More trouble as ex-con, 35, seeks revenge on 71-yr-old sleeping with his wife in Owerri

Onyekachi Alozie learnt a tad too late that his wife Oluchi was sleeping with a 71-year-old for money to take care of him and their three kids while he served three years in Owerri prison.

He could have taken, maybe, taken another route in seeking justice. He rather resorted to what he knew best—crime—to avenge instead of seeking justice from the state that jailed him.

Naturally, things would be different when he came home from prison last year. Nobody would hire an electrician slammed in jail for robbery and kidnapping. Nothing could even appeal to him by way of honest occupation, considering the crowd he ran with: the friends he made in prison back then, now free, including Maxwell Chimezie, a nurse who also ran a restaurant and medicine store, and an illegal orphanage before.

With so much time to kill now, Alozie mostly hanged out with other him, other ex-cons and felons.

But he was idling at home November 11 when his wife got on the phone with Chief Precious Okorie. Alozie ears tingled as he heard ‘hotel’ in their conversation. It was the strangest of all the words in the phone chat. And his instinct kicked in right away.

He knew Okorie as the grey-headed do-gooder whom Oluchi said had been giving her N5,000 and N10,000 . Such a nice papa wouldn’t muck around with the wife of a tramp of an electrician 36 years younger.

But it went beyond that

“I started having an affair with late Okorie in a hotel. We dated for about three years,” Oluchi said after her arrest by the Imo police Anti-Kidnapping Squad.

She didn’t tell Alozie about the string attached to the do-gooding relationship, and how she had slept with Okorie for three of the six years of their marriage.

The slip of tongue teed off the ex-con. Robbers, kidnappers have honors. Somebody else sleeping with Alozie’s wife had to get a mortal come-uppance.

He shared his heartache with Maxwell later that day. Maxwell was called the boss for things like this. He had the experience, facilities, the business savvy, and the men. They both buttoned things up in Maxwell’s restaurant. And Alozie made his request clear: kidnap first, and the ransom would be N20 million. Vengeance later.

Oluchi had no idea what was cooking.

“The next day, my husband insisted that I should call Chief Okorie around 3.00 pm and threatened that if I didn’t call him, he would kill me,” she said.

“I had to call Chief Okorie, and told him to meet me at the hotel, that I would join him soon.”

Okorie then teetered into his Camry, headed for their rutting nest.

Maxwell rode in his own car to intercept Okorie. They snatched the 71-year-old lover from his car, and dumped him in Maxwell’s.

Boss headed for the forest, where they held their victims.

“He said I should carry Okorie’s car, and meet them at Irate and we drove to a hotel in Owerri where he sold the car for N 1 million,” Alozie said in his confession.

Boss gave him N290,000.

“I was going to give him more,” Maxwell said.

It was hard to know if greed or counting your chicks before they are hatched motivated the zero-sum formula Maxwell applied here.

The other largesse didn’t jell as expected. Okorie’s family haggled the ransom from N20 million to N1.5 million.

Alozie got nothing from it either.

“It was the second time that they were demanding another ransom they promised to give me a share,” he said. And the call as to the fate of Okorie had to be made as time flew by.

More glitches, too. The Okories refused to send more money. It was during a paint job on the car at the mechanic’s that the Anti-kidnapping Squad also busted Maxwell.

As things got murkier, Alozie told Oluchi, who kept asking about the missing Okorie, to take their children, and run to Mbaitoli, her village.

For all the consequences that could follow the N2.5 million crime, Alozie got just N290,000 for his reward—in a deal he brought to Maxwell.  This, a double loss, could be annoying. Okorie slept with his wife; Maxwell finagled him out of millions of naira in ransom and theft.

But Alozie denied being intent on killing the old man.

“I didn’t know how they killed him,” he told the police. “It was some of our gang members who did the job.”

Maxwell, however, countered him.

Alozie wanted revenge on Okorie sleeping with his wife, he told the police.

“We later beat the deceased to death and we burnt his body,” he said.

Alozie is now striving to distance himself from the killing of his wife sharer Okorie. He can’t tell how sweet revenge tastes now because he’s got a lot on his plate. Another victim has identified him as part of the Maxwell gang that abducted and robbed him recently