Crime and Justice Lagos episode 2 recap: “This case is about a missing child”

In Nigeria, the birth of a child is a celebration, and today’s episode of Crime and Justice Lagos opens with such a party.

It is a Bini naming ceremony, colourful, joyful, and traditional. The parents stand out in white laces adorned with traditional red beaded jewelry.

A few years later, we meet Esohe, but just before we get to know her, she is kidnapped. It is a case the local police should handle, but Esohe’s dad is reporting to the Serious and Special Crimes Unit (SSCU) after a policeman advises him to take it to them.

Expectedly, Kelechi and Danladi, the unit’s lead operatives, are motivated to solve this case even though it isn’t under their jurisdiction. They visit the local police for information but are unsurprisingly overruled, with the police chief warning them “stay clear of our cases”.

But the stubborn detectives press on regardless. They visit the family, and on sighting police officials, Esohe’s grandma gets hysterical – telling her son to send them away. An ominous sound plays; there is something amiss about her. Esohe’s mum narrates that the driver, Bobo Bonsuwe, takes the girl and her brothers to school every day and has been doing so for years. She finds this kidnap weird and confusing; he has always been good to her kids. What changed?

As we will find later, the problem isn’t exactly his fault. He perhaps thought he was doing something good, even when that thing eventually turned sour. Danny wonders if this is a ritual murder. Stories of young girls being kidnapped and mutilated for money rituals are heard in every corner of Lagos. An evil that goes back to the 90s when the first ritual killers went mainstream, and has heightened with the introduction of ritual killings to Yahoo Yahoo (internet fraud).

The operatives visit the driver’s house, but the local police had already ransacked it.

“Sometimes I wonder how the local police think. I mean if you are looking for clues, why turn the suspect’s house upside down?” Danny wonders aloud.

As they continue their investigation, they butt head with the police again, who term Esohe’s kidnap a low-priority case not worthy of their time.

Back at the office, their bosses argue over the case. The SSCU boss, Biboye, tells his counterpart that the case has been with the police for five days and nothing has been done. The police chief, Jacob Jangfa, calls it nonsense. After a moment of back and forth, Jangfa reminds him several special units have come and gone and there is nothing extraordinary about them. It is a silly ego battle because a child is still missing.

Things take a different turn when the kidnappers demand a ransom of three million naira, which suggests Bobo Bonsuwe wasn’t acting alone. Kelechi and Danny secure the ransom and proceed to give the kidnappers with the hope of catching them, but they slip away. On returning to the office, they find out a child’s body has been found in a refuse dump. She was sliced, mutilated, and her clitoral gland removed.

What follows are spoilers, but the case is resolved unpredictably. The villains here are from
within but even they will argue they were righteous about their evil actions.

A new episode of Crime and Justice Lagos drops every Thursday on Showmax.