When her face appeared on the phone screen, her dad teased her that she looked hungry and tired. Her smile was more restrained, he noted. Her short hair, usually braided, was disheveled. “Make sure you drink warm milk and relax,” her dad said from his living room in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. It was February 24, the last time anyone in her family saw her. A month later — less than three years after Gakwa left Kenya for the United States — her family reported her missing. At the time of the February video call, Gakwa’s parents did not know she was living in Gillette, Wyoming, with a man she had met on a Craigslist dating forum. They also had no way of knowing that the police would later charge the man with withdrawing money from her bank account, maxing out her credit card and deleting her email account. And they never imagined that six months would go by without a word from her. “She was always a daddy’s girl,” her father, Francis Campo, said in a recent telephone interview from Nairobi. He took a deep breath as he remembered that last video call with his only daughter and the youngest of his three children. “He was supposed to come home for Christmas this year. I would buy that ticket myself for him to come if he couldn’t afford it,” he added, his voice shaking. “Now I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again.”
THE RESTLESS MEMBERS OF THE RARE FAMILY TWO CONTINENTS
Gakua’s troubled family spans two continents 9,000 miles apart. Her parents live in Nairobi while her two older brothers, Chris Munga and Kennedy Wainaina, live in Meridian, Idaho — a suburb of Boise. Her father became concerned in late February when she did not respond to repeated video calls. This was unusual for the 32-year-old, who spoke to her parents every other day. And her text messages sounded strange, her family said. Instead of the mix of Swahili and Kenyan slang he uses, the messages were in stiff English — like he was using Google Translate to send them, said Wainaina, her older brother. “Texts would be out of place,” her father said. In early March — between the last video call and the day she was reported missing — her parents received a few short WhatsApp messages from her account. Some made excuses for not making video calls. “Dad, I dropped my phone in the water and now the mic doesn’t work,” one message said. Another said: “I just want you to know I love and miss you and mom.” “We miss you… we want to see you, not just chat on WhatsApp,” her father replied. “We love you always. You will be my daughter forever.”
HER FRIEND TOLD THE POLICE HE PACKED HER AND LEFT
The last WhatsApp message came on March 9, her father said. The three brothers share a family cell phone plan. After Gakua’s brothers couldn’t reach her, they looked through her phone records and called a close friend she had talked to many times. That’s how they discovered she lived with her boyfriend, Nathan Hightman, 39, in a modest three-bedroom house in Gillette. The couple had been dating since 2020 but had broken up several times, Wainaina said. Her siblings thought they had broken up and were unaware that they had rekindled their love and moved in together. Her siblings reported her missing to the Gillette Police Department on March 20, and an officer spoke with Hightman that same day, according to a probable cause affidavit in a related separate criminal case against her boyfriend. Heitman told the officer he last saw Gakua in late February, when he returned home one night, packed her clothes into two plastic bags and drove off in a dark-colored SUV, the affidavit said. He told police he hadn’t heard from her since. He also said he took money out of her bank account so she would be forced to contact him if she needed money, the affidavit said. Heitman did not respond to the brothers’ request that she deliver her belongings to their home, Wainaina said. They begged him to give them her documents, including her Kenyan passport, but Heitman refused, Wainaina added. Heitman is considered a person of interest in her disappearance and “has not been made available to detectives seeking to resolve questions that exist in the investigation,” Gillette police said in a statement. “We believe he has information regarding Irene’s disappearance, but has chosen not to provide that information to law enforcement at this time,” Gillette Police Detective Dan Stroup told CNN. CNN has made repeated attempts to reach Heitman by phone, text and email, but he has not responded. CNN also left messages with his public defender, Dallas Lamb, but did not receive a response. Heitman has not been charged in Gakua’s disappearance, but is suspected of financial crimes against her after she disappeared. Gillette police arrested him in May and charged him with two counts of theft, one felony count of unauthorized use of a credit card and two felony counts of intellectual property crime for allegedly changing her bank account password and deleting her email account. disappeared. Between February and March, Hightman transferred nearly $3,700 from Gakwa’s bank account to his own and spent an additional $3,230 on her credit card, according to court documents. She also changed her bank passwords and deleted her Gmail account, court documents state. All of the changes were made from an IP address associated with Hightman after the date he told police Gakwa had moved away, according to the probable cause affidavit. “This would indicate that Nathan Hightman accessed Irene’s account, removed funds and changed the password to deny Irene access,” the affidavit said. “These transactions began on February 25, 2022 and continued until March 2022.” Heitman pleaded not guilty to all charges and was released on $10,000 bail. His pretrial conference is scheduled for November.
COMMUNITY ADOPTION PUSHES FOR ANSWERS
Meanwhile, Gakwa’s two brothers and sister-in-law commute to Gillette from Meridian several weekends a month to organize search parties. Most days, they have no idea where to start. They have visited morgues and hospitals. They have checked the shelters for strays. They created a website, whereisirene.com. They asked local authorities to check if he joined the US military — an idea he briefly entertained. Some residents of Gillette, a town of 32,000 in northeastern Wyoming, have come together to find her. Wearing t-shirts that read “Where is Peace?” They have hosted weekend search parties and canvassed neighborhoods asking for permission to put up missing persons signs. It is not unusual to see pictures of Gakwa posted in the neighborhood where she lived with her boyfriend. “No family should ever go to bed at night wondering where their loved one is,” said Stacy Koester, who lives in Gillette and has been organizing searches with a group of local women since April. They’ve mapped out areas to search and marked where they’ve already looked so they don’t go the same place twice, Koester said. “We promised her father and her brothers that we will never stop looking until we bring her home or they have answers,” he added. “That’s our goal. We’re their family here at Gillette.” Koester and other neighbors have also gathered outside Hightman’s home, holding signs and shouting, “Nate, where’s Irene?” Sometimes, her father watches the protests via video from Kenya. But with each passing day, hope fades a little.
HER PARENTS HAD MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT HER MOVING TO THE US
Born and raised in Kenya, Gakwa immigrated to the United States in May 2019, hoping to start a career in healthcare. A petite woman, she was just over 5 feet tall and weighed about 90 pounds. At first, her parents resisted their introverted daughter’s plans to move to a faraway country. They worried about how she would adjust — she was so shy that she barely left her room in their Nairobi home to go out, her father said. “Sometimes we had to remind her to get out of the house and get some sunlight,” her father said. “But we decided since her brothers are there, why not?” Gakua first settled in Idaho to be near her siblings, with dreams of going to nursing school and working in a hospital. She lived with the youngest of her siblings, Chris Munga, and his wife, Giois Abatei, in Meridian. There she developed a close bond with her sister-in-law. Both women took a girls’ trip to Los Angeles in 2020, and in between shopping, eating out and visiting the beach, Gakwa confided in Abatey that she was dating Hightman. Gakwa spent a lot of time with him on the phone, Abatey said, but did not share many details about their relationship. Abatey described her sister-in-law as a sweet, fun-loving person who started her mornings with a cup of tea and enjoyed cooking, shopping and watching Nigerian movies. “She’s so free-spirited, so caring, silly, just goes with the flow,” Abatey said. Gakwa and Hightman eventually moved to Meridian together and she started nursing school at the College of Western Idaho. In the summer of 2021, they moved to Gillette, where he transferred to Gillette Community College. From time to time, her father would ask Gakua if he wanted to return to Kenya. “He was telling me, ‘Dad, I’m fine. I have my own life now,” Campo said. In the months before she disappeared, Gakwa returned to Meridian several times to visit her family. Last Thanksgiving, they gathered at the home of Munga, her brother. There, she and her siblings would prepare their favorite African delicacies, such as barbecue goat, jollof rice and ugali, a form of maize popular in Kenya. Go cook…
