Jane Kuria and her three children — two daughters and a son — immigrated to the United States in 2002 after the death of her husband.

By 2007, Jane’s family was well established in Powder Springs, Georgia, a suburb northwest of Atlanta. Her oldest daughter, Isabella, was in college and her middle daughter, Annabelle, was enrolled in high school. During the summer of 2007, however, things took a horrifying turn.

July 29 was a normal Sunday afternoon. Family was visiting from Kenya, and Jane’s sister-in-law, Pauline, dropped off her son PK to play with Jane’s son, Jeremy. The young cousins spent the day playing outside and collapsed into bed early that evening.

The next day, another sister-in-law tried to reach Jane, but there was no answer. When Wednesday came with no contact, Pauline and Jane’s niece, Diana, went to the house to check on the family. Jane and Isabella’s cars were in the driveway. Diana walked behind the home to try the back door, which was unlocked. Before she could step inside, she saw a large pool of blood on the floor, and she called the police.

Officers at the scene made a sickening discovery. Jane and her daughters had been bludgeoned to death. PK and Jeremy were clinging to life in the same bed where they’d fallen asleep Sunday night. The boys were rushed to Atlanta Children’s Hospital where they each spent days in a coma. When they did regain consciousness, neither child remembered anything that happened after they went to sleep on Sunday.

It appeared that all of them had been struck multiple times with a long, skinny object that was likely forked at one end, though the weapon was not found on the scene. Based on the blood spatter, Jane had definitely put up a fight against the attacker before she was overcome.

Two suspicious people

As authorities combed through Jane’s phone records looking for clues, they realized she spoke to a man named Patrick multiple times every day. The day of the murder, Patrick and Jane last spoke around 10 p.m. He didn’t try to call her again after that. Police questioned Patrick about this discrepancy and he had no explanation for why he suddenly stopped calling.

As part of the family worked to make sure Jane and her daughters were transported to Kenya for burial, a woman they went to church with was working behind the scenes to gain guardianship of Jeremy. The woman, Elizabeth, was able to ingratiate herself with one of Jeremy’s grandmothers and get custody of the boy. Elizabeth also began selling all of Jane’s possessions and Jane’s home. The only link that police found between Elizabeth and Patrick were that they attended the same church.

Neither Elizabeth nor Patrick were never named as suspects or persons of interest in the case, and the case remains unsolved.

For more on this case, stream Still A Mystery: “Secrets in the DNA” now on Max.