Missionary Pedophile Gregory Dow finally Sentenced to Jail
By: Aska Makori
Posted on Friday, February 5, 2021
Gregory Dow is a name that will remain in the minds of Kenyans for years to come and will change the way people view children orphanages forever. This is a man who opened a Children’s home in Kenya, Bomet county, not to help kids but to defile them. An act that continued until he fled the country in 2017 after locals started suspecting him and authorities got involved.
The sickening thing is that Gregory was a registered sex offender in the United States until 2006. In 1996 he pleaded guilty to assault with intent to commit sexual abuse to which he received two years’ probation with orders to register as a sex offender for a decade. These are details that Kenyan authorities missed simply because at the time when he opened the Dow Family Children’s Home in 2008, foreigners were not required to submit to background checks in Kenya.
His wife Mary Rose, who ran the orphanage with him was arrested on child abuse charges. It is believed that she was an accomplice. Her role was to take the girls to the hospital for birth control implants to ensure that none of her husband’s victims got pregnant. Gregory escaped and went back to his home in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, after his wife’s arrest. His case went cold. It was until a U.S based Kenyan lady from Boito, Bomet, decided to pursue justice for the children that were sexually abused by a man who was supposed to protect them.
36-year-old Margaret Ruto, a Pennsylvania nurse coincidentally lived a short distance from Gregory Dow while abroad was also from Boito village , Bomet County back in Kenya. She had come back to the country in 2018 to take care of her ailing mother-in-law when she heard the stories of children who were yet to get justice after being assaulted by an evil ‘missionary’ man. According to some of the girls, Gregory would force them to sleep with him and when they refused, he would punish them by forcing them to drink alcohol or eat soap.
He was sentenced on Thursday to more than 15 years for his crimes, a sentence that many feel is lenient since he molested several children for almost a decade in a foreign country then avoided justice. This is however not the first case of sexual offence perpetrated by a foreigner in an orphanage in Kenya. In 2016, Matthew Durham, a 21-year-old Oklahoma man was sentenced in a U.S. federal court to 40 years in prison for molesting eight children at a Nairobi orphanage. The big question is, why is justice pursued abroad but not in the country where the crimes took place? How are these foreign sex offenders fleeing without getting caught? What does this reflect on the Kenyan justice system? Food for thought.
