Margaret Ruto, 30, a dual U.S.-Kenyan citizen, carried out an investigation on an American pedophile that led to his arrest in the US.
The Washington Post reported that Ruto worked as a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant, Ruto collected sufficient evidence that eventually saw Gregory Dow, 61, sentenced on Thursday, 4 February 2021 in a U.S. federal court, to 188 months in prison on four counts of “engaging in illicit sexual conduct in foreign places.”
On returning to her home in Kenya, Ruto found out that Dow, who lived just 10 minutes from her home in the US, had opened an orphanage less than 10 minutes from her village and was being accused of sexually abusing children.
Ruto took it upon herself to carry out an investigation that saw her travel between the two continents in search of justice. The Pennsylvania nurse approached the police who directed her to the US embassy in Kenya.
However the investigation hit a dead end and she decided to approach the press to get more attention on the story. The LNP, a newspaper in Lancaster, publication eventually made its way into the hands of FBI agents after which an investigation was opened.
The orphanage, which housed more than 87 children, was closed in 2017 and the children were sent to other homes or back to their respective parents.
Ruto was however not satisfied with the investigation stating that there were more victims of the crime whom the FBI were unable to verify.
“It was not just four girls,” Ruto said. “The rest of the victims and their families deserve so much better. You can’t say that justice has been fully done yet.”
A Kenyan trial in January 2018 for Mary Rose, Dow’s wife, found her guilty of four counts of child abuse, but was later released after paying a fine.
During the trial, in which she pleaded not guilty, she told a Kenyan court that she took girls to get birth-control implants because they were “promiscuous”. She soon after left the country and was not charged alongside her husband.
During the time when Dow Family Children’s Home was opened in 2008, foreigners were not required to submit background checks therefore missing the fact that Dow had been a registered sex offender in the US till 2006.
A former gardener at the orphanage, Davis Bett said, “If it were not for Maggie’s extreme efforts, everybody and everything would have been in darkness.”
Bett and other employees claim to have confronted Dow about his behavior and also tried alerting children protection services officials to no avail.
“At one point, I reached out to the children’s department and one of the officials told me that the home was ‘a small America in the village’ and that I should leave Gregory alone,” Bett said.
Locals were content by the fact that Dow was arrested and charged but sought compensation for the girls who had been left to bear the consequences of his actions.
“Dow “deserved a life sentence. These children called him ‘Dad.’ That was a deep betrayal. What can ease the suffering of these families is compensation to make their lives better,” said Mary Rotich, a neighbor to a boy’s grandmother who died in the home under unknown circumstances.
Another case was in 2016 when, a 21-year-old, Matthew Durham from Oklahoma was sentenced in a U.S. federal court to 40 years in prison for molesting eight children at an orphanage in Nairobi.
