills on his motorbike to reach the Masai, and spent nights in their dung-and-ash huts, returning home crawling with lice and fleas.

As elections loomed in December 1997, ethnic carnage again racked the country. Moi held on to power through fraud and mass evictions. At church meetings, Kaiser railed against the church's passivity, what he called "the scandal of our lack of leadership." Among his targets was his new bishop, an Englishman named Colin Davies, who would tell Kaiser, "Look, don't provoke too much."

By now, Kaiser was accustomed to making his colleagues uncomfortable. Sensible clergymen knew how vulnerable a parish house could be, how speaking up too loudly endangered not just yourself but those around you. To do the work of tending to people's souls, the thinking went, the church depended on the government's goodwill.

Kaiser's logic was different. Wasn't the church's role to alleviate suffering, and wasn't the country's "paramount evil," its fratricidal violence, the handiwork of the regime? "Why then do we so easily accept the admonition of government ministers that we who are religious should 'keep off politics'?" Kaiser wrote. "Is the exaggerated adulation given to President Moi by so many leaders, even religious leaders, given out of true respect or fear?"

*****

It was a truism in Kenya that when Moi needed a delaying tactic, a distraction, a smoke screen, he convened a commission. The stated aim of the panel launched in July 1998 under Justice Akilano Akiwumi was to look into the tribal clashes that had claimed more than 1,000 lives in the last seven years.

Kaiser saw an opportunity, a public platform. He knew church leaders regarded his eagerness to speak as pointless, foolhardy or both. Bishop Davies considered the tribunal "a waste of time" -- did Kaiser expect to change Moi's mind? -- but did not stand in his way.

The priest planned to name names. He asked for prayers. He felt "very out on a limb." Still, he told a Kenyan friend, carpenter Melchizedek Ondieki: "I have America to defend me. I have the church to defend me."

To keep Kaiser company as he prepared, the bishop sent another priest from the Mill Hill order, a companionable Irishman named Tom Keane, to live with him in Lolgorien.

Keane quickly sensed the depth of Kaiser's fear. He heard him wake screaming from nightmares. He watched him carry his shotgun to Mass, in his truck, on his motorcycle. Kaiser slept beside it on his mattress, Keane said, "like having a woman."

Keane watched Kaiser swing from heights of energy, aflame with purpose, to depths of despondency. Kaiser played solitaire on his bed. He read Ecclesiastes. He made bullets.

At night, Keane invited him to sit on the veranda of the parish house that looked out past a sausage tree toward the rolling savanna. After the day's pastoral duties, Keane liked to relax with a beer and listen to the hyenas. "It's a beautiful evening, John," he would say.

Kaiser refused to join him. The darkness ran deep and unbroken. He would not make himself a target for enemies who might be hiding in it.

*****

"I have been working in this country for 35 years as a missionary but I should feel like a guest," Kaiser began his testimony on Feb. 2, 1999. "There are things which a guest does not normally do when he is in his host's house or country. One of those things. . . . is to criticize the government of that country."

But that, he made clear, was what he planned to do. He detailed the horrors of Maela. He described farmers fleeing police violence by the thousands. He aimed his attack at Julius Sunkuli, a Masai lawyer and a fast-rising member of Moi's inner circle. He called Sunkuli's reelection to parliament fraudulent and accused him of orchestrating land seizures in the days before the December 1997 voting.

He named more names. He declared it "general knowledge" that Cabinet ministers William Ole Ntimama and Nicholas Biwott had organized the training of thugs to terrorize farmers.

Biwott's lawyer rose to denounce Kaiser, calling his allegations "absolutely worthless."

To reimburse the dispossessed, Kaiser continued, government officials should sell their own property. There should be prayers, he said, "for their confession, conviction, repentance, and for the restitution of the landless people."

The next day, the country's big dailies ran lengthy accounts of his testimony. Sunkuli responded with fury, threatening to deport Kaiser. "Christianity will be better off without him in this district," Sunkuli was quoted as saying.

As he prepared for his second day of testimony, Kaiser wrote to his sister that he hoped she could make it to his funeral, should he die. "I hope your passport is up to date," he wrote.

He returned on Feb. 11, 1999. Lawyers took turns grilling him. Sunkuli's lawyer called him a liar.

It went on for hours. Then Kaiser said something that electrified the room. He named Moi himself as the man responsible for so much of the country's pain, the man who had the power to stop the tribal clashes but had not.

The proceedings were halted. Justice Akiwumi purged the record of the Moi remark and ordered the press not to publish it. He declared Kaiser a "busybody" and said, "You seem to be very interested in other things than spiritual matters."

Kaiser left the courtroom exhausted. He believed that he had held his ground. He wrote that he had seen fear in the faces of the government lawyers. The press had been there, and Kaiser's account -- a good part of it, at least -- was now public record. He believed that would provide a measure of safety.

Sister Nuala Brangan told him it was not safe to return to Lolgorien.

"Don't worry, I'm a good shot," the priest replied. "I'll shoot a few bullets in the air, and they'll go running."

A month after his testimony, Kaiser and Keane found themselves pursued by a white car on a dusty road a few miles from the parish house. Kaiser sped to a bridge, wide enough for just one vehicle, and hit the brakes, blocking the way. "Get out," he told Keane.

Kaiser carried his shotgun. Keane carried an ax. They scrambled up a wooded bank into the trees, watching and waiting. It was common knowledge that Kaiser was armed, a crack shot. The pursuers, roaring up, must have sensed their disadvantage. They soon vanished.

*****

That summer, two young women in his parish approached Kaiser for help. They said Sunkuli had raped and impregnated them when they were in their teens.

Kaiser appealed to the Federation of Women Lawyers to protect the women and pursue a criminal case. Sunkuli's loyalists tracked down the women at a Nairobi safe house and hauled them to a police station. The message was chilling: We can find you anywhere.

Still, Kaiser urged the women on, and one of them filed a private prosecution that generated a front-page headline: "Sunkuli Accused of Sex Attack." A Nairobi magistrate ordered Sunkuli to appear in court to face the charge.

"It's a just war," Kaiser wrote, "and I am on the right side."

Sunkuli, now a minister of state and a rumored successor to the president, accused Kaiser of orchestrating "a sex scandal," and called the allegations "all politics."

In late October, the government ordered Kaiser deported, on the pretext that his visa had expired. The U.S. Embassy intervened. Kaiser hid in a convent loft, shimmying down an iron pipe to the back alley when police arrived. The order was rescinded.

In its heavy-handedness, the regime was turning the priest into a symbol. In March 2000, the Law Society of Kenya, a spearhead of the pro-democracy movement, gave him a human rights award. At the banquet, a speaker compared him to the prophet Elijah. Lawyers and foreign diplomats lined up to shake his hand. He wore a Roman collar and a pair of $10 pants.

Before the crowd, Kaiser declared that Moi should be tried at The Hague for crimes against humanity.

After the banquet, walking through Nairobi with a visiting Minnesotan named Don Beumer, Kaiser pointed to a burly man across the street. "That's one of those thugs," Kaiser said. He told his friend not to be surprised if he was killed. "They'll say I committed suicide."

Worried priests remonstrated with Kaiser. To call for Moi's prosecution was to invite retribution. They could kill us, the priests said. Can't you ease off, John? More than once, church superiors urged him to go back to the United States to rest. He said his work was in Kenya.

In Lolgorien, he went through the parish house, making sure the windows were closed and draped. He wrote: "They have tried to deport me & failed & have made death threats but what is that to a 67 year old has been."

*****

The threats kept coming.

As Kaiser would tell friends, a game warden brought him a message: There is a plan to shoot you and plant a dead animal beside you, so it appears you were gunned down as a poacher.

A rock flew through Kaiser's window. An anonymous letter arrived in his box. He opened it. The threat was in Swahili.

Utaona moto.

You will see fire.

Then came a hand-delivered letter, on Saturday, Aug. 19, 2000, from a surprising source: Giovanni Tonucci, the pope's appointed spokesman in Kenya, known as the papal nuncio. He wanted to see Kaiser urgently in Nairobi.

Kaiser knew the nuncio did not send a summons casually, and believed he would now be ordered out of the country, exiled for good. He wept during Monday morning Mass.

That night, Aug. 21, he arrived by truck at his bishop's house outside Nairobi. He seemed unhinged, fearful. He spoke of being followed. He complained of not sleeping in three days.

His behavior over the next two days would later be scrutinized and dissected. Even after Kaiser met the nuncio and learned that he was not being thrown out of Kenya, his mood swung sharply. He played a friendly game of croquet. He pumped hands at a church construction site. He wept at lunch. He told one Mill Hill brother he felt "close to a breakdown."

On Aug. 23, he approached a fellow missionary, Paul Boyle, to announce that he didn't think he'd live through the next day.

Sometime after 6 that night, Kaiser's truck was heard leaving the bishop's gated compound. His room was left empty, the bedding stripped. He told no one where he was going.

The next morning, workmen noticed Kaiser's pickup aslant in a ditch on the shoulder of a road about 50 miles northwest of Nairobi. In the dirt lay Kaiser's body, faceup. The back of his head was gone. Nearby lay his shotgun.

christopher.goffard@latimes.com

With trepidation...

I publish this simply because I try to report any information I have. I will keep my personal opinions to myself on this issue.


I am innocent, says Kaiser’s kin

Published on 15/10/2008

By Lucianne Limo

He is the man who allegedly saw Father John Anthony Kaiser, the late priest at Lolgorian Church in Ngong, watching a movie of a priest who shot himself dead.

He was a close friend to the Mill Hill priest, who the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) said committed suicide by shooting himself dead.

But despite his close ties with the priest, an inquest into the death of the Catholic priest ruled that this man needed to be further investigated in connection with the death.

Now the former catechist, who was adversely mentioned during the inquiry into the father’s death, has come out to clear his name.

Francis Kiisikirr Kantai, who served with the Mill Hill priest at Lolgorian Church, Ngong wants fresh investigations carried out to deal with the culprits once and for all.

Kantai says he has been restless since a court recommended that he be investigated further for any possible role in the killing.

Bothering questions

The allegations, which he vehemently denies, have made him a very bitter man, considering that besides having worked as Kaiser’s aide, he is also married to the priest’s cousin, Camille.

"Why would I kill the priest?" is the question that he has repeatedly asked.

"I had very good relations with him. He was my friend, my mentor and pastor and in the last few months to his death I was like a son to him," Kantai says.

Kantai now resides in the Unites States where he moved to in 2003.

Kaiser’s body was found along the Nakuru-Nairobi highway in Naivasha on August 24, 2000. He had a gunshot wound to the back of his head.

An inquest into his death presided by Nairobi magistrate, Maureen Odero, was concluded last year.

Though the court didn’t establish the killers, the magistrate singled out Kantai together with Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) game rangers Samuel Kortom, Joseph Kupasar and Daniel Suya as people who needed to be investigated further.

The magistrate ruled that Kantai knew more on the matter than he had testified. She said he needed to be further interrogated.

His conduct just before Kaiser’s death raised many questions, the court ruled.

His evidence was, in the court’s view, "unreliable, evasive and contradictory" besides his admission that he lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

He disappeared after Kaiser’s death and never attended his funeral, as would be expected of a friend.

Attorney General Amos Wako directed the Commissioner of Police to reopen the investigations.

"I cannot rest until my name has been cleared. The police should start investigating so that the people who murdered the priest can be brought to book," Kantai told CCI by telephone from Nebraska, USA.

He expresses concern that the Mill Hill Catholic Church was no longer interested in pursuing the truth on the matter.

"Why has the church gone quiet? They were very vocal before the inquest," he says.

Kantai says he is ready to come to Kenya to clear his name. He says police have not yet contacted him adding that he is not on the run.

"Police have not contacted me so far although I am not sure there is anything I didn’t tell them. What new questions could they have for me now?" he wonders.

"Although I highly welcome any investigations, I feel like I am being sacrificed, abandoned, and betrayed by my country and my church. Those people who testified at the inquest were selected to implicate me," he adds.

Church’s betrayal

He says the church further betrayed him by refusing to solemnise their marriage with Camille.

Kantai and Camille have four children, Georgina 12, who is still residing in Kenya, Nakuyo 4, Lepiro 2, and Nyamalo two months.

Kantai says as his relationship with Father (as he fondly called Kaiser) grew, the priest started allocating him responsibilities like going to pay school fees for the students he was sponsoring or cash to discharge people from hospital.

"He would also send me to represent him at school board meetings, something other priests did not like," he adds.

Kantai says he first worked for Kaiser as a catechist.

"Later, he asked me to recommend another catechist to work for him so that I could assist him full time in his quest for justice and peace in Kenya," he says.

He lived with Kaiser since he was posted to Lolgorian.

Kantai recalled his last moments with Kaiser.

He says he had gone to meet him at Mill Hill House and found him watching a movie of a priest who shot himself.

"I sat behind him and watched him rewind this clip three times. The fourth time I thought he was doing this while waiting for me, so I made my presence known by calling his name. Father then stood up and said Twende," he recalls.

He says the priest ejected the videotape out of the machine.

Kantai described Kaiser as his rock and he did everything to please him.

"He was my whole world and I knew without him, I couldn’t survive. My work and everything I knew was in him. I remember that when Father went home, the priest who came to take care while he was away sent me home. I loved my job and could not have done anything that would jeopardise that," he says.

"I met this girl who was Kaiser’s relative and he was the only link I had to her," he explains of how he met Camille.

"When I was testifying, the Catholic Church lawyer Mbuthi Gathenji accused me of conspiring with the then Internal Security Minister Julius Sunkuli to kill Kaiser. Now that Sunkuli has been cleared who then could have hired me?" he ponders.

Kantai says he migrated to the US in October 2003 to be with his wife and not to escape justice.

"My wife returned to the US for medical reasons and I was unable to obtain a visa until after our first child was born," he adds.

He says the last time he was in Kenya was in August 2006 when he attended Kaiser’s memorial mass in Lolgorian.

Francis Kaiser

It is with a heavy heart that I share the news that my uncle, Francis Kaiser, died this evening, August 29, 2008.

Fran was surrounded by his family during his final hours and has joyfully joined his brother, Fr. John Kaiser, his parents, Arnold and Mary Catherine Kaiser, in heaven.

Missouri Knights of Columbus resolution

WHEREAS, John Anthony Kaiser, MHM, of the St. Joseph's Missionary Society, also known as the Mill Hill, was a priest for 36 years; AND

WHEREAS, having attended and received a degree from Saint Louis University, Fr. Kaiser received his First Degree at Bishop John N. Wurn Council, formerly Clayton Harty University City Council, in 1973 while parochial vicar at All Souls parish in Overland, and remained a member of the Missouri Knights of Columbus for 27 years, AND

WHEREAS, Fr. Kaiser, while serving since his ordination as a Missionary in Kenya, fought tirelessly for the human rights of his parishioners and for all Kenyans, including bringing the attention of the world to the mistreatment of internally displaced Kenyans in a camp at Maela through his testimony before the Akiwumi Commission; and in another incident, finding assistance for a number of young girls in his parish who were alleged victims of sexual abuse, which allowed at least one of them to keep her baby and avoid an abortion; AND

WHEREAS, Fr. Kaiser was the recipient of numerous awards for his human rights work, including the Human Rights Award from the Law Society of Kenya, an award subsequently renamed in Fr. Kaiser's honor; and the Milele Lifetime Achievement Award, received posthumously, from the Kenyan National Human Rights Commission; AND

WHEREAS, Fr. Kaiser was found dead on August 23, 2000; and on August 1, 2007, a Kenyan court found that Fr. Kaiser had been murdered by unknown assailants; AND

WHEREAS, the Most Rev. Giovanni Tonnucci, former Apostolic Nuncio to the Republic of Kenya called Fr. Kaiser's death "a religious assassination," and Fr. Kaiser himself "a martyr;" and the United States Congress agreed by adopting a resolution in its 106th session, twice referring to Fr. Kaiser's death as an "assassination;"

RESOLVED, THAT the Missouri State Council continue to use its resources to tell the story of Fr. Kaiser's dedication to human rights and heroic service to his parishioners, and of his murder; AND

RESOLVED, THAT the Missouri State Council of the Knights of Columbus encourage all of its members to annually set aside August 23 as a remembrance to our deceased brother Knight and priest; AND

RESOLVED, THAT copies of this resolution be forwarded by the State Secretary to Mrs. Carolita Mahoney, Fr. Kaiser's sister and next of kin; to Fr. Hans Boerakker, archivist for the St. Joseph's Missionary Society; to Bro. Eugene Hippe, State Deputy of Minnesota, Fr. Kaiser's home state; and to the Supreme Council for their consideration.

Kenya elections

ODM alleges plot to rig polls

Story by NATION TEAM

Publication Date: 6/4/2008

ODM Tuesday claimed that an elaborate scheme had been hatched to rig the Kilgoris by-election in favour of the PNU candidate.

According to the party headquarters, the rigging scheme involves the use of incitement, tampering with the by-election result forms and deliberate delay of the voting process to ensure only a few voters took part, especially in Kirindon, Lolgorien and Pirrar divisions.

The latter, said ODM secretary general Anyang’ Nyong’o, was meant to frustrate voters and provoke them to violence.

“Police will then move in and poll officials will leave the venue pretending to be under threat,” claimed the ODM official.

ECK, however, dismissed the claims as baseless.

Chairman Samuel Kivuitu said it was untrue that ECK was training officers to falsify results in the June 11 by-election.

The presiding officers, their deputies and polling/counting clerks, the chairman said, were recruited on merit “and not on basis of party or ethnic affiliation.”

“The 344 POs and DPOs have been trained at Maranatha Catholic Church Hall in Kilgoris Town while the 688 polling/counting clerks will be trained at three venues; Fr Kaiser Hall in Lolgorian, Abosi Catholic Church Hall and Maranatha,” Mr Kivuitu said in a statement released in Nairobi last evening.

Prof Nyong’o told the press at Orange House that the party’s intelligence team found that the returning officer and election coordinator had drawn a special list of about 20 presiding officers and their deputies from communities perceived to be friendly to PNU, to aid rigging.

He claimed the presiding officers had been undergoing secret training at Shade Hotel in Ngong, where they are being lectured on how to facilitate rigging. The lecturers are allegedly being led by three ECK commissioners.

Some of the polling centres said to be targeted include Angata Barigoi, Kapsasian, Ololmasani, Emurwa Dikkir, Ilkerin, Njibiship, Mogondo, Chemamit, Kapueria, Murkan, Chebulu and Kapolecho.

Mr Kivuitu, who has been highly criticised in some quarters over ECK’s handling of last year’s General Election, said two commissioners from Kilgoris were in the area to monitor the polls. ECK would also accredit local and international observers and journalists for the elections, he said.

Campaign team

And the Party of National Unity was Tuesday asked to form a team to pitch tent in Embakasi and campaign for their candidate, Mr Ferdinard Waititu.

“ODM has already started their campaign and so we also need a campaign team from our party,” Mr Waititu told Justice, National Cohesion and Constitutional Affairs minister Martha Karua.

He asked Ms Karua to lead the team.

PNU is yet to form a campaign team to drum up support for its candidates in the five parliamentary by-elections.

By-elections are being held in Embakasi, Emuhaya, Ainamoi, Wajir North and Kilgoris as well as in 52 civic wards.

Reported by Caroline Wafula, Muchemi Wachira and Lucas Barasa

Stay strong, stay tough

Helen and Peter fell for each other in Africa and built their life in Minnesota. Since his death in the bridge collapse, she relies on that love each day.

By Pam Louwagie, Star Tribune

Last update: November 03, 2007 – 10:42 PM
They gathered in the foyer before sunrise, the widow and her children singing to the man missing from their lives.

The older two -- Justina and Andrew -- stood at the door, backpacks at their feet. The younger two -- Theresa and David -- stood on either side of their mom, still in pajamas. They sang lustily, eyes filled with tears.

It is tradition in Peter and Helen Hausmann's family to sing on birthday mornings. They've done it on every birthday since the kids were little.

So on this dark October morning they sang to their father, who died when the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed.

Ready? Helen started and the kids joined in. Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Daddy ...

Often, Peter had to encourage his children to belt it out. Louder, you hooligans! But this morning, they sang out without prompting.

Helen held back her sobs. She was staying strong for her four kids.

• • •
Even as a younger man, Peter Hausmann reached out to others. He'd see the sad stories of Third World children on TV commercials and couldn't help but send money. A farm kid from South Dakota, he landed a high-paying computer job in the Twin Cities that took him around the world. It was a life he'd worked hard to get, but it wasn't making him happy.

Finally, his brother Leo, who would become a Catholic priest, suggested that Peter do mission work. In 1987, Peter arrived at a boarding school in a remote Kenyan town to teach science.Helen Ongaki, a slight woman who wore her hair in braids, worked at the school, watching him from afar for about a year. He looked like a girl, she thought, with his scrawny build and flowing brown hair.

In the mud-soaked town during rainy season, with lousy roads and poverty all around, he was always smiling, kind and happier than anyone she knew.

One day, as children playfully quizzed Peter on their names, Helen spoke to him for the first time.

What about me? Do you know my name?

He did.

Do you know my name? he asked back.

You are Mr. Peter Joseph Hausmann.

He looked at her, wide-eyed. How do you know my middle name?

She grinned.

That's my secret.

***
Their courtship included hikes down a muddy road, him getting to know her family and winning their love. It was an improbable union and grew more so when Helen and Peter married and, after his visa expired, moved to South Dakota.

Peter got another computer job, and they moved to the Twin Cities. So much was new to Helen, but she was determined to adapt. Her first time on an escalator, she stepped on as if she'd done it her whole life, totally assured that Peter wouldn't lead her into danger.

And there was the 1991 Halloween blizzard. She tried opening the front door and couldn't because of the snowdrifts that had piled up. Watching Helen's expression, Peter doubled over with laughter.

She wondered what kind of frozen hell he'd brought her to.

When do we go home? she asked.

Any time you want to, he replied.

But they stayed. They had four children and built a family life in Rosemount, getting to know neighbors and becoming involved in the Church of St. Joseph, where Peter taught confirmation classes and the children went to grade school.

On most summer evenings, Peter built a bonfire in the back-yard fire pit, and sat near it until somebody joined him. They often had deep spiritual conversations. But he was never serious for long, keeping the mood light around the house, never using real names. Helen was "Mrs. Wiggins," or "Flossy" for her love of dental flossing.

For their 17th anniversary this year, Peter gave Helen a card listing the "Top 10 great things about being married as long as us."

Peter added six more. "We are there to help each other," he wrote. "We play ridiculous games together... We are furnaces for each other... We love each other a lot. Really a lot."

In late July, Peter and Justina talked around the fire about an accident in the news. A man had died and his family was left behind. Justina asked why bad things happen to good people.Justina remembers what he told her: I can guarantee you, in 100 percent of those cases, those people are always ready to go.

***
The phone rang just before 6 p.m. on Aug. 1. He was stuck in traffic, he told Helen, and was on his way to pick up their friend -- a priest from Kenya -- to bring him to dinner. The phone went dead and it went right to voice mail when Helen called back.

At first, she didn't worry.

But 10 minutes turned into 20 and when Theresa turned on the TV at 6:30 to watch "Wheel of Fortune," they saw news of the bridge collapse.

Right away, Helen knew.

She got a ride from a family friend into the city that night. They checked a hospital. They went to the Holiday Inn where families were gathering, gave them Peter's description and waited for word.

Peter's brothers and sister came from out of town, and every day they drove from Rosemount to the Holiday Inn near the bridge. The children stayed home, comforted by neighbors and church friends.

On the fourth day, divers found Peter's van. He wasn't in it, which gave the family some hope. Did he swim to safety? Maybe he had hit his head and was wandering the streets, unsure of who he was?

* * *
It wasn't like Peter, 47, to be away. He avoided overnight business trips. Sometimes he worked from home. On days when his son had a football game, he started his day early to be there. He cooked on weekends sometimes. He kept track of paying the bills. He fixed the rattling refrigerator.

When Andrew wanted to go out for football, Peter convinced a nervous Helen that it would be OK. When the girls wanted to wear nail polish, he persuaded her to give in.

Helen doesn't drive, so Peter shuttled the family everywhere, making sure the kids got to religion classes, doctor appointments and school activities.

On Saturday nights, after the little kids were in bed and the older ones could watch them, Peter and Helen did the grocery shopping together.

* * *
While Helen and Peter's siblings waited for news with other families, they spoke with the relatives of Sadiya Sahal and her 22-month-old daughter, Hana, who were also missing. Their family had immigrated from Somalia. They talked about beliefs and faiths, Christian and Muslim.

On the ninth day, Helen was at home when the phone call came. Peter's body had been found.It's done, she thought. No more torture.

Helen said she was told by authorities that Peter's body was half in and half out of another car, and it looked like he was trying to rescue a little child -- possibly Hana.

"That makes it OK," Justina said later, through tears. "Because, you know, he probably would have struggled with depression and all that if he had gone away not helping."

* * *
Helen doesn't sleep much. She sits in bed, her little children sleeping beside her, and opens a book of word-search puzzles Peter once bought her. She focuses intently on each word, each puzzle, trying to stop worry from creeping into her thoughts. Life is a struggle to keep grief at bay.

Sometimes, worry wins. That's when she feels like she's drowning, too.

In her eyes, Peter rescued her from Kenya and brought her to the United States for a better life for their children.

She wonders who will rescue her from this?

"I don't know who will be my hero anymore," she said. There's no one left to turn to."

"Not the way I turned to him."

During the day, Helen draws strength from her children.

Justina, an A student who wants to be a pediatrician, has band performances. Andrew, 14, has football games. The younger children rush through the front door in their school uniforms. David, with Peter's mannerisms and energy, jumps around constantly, asking to play outside. Theresa brings home giggly friends.

Helen tries to laugh when she can. "Your dad would say, 'Come on, you hooligans!'" she tells them, trying to herd the family to the dinner table.

But now, when Justina, 17, asks to drive someplace after dark, or when the other children try to bargain about playtime, Helen is left to decide alone.

Peter's advice echoes through her head.

Stay strong, stay tough, she hears him. Say 'no' even if you know it's going to break somebody's heart.

Helen's brother, sister and niece, who came in from Kenya for the funeral, are staying as long as they can to help. Peter's siblings make frequent trips to town. Friends take Helen to Andrew's games.

She spends two mornings a week battling with the bills Peter used to handle. On the phone, arguing about discrepancies on a late bill, she refrains from telling what has happened.

"I don't want that 'poor lady excuse,'" she said.

But later, when the children have gone to bed and the house is still, the gravity sets in.

"I am afraid of sinking," she says. "If I stand still, I'm afraid I might go into the thought mode. ... I'm the one holding up the whole family."

* * *
On Peter's birthday, Oct. 12, Helen sent Justina to get eggs while she finished some paperwork. Then she opened a box of chocolate cake mix and started measuring. She slid the pan into the oven, kids licking the beaters, and made sure Justina knew her job was to take it out.

A family friend drove Helen to Andrew's football game. A ninth-grader, he was playing on the Rosemount varsity for the first time. His opening kick sailed under the bright lights. Helen could imagine Peter there with her.

Way to go, young man, she could hear him saying. A-bear, you did good!

At halftime, Justina danced in step with the marching band. After the game, Peter's relatives arrived. Helen took out a single white candle and set it in the middle of the chocolate cake. She lit the wick. She called everyone into the dining room.

They ended the day the way they began: Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you...

Pam Louwagie • 612-673-7102

Pam Louwagie • plouwagie@startribune.com

City Pages

A few months ago, I was interviewed by a young lady who works with an "entertainment" type newspaper; in Minneapolis-St. Paul, it is the City Pages. In St. Louis, where she was from, it's the Riverfront Times. Several people were interviewed and my mother suggested some others. One of them refused to be interviewed, citing the paper as a "rag." Personally, I was of the opinion that any information was good information, no matter what angle they took.

And, I'm pleased to report, they took the high road. This article is the cover story on the City Pages, and I would imagine on similar papers in other cities. Thank you, Aimee. You did a very nice job.

- - - - - - - - -

Was it a Kenyan assassin who killed the Minnesota-reared missionary—or was it madness? Seven years later, the verdict is in.

The Death of Father Kaiser

By Aimee Levitt

Just before dawn on an August morning seven years ago, John and Henry Kanbo drove toward the market town of Naivasha to buy cattle. The Naivasha-Nakuru Highway is usually one of the busiest roads in southwest Kenya's Rift Valley, but at 6:00 a.m. it was deserted, except for the battered white Toyota pickup perched on the edge of a ditch near a grove of acacia trees. The brothers pulled over and noticed a string of pink rosary beads hanging from a switch on the dashboard and a body lying in a brick drainage culvert.

In the dim morning light the Kanbos made out the corpse of a large white male, 6-foot-2-inches and 200 pounds. He lay on his back, his black leather jacket and gray trousers splattered with mud. There was a pile of blankets and sheets at his side, and a double-barreled shotgun at his feet. Blood oozed from where the back of his head should have been.

When police arrived, they had little trouble identifying the body. The man's name was John Anthony Kaiser, a man much loved by the people of Kenya for the work he did on behalf of the poor and dispossessed. He was an American priest who had first come to Africa 36 years earlier as a missionary, fresh from his ordination in St. Louis, where he attended Saint Louis University and began studying for the priesthood.

At first the Kenyans knew him as Father Seven Oxen because of his physical strength. Later they called him the Rhino because he was tough and stubborn, not a man to be crossed. In the few years before his death, he'd become the Key, or the Voice of the People, unafraid to speak out against the corruption that permeated the Kenyan government.

Father Kaiser was 67 years old when he died that early morning of August 24, 2000. Naivasha police told the Kenyan newspaper The Nation that he'd been shot in a "gangland style execution."

Kaiser was not the first outspoken Catholic priest in Kenya to perish under mysterious circumstances. "You'd be surprised at how much went on in western Kenya in the 1990s," says Dave Durenberger, a former U.S. Senator from Minnesota and a high school classmate of Kaiser. "A lot of priests spoke out against the government, and the government tried to scare them off and keep them in their place."

Sometimes they went even further, says Father Cornelius Schilders, the current bishop of Ngong, Kaiser's old diocese. "Many people who spoke out against the oppression and corruption disappeared," he explains in a recent email.

In public forums and in the Kenyan and international press, Kaiser accused Kenya's president, Daniel arap Moi, of staging bloody tribal wars in order to drive people from their land and seize it for the government. Throughout the 1990s, Kaiser had been followed, harassed, and even beaten and placed under house arrest by Kenyan police and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).

"I reckon they tried to frighten him so he would leave Kenya," Schilders writes. "But then they really did not know him! Nothing would make him do that, only death."

"John always knew he was going to die in Africa," says his niece, Mary Mahoney Weaver. "It was his home."

Before his journey to Kenya, Kaiser's home was his parents' dairy farm near the town of Perham, in northern Minnesota. Although the family struggled financially, they were resourceful. The four Kaiser children grew their own vegetables and played with homemade toys. As a young boy Kaiser learned how to hunt and fish, good preparation for the rugged life of a missionary. "John never had comfort," recalls Kaiser's cousin, Michaela Dasteel. "He did not want comfort."

At 13, Kaiser left the farm for St. John's Preparatory School, a Catholic boys' boarding school in Collegeville, Minnesota, 200 miles away. His parents strongly believed in giving their children a Catholic education, regardless of the considerable sacrifices.

His old St. John's classmate Durenberger remembers Kaiser as "a big, gangly farm boy who wasn't afraid of anything." He was captain of the football and track teams, set the school's pole-vaulting record, and was a talented artist and star student.

"He was a normal kid with exceptional talents," remembers Kaiser's sister, Carolita Mahoney. "Wherever he went, people wanted to be around him. But he was a loner. He would just as soon have been out hunting in the woods."

Kaiser entered Collegeville's St. John's University in 1951 with the intention of studying English literature and becoming a teacher. But even then he suspected he might be facing a different sort of future. "God calls you to become a priest," explains Mahoney. A devout Catholic like Kaiser could not ignore God. But, she adds, "He put off answering the calls."

"It was a real sacrifice for him to become a priest," says Dasteel. "He loved women."

Kaiser left college in 1954 and enlisted in the peacetime Army, where he spent three years as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division. He jumped out of airplanes, slept in the woods, and developed a taste for adventure that he didn't think he could satisfy as a parish priest.

"John had a real fear of being a diocesan priest and being sent to a big city," Mahoney says. As Dasteel puts it: "He was a country guy; the problems of middle-class Americans would have gotten him down."

Soon after Kaiser's return to St. John's in 1957, a Dutch priest from the St. Joseph's Missionary Society paid a recruiting visit to the college. More commonly known as Mill Hill after its headquarters in England, it is the largest of the missionary orders. "The recruiter talked about the wildlife of Africa," remembers Father Bill Vos, a St. John's classmate who later worked with Kaiser in Kenya. "That got John."

Mill Hill sent Kaiser to St. Louis to begin his seminary training at SLU. He graduated in 1960 and went on to England to finish his studies, but he insisted on returning to St. Louis for his ordination in 1964. He'd made friends with several local families and the bishop. It felt like home.

That autumn he boarded a freighter for the two-month voyage to Kenya.

On the afternoon of April 18, 2001, two FBI agents arrived at Carolita Mahoney's home in Underwood, Minnesota. It was not the first time they had visited. Immediately after Father John Kaiser's death, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Johnnie Carson, had arranged for the FBI to join the Kenyan police and the CID in the investigation. Carson was afraid that the Kenyans would try to protect President Moi and paint Kaiser's killing as something other than a political assassination.

Mahoney cooperated with the agents, telling them everything she knew about her brother's life. She wanted justice—and resolution. After eight months of investigating, they brought her an 81-page document titled "The Final Report into the Death of Father John Kaiser." She grabbed the report and turned to the final summary page. She noticed the agents did not linger to see her reaction. "They were out the door so quickly it was like they knew I was not going to be happy," she recalls.

"The manner of the death of Father John Anthony Kaiser is more consistent with a suicide than a homicide," she read. "This suicide resulted from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head."
The FBI report, a devastating glimpse into Kaiser's "deteriorating" mental state, focused on the final 96 hours of his life in Nairobi. It said colleagues described him as "out of sorts," "tense," "scared," "exceptionally nervous" and "haunted." He was seen crying at Mass and spent nights awake with a shotgun by his side, and when he did sleep, "Father Kaiser could be heard calling out the names of prominent Kenyan politicians." The report continued: "He confides that he thinks he is being followed." He told his bishop that "death was near."

Mahoney stood in the doorway, shocked and angry. Devout Catholics did not commit suicide, especially not Catholic priests. "Anyone who knew John would know that report was ridiculous."
Says niece Mary Mahoney Weaver: "They said he was mentally unstable because he cried during Mass. He cried many times when he was very moved."

Kaiser himself had suspected that he might be murdered and that someone would try to cover it up; he'd seen it before, when other priests' deaths were attributed to unfortunate car accidents. Shortly before he died, he wrote in an open letter to his family and friends: "I want all to know that if I disappear from the scene, because the bush is vast and hyenas many, that I am not planning any accident, nor, God forbid, any self-destruction."

Kaiser's family immediately grasped the implication of the FBI's conclusion. Suicide was a mortal sin, a violation of everything Kaiser stood for as a Catholic priest. "It was a smudge on his name," says Weaver.

"John loved Africa from the minute he got there," Michaela Dasteel says. Kenya won its independence from Great Britain in 1962, two years before Kaiser arrived, and he was excited to help build the new nation. After several years of training, he took up his first parish among the Kisii people, in the high plains of the Rift Valley.

Father Kaiser had to build a congregation from nothing, Father Vos recalls. In the beginning, there wasn't even a church. Kaiser led Mass under a tree. "It was grassroots evangelism," says Vos. As his flock grew, Kaiser began to build churches and schools and proved himself an effective, economical contractor. "He would use the local materials," Vos remembers. "He was very clever. He'd cut down trees and get the people to haul stones."

His physical strength amazed the Kisii. "Once a group of men was trying to raise a huge tree for the center post of a church," Weaver recalls. "John was determined to get the thing done. But it got late and everyone went home. When they came back the next morning, the post was up. He never said how he did it. They considered him superhuman."

Kaiser's happiest times were on hunting trips with the tribe. "The Kisii were traditional hunters," Vos says. "They were proud to have a priest who connected with them on that level."
"He lived very simply," Vos adds, "like African people do." Aside from his motorcycle, all of his possessions could fit in a sack. His family would send him underwear, socks, and deodorant, but he'd give it all away. "He didn't need it," says Weaver.

"You rarely saw him down," says Weaver. "He could find joy in the simplest things." On visits home, he would devour bowls of ice cream, quote lines from the movie Fargo in a Minnesota accent, and sing his favorite song, Glen Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy." A week before his death, Kaiser wrote home to say he hoped he and his family could "all meet again and have a fishing trip up in the border waters of northern Minnesota, canoe country. The best time would be late August or September..."

But there were at least two periods in Kaiser's life, according to the FBI report, when his natural exuberance deserted him.

In 1969, Mill Hill reassigned Kaiser to its mission near Albany, New York, where he served as a rector, guiding other young men who hoped to join the order. His superior was an older priest who had served the parish for many years. Soon after Kaiser arrived, he noticed that money appeared to be missing from the parish's coffers. He announced that he would ask a friend, a CPA, to check the books.

"Soon thereafter," the April 2001 FBI report read, "Father Kaiser traveled to New York City. While there, Father Kaiser was taken into custody by the New York Police Department and taken to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. Father Kaiser had resisted the NYPD officers because he believed there was nothing wrong with him. He subsequently learned that [the other priest] had filed a report stating that he (Father Kaiser) was mentally impaired, possessed a gun, and had gone to New York City." Mahoney went to Bellevue to visit him and found him under heavy medication.

Kaiser agreed to voluntary commitment so his insurance would pay for treatment, the report continued, "and stated it would be a good opportunity to rest."

The real problem, Mahoney maintains, was not Kaiser's mental condition, but widespread corruption within the Albany parish. "There were things amiss in that place," she says. "There were problems—not with John, but with someone in so-called authority."

Mahoney arranged for Kaiser's release from the hospital, and Mill Hill sent him back to Africa. He had no further mental-health issues until 1980, when, on a visit home, he began to feel agitated and had trouble sleeping. His family took him to see a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium. Kaiser took the medicine until he returned to Kenya later in the summer of 1980 and no longer felt he needed it.

Weaver believes Kaiser was suffering from culture shock. "He came back here," she says, "and everything was so different. He never had a problem in Africa."

"There was a lot of misinterpretation of his behavior in the FBI's analysis," Mahoney adds.

Kaiser's life as an ordinary missionary priest came to an end one night early in 1993. He'd recently been transferred to a new parish in the central Kenyan highlands, just east of the Rift Valley. Driving along a mountain road, he saw a group of Kikuyu tribespeople trudging through the chilly rain. Kaiser stopped to ask them where they were going. To a refugee camp in Maela, halfway up the mountain, they told him. The government had just confiscated their land in the valley and they had nowhere else to go.

Like nearly everywhere else in Kenya in the early 1990s, the Rift Valley had been the battleground of a bloody tribal war. In the past, the Kikuyu people had leased farmland from their Maasai neighbors. The arrangement benefited both tribes, and they lived together in relative peace. But in 1992, just before Kenya's first two-party election, some of the Maasai began stealing cattle from their Kikuyu tenants and attacking Kikuyu farmers for violating the terms of their leases. The Kikuyu fought back. War broke out, and some entire villages were decimated. The government intervened and seized the Kikuyu's land.

Kaiser volunteered to serve as chaplain in Maela. After several months in the camp, he began to realize that the tribal war was not the dustup over cattle rustling and land leases that it first appeared.

Daniel arap Moi had been the president of Kenya since 1978. He was a popular leader at first, but as time went on he began to resort to more menacing measures to maintain political power. By the early '90s, says Durenberger, "the Moi government was rotten to the core."

"Moi was a dictator," says Dasteel. "He had any opposition tortured or murdered. Ballot boxes were stolen. Anyone who tried to run against Moi got killed." One of Moi's favorite methods of eliminating his rivals was to stage car "accidents" in remote locations.

The 1992 election was particularly crucial for Moi. For the first time since becoming president, he was facing a real political challenge. In 1991, in order to continue to receive Western aid, he reluctantly agreed to allow multi-party elections, even though he believed multiple parties would lead to increased tribal warfare.

The parties were indeed split along tribal lines. The Kikuyu did not support Moi. In order to prevent them from voting, Moi staged a tribal war, hiring thugs to pose as Maasai and attack the Kikuyu. By 1993, when Kaiser became chaplain of the Maela camp, Moi had been re-elected president, and 30,000 Kikuyu had lost their homes and were living in squalor.

"The people were in shock," says Carolita Mahoney. "They had to live in plastic huts. The U.N. provided rations, but they were starvation rations. John would secretly load up his truck with powdered milk and maize and soybeans so they would have something to eat. He got in big trouble."

Kaiser appealed to the U.N. to improve the conditions at Maela, but nothing changed. Kaiser believed it was because the U.N. was afraid to antagonize Moi. Looking to shame the relief organization into changing its mind, he took the case to the press. Soon the missionary priest became a national figure—and a target of the Moi government.

"He didn't welcome the attention," Mahoney says. "He was happy being a pastor. He didn't recognize the danger. The Kisii were not having the same problems as the Kikuyu. But he felt he should have spoken up sooner. The most important thing he remembered from seminary was the time a priest had asked his class what was the most important virtue a priest should have. The students said things like humility and kindness. The priest slammed down his hand on the desk and said, 'No! It's courage! If you don't have courage, you will never be a good priest.' John lived it."

It was because of John Kaiser that stories about the harsh conditions at Maela began to appear in American papers. Facing international embarrassment and, more important, the loss of foreign aid, Moi decided to close the camp and disperse the Kikuyu refugees. Government soldiers arrived in Maela on Christmas Eve in 1993.

They came in trucks to haul the human cargo away to empty stadiums and open fields. Kaiser refused to leave. He herded the women and children into the church and stood guard at the door to protect them. For his efforts, he was beaten and dumped out in the bush to die. Somehow he survived. But that was only the beginning.

For the rest of his life, Kaiser was harassed by agents of the Kenyan government. They tailed his car at night and threw rocks through the windows of his house. Once, says Vos, the Kenyan police caught him in the bush and held a gun to his head. Kaiser told them, "Shoot me and my troubles are over, but yours are just beginning." They let him go.

The church began to worry about Kaiser's safety. Bishop Colin Davies reassigned him to Lolgorien, a remote parish in the green, hilly Maasai territory near the Tanzania border, and warned him to "go easy." But easy wasn't Kaiser's style. Though he had great respect for Pope John Paul II, he was impatient with the church bureaucracy and believed his first loyalty was to his parishioners.

"John could be quite stubborn when he wanted to be," says Mary Mahoney Weaver. "He was disappointed that people could be so absolutely cruel and disrespectful of life."

So in 1998, when Moi organized a tribunal called the Akiwumi Commission to look into the causes of ethnic violence, Kaiser was determined to testify. He assembled documents and traveled to Nairobi, where he spent several weeks sitting outside the courtroom waiting to be called. When he finally did take the stand in February 1999, his testimony caused a sensation. He claimed the government had instigated the tribal clashes, and he named names: Minister of Defense Julius Sunkuli, Cabinet member Nicholas Diwott, and President Moi himself.

"In the constitution of Kenya, it's written that you cannot defame the president," Vos explains. "John publicly said Moi should be indicted in the world court at The Hague for crimes against humanity, and he volunteered to testify. It was not the best way to ensure his future."

Kaiser knew what he was getting into, says Bishop Cornelius Schilders, who was then the regional superior of Mill Hill. "He said, 'They may well kill me for this, but I am prepared to die for the truth, because God's people are being trampled on and we have to speak,'" Schilders writes in an email. "He was particular in mentioning names, including the president's. He did so because if one remains general, nobody will take it to heart and nothing will change."

The Akiwumi Commission struck Kaiser's testimony from the record—not that it mattered. The commission never bothered to release a report. Meanwhile, Kaiser had found another crusade. Two girls in his parish claimed they had been raped and impregnated by Sunkuli. Kaiser encouraged them to take legal action against the minister, the second most powerful man in Kenya.

By now, Kaiser knew his life was in real danger. A sympathetic government security agent warned him that plans had been made for his assassination. "He was more and more stressed," Vos says. "He was on guard more and he kept his gun with him when he slept."

In the autumn of 1999, the Kenyan government found a perfect excuse to expel Kaiser from the country: He had neglected to renew his work visa. But Kaiser went into hiding, moving from place to place—including a convent, where Vos says the nuns lied to protect him. The church and the U.S. State Department intervened, and the Kenyan government issued Kaiser another visa.
But why didn't he take the opportunity to leave Kenya while he still could and save his own life? "He was afraid to come home," Dasteel says. "He was afraid he wouldn't be able to get back into the country." Besides, he had spent more than half his life in Kenya; he was more African now than American. "He was happiest in Kenya," says Weaver.

Dasteel believes that Kaiser martyred himself to save Kenya. Although the two girls succumbed to government pressure and dropped the rape charges against Sunkuli, the case damaged Sunkuli's reputation enough that he lost the 2002 presidential election.

"If Johnny hadn't done what he did," Dasteel says, "Sunkuli would have succeeded Moi and the corruption would still be going on. He didn't want to die. He loved life. But I think he thought that maybe he could make a difference."

Three days before he died, Father Kaiser traveled to Nairobi at the summons of the papal nuncio, or representative of the pope. Kaiser was afraid that the church was about to order him to leave Kenya, and he wept as he recited his last Mass in Lolgorien. To the other priests who saw him in Nairobi, Kaiser appeared to be on edge. His moods changed abruptly and he wasn't sleeping.

"They said he was paranoid," says Weaver. "Well, he was beaten and attacked and his house was ransacked. They said he wasn't sleeping. Well, yeah. He had rocks thrown through his window. Of course he was paranoid. He knew he was skating on thin ice. In that report, there was not one comment or statement by anyone who remotely knew him."

Mahoney says Kaiser's mood swings could be easily explained: "John thought the nuncio was going to send him home because he was going to get himself killed. Instead the nuncio asked him for advice about who should be the next bishop in the Ngong diocese. He wanted advice from someone the people respected. John was delighted."

Kaiser left Nairobi for Lolgorien the evening of August 23, 2000. Only a few hours of daylight remained. The Nakuru police commander Andrew Kimetto described Kaiser's final hours to The Nation, based on crime-scene evidence. Kaiser's truck was hijacked and driven off the main road into the forest. He was pulled from the truck and forced to kneel and say his final prayers. An assassin then shot him in the back of the head. The killers drove the truck back to the Naivasha-Nakuru Highway, dumped his body in the ditch, and disappeared.

A month after Kaiser's death, FBI agents traveled to Kenya to interview the Naivasha police and the coroner who performed the autopsy. Their final report relied most heavily on the opinion of Dr. Vincent Di Maio, a gunshot expert in Texas. Di Maio, though, did not examine the body, and, of the many photographs available, none showed a clear view of the head wound. Also, the FBI's "behavioral analysis unit," which deemed Kaiser suicidal, had never met him and only reviewed his medical history, which they conceded was incomplete.

"I'm not severely critical of the FBI," Mahoney says, "but I wouldn't recommend those investigators for anything."

Kaiser's family and friends are convinced the investigation was a sham. "Someone else was calling the shots," Durenberger says. That someone else, he believes, was the U.S. State Department.

In early 2001, the U.S. was preparing for the possibility of war with Iran. On the Indian Ocean, the Kenyan harbor of Mombassa would be a strategic location to hold ships and aircraft carriers. "I am convinced that a deal was made between the U.S. government and the Kenyan government," Bishop Cornelius Schilders writes. "The price for the use of the harbor was John Kaiser and the explanation of his suicide."

Durenberger used his connections to get in touch with Carson. "I asked what the State Department was going to do. He said, 'Nothing.' He wasn't going to rock the boat. It ticked me off. Till the day I die, I am going to believe that my Department of State and my Department of Justice played a role in the decision to cover up for the people responsible for John's death."
Father Tony Chantry, the general superior of Mill Hill, offers a more blunt assessment: "The FBI colluded with corrupt members of the Kenyan government."

The Catholic Church and then-Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone both condemned the report and began pressuring the governments of Kenya and the United States to launch an inquest into Kaiser's death. The Kenyan courts finally began the inquest in 2003, after Moi had been swept from power. It dragged on for more than four years, with frequent recesses and a change in the magistrate halfway through. Some 112 witnesses gave testimony. The magistrate called the FBI agents to the stand three times, but they never appeared or gave an explanation for their absence.

Mahoney believes Kenya's inquest probe was far more complete than the "official" one by the FBI. "So many people who should have been interviewed came forward at the inquest," she says.

On August 1, 2007, the inquest finally came to an end. Kenyan Magistrate Maureen Odero ruled that John Kaiser did not commit suicide, thus rejecting earlier findings by Kenyan authorities and the FBI that he shot himself in the back of the head with a shotgun. Kaiser was murdered.
Kevin Foust, the FBI agent who led the investigation, offered but two words last week when asked to square his determination of suicide with the findings of the inquest: "No comment."

"The wonderful thing about this whole thing is that there are thousands—thousands—of Kenyans who absolutely knew John was murdered," Fran Kaiser, the priest's brother, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. "He had been their greatest advocate for years. Their hope for any justice was bashed, but now it is resurrected again."

Mahoney, though, is not optimistic about the Kenyan government's chances of ever finding her brother's killer. "It's a cold case," she says. "Whoever pulled the trigger is probably dead themselves."

Four thousand people attended Father John Kaiser's funeral on August 31, 2000. They packed the basilica in Nairobi and stood in the street outside. Pigeons circled the rafters of the cathedral—"like the Holy Spirit," Mahoney says—as the crowd sang the missionary anthem, "Here I Am, Lord." As Kaiser himself had requested, his body was laid to rest under a fig tree in Lolgorien. His family covered the grave with a protective layer of cement.

In Kenya today, the American missionary remains a national hero. Children are named after him. "Every August 24 is celebrated like Martin Luther King Day here," says Father Vos. "He's a focal point for anyone working for peace and justice in that country."