Girl Kills Landlord's Daughter Over Bathroom Slippers

It started as a squabble between two ladies. One was the landlord’s daughter, the other a tenant’s little sister. In time, it graduated to a brawl. People, including the landlord, came to separate them. And there was peace – or so the people thought. Just when everyone was just settling down with what he or she was doing, there was a fresh commotion.

The two ladies had gone back at each other. This time viciously. By the time it all ended, one of the ladies lay dead. It was the landlord’s daughter, named Rhoda. It was said that her alleged assailant, the tenant’s little sister named Happiness, stabbed her in the chest. Her dead body is now in a morgue in the Isolo area of Lagos.

Rhoda, a 23-year-old hairdresser and mother of two (she was nursing the last one before her death) was living in her father’s house, at No. 23 Odulaju Street, Sabo, with her children. Her father Oladuyoye Abel is a pastor with Christ Apostolic Church.

Her alleged killer, Happiness, 19, from Nnewi South, Anambra State and a salesgirl at Alaba International Market, Ojo, said she never intended to kill Rhoda. According to her it was Rhoda who wanted to stab her.

Narrating the incident, Happened said she returned from the Lagos International Trade Fair to notice that her bathroom slippers were not at the entrance of her room. She started looking for them and saw Rhoda’s first child of about four years wearing them.

She continued: “I was cautioning the little girl and I didn’t know that her mother was by the well-side. Instead of Rhoda to caution her child, she started asking the little girl why she should wear the slippers of a valueless, worthless, miserable and good-for-nothing girl. She was calling me other unprintable names. It was from then that fight erupted and her father and my brother intervened immediately and separated us. That was about 7.30pm. Her father was angry with her and he asked her if she was the only lady in the compound that every time, she would quarrel with people.”

Happiness said, in annoyance, the old man went inside the house and started throwing out his daughter’s belongings, asking her to “leave the house as he is fed up with her trouble. My brother also cautioned me that this shouldn’t be the reason to fight. I wanted to go inside when she rushed at me from behind and I shouted and drew the attention of people that thought that the fight had ended and I fell on the door of the tenants’ kitchen and she was holding my jugular.

“Her mother was there, I didn’t know how she got a kitchen knife on the floor probably left by a tenant that was cooking and wanted to stab me. I overpowered her and took it from her and it slipped through my finger and I stabbed her. It was later that I heard that it was on the chest that I stabbed her.”

Happiness is undergoing interrogation at the homicide section of SIB in Yaba, Lagos.