Port Harcourt serial killer, who wasted many women, to die by hanging

Gracious David-west who was accused of killing women in hotels is to be wasted. This is because a Rivers High Court sitting in Port Harcourt and presided over by Justice Adolphus Enebele, on Friday, October 9, sentenced DavidWest to death by hanging.

The judge convicted the serial killer over his role in the murder of 11 young women and attempted murder of Benita Etim in a hotel in 2019.

Enebele in his judgment said the prosecution team was able to convince the court that DavidWest was the killer of several females. The second defendant, Nimi Thankgod, who faced a one- count charge of misconduct with corpse, has been discharged and acquitted.

The convict, who was born in 1980, killed about 15 women mostly in Port Harcourt, from July to September, 2019. He was apprehended on September of the same year, and later confessed to a total of 15 murders.

In the confession, DavidWest claimed he had “an irresistible urge to kill” and told detectives that every night from June to his capture in September; he combed the streets for women in his car.

He said he would proceed to a local hotel where he and the woman would eat, have fun, and then go to sleep. In the middle of the night, he confessed, he would wake up the victim and threaten her with a knife. Before killing his victims, he would rob them of their money, ATM cards and other valuables.

He would then turn the television or the radio on high volume, and using strips of cloth he had cut from the pillow cases, he would tie up the victim before manually strangling her. Victims were often found naked, bound with a white strip of cloth on their ankles, arms, and neck. The modus operandi and the white cloth provoked a suspicion of ritual killing.

He was arrested when his method failed him in the early morning of September 19, 2019, when a woman who had accompanied him to a hotel woke up to David-west tying her up and preparing to suffocate her. David-west and another individual were arrested and charged with homicide.

Many have wondered how a man would be comfortable and calm in making love to a woman and killing her thereafter without any provocation. This led to many theories of his upbringing.

David-west reportedly had a tough childhood. Several individuals who knew him claimed that he was the only child born into a polygamous household, but he and his mother lived separately from the rest of the family.

He claimed his mother was poisoned and as the only son of his father much was expected of him but that he could not deliver. He claimed to attend the branch of the Lord’s Chosen Church in Obigbo, where he said he confessed to the pastor that he had been killing women. The pastor reportedly invited him to a crusade prayer service to heal him. He stated that the church helped him to get a job in Owerri, Imo State, but he killed someone and ran away.

David-west was reportedly a member of the Greenlanders (also known as Deebham, or Dey Gbam), a mafia-styled street gang that sprung out of the armed militant groups notorious in Nigeria for engaging in criminal acts of violence and voodoo.

He was arrested while fleeing to Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, and cooperated with the police all through. Many wanted to hear about high profile collaboration but none of such happened till his sentencing.