On the night of 30 October 2026, 86-year-old Dorita Lasinder Macharia was found dead inside her home at Loresho Ridge Estate in Nairobi, lying in a pool of blood with a deep cut wound to her neck.
Court filings and police affidavits presented at Kibera Law Courts on 2 November describe a domestic confrontation that began when she found her granddaughter, Thandie Malaika Wanjiku Gitao, in a compromising situation with her boyfriend, Immanuel Waigwe Munyeki, inside a bedroom.
The elderly woman ordered the pair and any other visitors to leave and to surrender the house keys. Investigators say a commotion followed; Thandie left the premises but later returned and remained inside with her grandmother for roughly an hour before the body was discovered.
The granddaughter is alleged to have run outside shouting that the older woman was bleeding.
A Nairobi magistrate ordered that Regina Wambui Gitau, popularly known as Regina Re and a former host of the KTN game show Who’s Smarter Now?, be detained for ten days together with her brother Antony Jimmy Macharia, the granddaughter Thandie, and the boyfriend Immanuel.
Detectives from Gigiri Police Station, through an affidavit by Police Constable David Njoroge, told the court that Regina and her brother were found at the scene attempting to clean the room.
Family lawyer Senior Counsel Philip Murgor confirmed that the injuries and the volume of blood made the death appear unnatural.
The four are held at Gigiri Police Station pending further inquiries, including CCTV retrieval, forensic analysis, witness statements and a post-mortem; the matter returns to court on 12 November.
These publicly reported facts still leave several points unresolved.
- Court statements indicate that police arrived to find Regina Re and her brother already cleaning up the evidence. Who placed the call that brought officers to the house?
- Reports place Regina Re and her child living at the Loresho family home at the time of the incident. Does that arrangement mean she is divorced from her husband Philip Gitao, or is there another domestic explanation for the household composition?
- Shortly after the death, Regina Re posted a tribute on her Instagram account expressing remorse and shock at the loss of her mother, even though she remains a key suspect. Was the message a genuine expression of grief or a calculated performance intended to shape the early public narrative?
- The mother died on 30 October, yet the story did not surface in the media for some time despite the Directorate of Criminal Investigations operating a full propaganda team that routinely leaks case details to bloggers. Who pulled strings to delay or suppress the information, and what interest was being protected?
- Regina Re’s Instagram page carries photographs of her late father but none of her mother. Why is that selective absence present in light of the current allegations?
- The mother’s full name is recorded as Dorita Lasinder Macharia while Regina’s own surname has appeared in records as either Gitau or Gitao. What accounts for that discrepancy, and does it affect the precise family relationships under investigation?
Tribute by Regina Re on her Instagram page
Investigators have not yet charged anyone, and the ten-day detention is for the purpose of completing inquiries rather than a finding of guilt.
The publicly available sequence – from the argument over the granddaughter’s presence in the house, to the alleged cleaning of the scene, to the delayed public reporting – continues to generate questions that only the completed investigation and any subsequent court proceedings can answer.
