Ogun pastor kills wife, dies under truck

Two mounds of freshly turned earth behind a modest bungalow in Akiode Ibogun, in Ogun State’s Ifo council area, now mark the final resting place of a couple whose deaths have left their community searching for answers.

The house, which sits beside the Celestial Church of Christ’s Iri Orun Parish, stood empty when a reporter visited on Thursday. The adjoining church, too, was silent, a stillness that belied the violence that had unfolded there days earlier.

In the early hours of Monday, 31 August, Bidemi Odukoya, the parish’s shepherd, allegedly attacked his wife with a machete during a heated domestic quarrel, killing her. He is then said to have fled roughly twenty minutes away to the Coker junction on the Lagos-Abeokuta Expressway, where he threw himself into the path of an oncoming truck and died instantly. Both were buried behind their home the same evening.

Neighbours described a couple who had lived in the area for nearly a decade and were widely seen as warm and courteous, making the killing especially hard for residents to accept.

The community’s traditional ruler, Chief Taiwo Akiode, called it an unprecedented tragedy, the kind more familiar from films than real life. He said he had never known the couple to be quarrelsome and was stunned to learn what had happened only after neighbours roused him near dawn.

When he reached the house, he found the woman’s body in a pool of blood, apparently struck with both a machete and a wooden stool. Officers who attended the scene photographed the aftermath, but Odukoya himself had already vanished.

Word later reached the community that he had been seen pacing back and forth across the expressway before sitting on the central reservation and stepping into traffic. Residents dispatched to confirm the report found it to be true, and police at Ifo took over the case from there.

Though Odukoya was widely regarded as easy-going, a different picture emerged from a neighbour, Oluwatoyin Oseni, who said the couple had a history of physical altercations, one serious enough in the past to involve the police, and had reportedly not spoken to each other since June following a bitter dispute.

She said it was the couple’s fourteen-year-old son who raised the alarm that night, prompting her and another neighbour to rush over and find the woman already dead. Odukoya, she said, was found holding the cutlass and, when questioned, remarked only that he too was “as good as gone”, before slipping away unnoticed to end his own life at the expressway.

Oseni said she had long urged the woman to leave the marriage for her own safety, but she had refused, unwilling to leave her children, particularly her youngest, aged seven.

Community youth leader Seun Adelana said mutual accusations of infidelity lay at the heart of the dispute, with each partner reportedly suspecting the other of an affair. Another elder, Chief Oluwasegun Adeboye, said the couple had in fact taken their conflict to court and had been sent home to attempt reconciliation, with a further hearing scheduled for the Wednesday, two days after the killing. Some residents, he added, suspected spiritual forces were at play.

Police in Ogun State confirmed the case file has been forwarded to the State Criminal Investigation Department for further investigation.

PUNCH.