Off The Record
British Woman Marries Kenyan Warrior After Holiday Romance — Their Tragic Ending Will Break Your Heart
After leaving her husband and three kids for a Masai warrior, a former hairdresser has admitted that she is plagued by guilt and feels that he used her as a “meal ticket” to help him get out of poverty and pursue a better life in the UK.
After falling in love with Daniel Lekimencho, Cheryl Thomasgood left her cosy home on the Isle of Wight for a mud house in a rural area of Kenya, a move that garnered international attention.
In March 1994, Daniel visited Cheryl’s hotel as a member of a group that entertained guests with traditional Masai dancing while she was on vacation in the East African nation. Cheryl was 34 years old at the time.
She left her husband Mike Mason and her three kids within weeks of falling in love with him in order to start a new life with the handsome warrior, who was ten years her junior and 6 feet 2 inches tall.
Talk shows and media at the time frequently discussed Cheryl’s strange relationship with Daniel, leaving the country stunned and bewildered by her decision to leave her family and middle-class life for one of arduous poverty with a Masai warrior she hardly knew.
She decided to live with Daniel and his tribe in the Samburu region of Kenya after briefly returning to the UK to inform her second husband Mike that their marriage was terminated, following the three-week vacation when she first met him.
She lived on a diet of cabbage and cow’s blood, slept on goatskin, and assisted them in hunting and cooking.
In 1995, she and Daniel finally made their way back to England, where they were married on Valentine’s Day at the Newport Registry Office on the Isle of Wight while both dressed in traditional Masai garb.
With intentions to raise a family and be closer to Cheryl’s kids, they made the decision to leave the hardships of Kenya for a more pleasant life in the UK. But their marriage, which gave birth to a 27-year-old daughter named Misti, ended tragically.
Now, over 30 years later, Cheryl disclosed that she has decided to talk candidly about her “tormented” relationship with Daniel for the first time because she has reached a point in her life where she is taking stock of her life.
Speaking to MailOnline, she cried: “I made a huge mistake, it was very wrong of me, and I have a lot of regrets, especially about how it damaged my children. Now I just want to make peace with it all.”
“My relationship with Daniel was crazy, it became a media circus, the whole country was fascinated by us and I’m now trying to make sense of it. Would I do it all again? No, I wouldn’t. I paid a very high price for being with him.”
After divorcing Daniel in 1999, one year after the birth of their daughter Misti, Cheryl is now 65 years old and lives alone in a Somerset coastal town.
She is well-known in her neighbourhood, where she has lived for the last ten years, but she said that none of her acquaintances are aware of her contentious history or the fame she has gained.
She said, “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what I did, all the hurt I have suffered and caused and all the things that happened. It’s quite a lot to take on and talking honestly about it now helps me. But I’m sure that a lot of people who’ve got to know me over recent years will be very shocked to find out about it all.”
When she first met Daniel at the Bamburi Beach Hotel in Mombasa, Cheryl said that he was the first man who she felt genuinely listened to her and who wasn’t preoccupied with money or other possessions.
She said, “We became inseparable soon after meeting. He would speak about the Masai way of life, their culture and how they weren’t obsessed by materialism, and he was also a very sincere. Something very deep changed in me, and I fell in love not just with him but all that the Masai stood for.”
However, she is still astounded by how rapidly Daniel changed after coming to the UK; he developed an obsession with money and material possessions and was always whining about life.
Cheryl burst out laughing as she compared him to a Masai version of Victor Meldrew, the gloomy and eternally unhappy character from the BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave. She was speaking from her immaculately kept semi-detached house.
Cheryl and her three children at the time—two boys named Steve and Tommy, whom she had with her first husband Robert, and her daughter Chloe, who was born during her second marriage to Mike—lived in Newport, on the Isle of Wight.
Cheryl recalled, “He came to the UK and became a different person. I thought I had a met a spiritual Masai warrior, but I ended up with a miserable old sod who became more like Victor Meldrew.”
“He was always moody and complained a lot and we started fighting all the time. All his spiritualism quickly went out of the window. He became obsessed by money, so that he could send it to his relatives in Kenya, designer clothes and wanting a bigger home.”
As a smile spread across her face, she recalled, “The only time when he was really happy was when he was jumping up and down in the garden doing his traditional Masai warrior dance. He would say that he was getting ready for battle and wanted to jump as high as an elephant. The kids loved it, but it got on my nerves after a while.”
Cheryl revealed that she began to doubt Daniel’s intentions for wanting to remain with her because of his change and his fixation with money.
She said, “I doubted if he loved me and felt that he just used me as a meal ticket to escape his life in Kenya. Once he was in the UK it all became about him and what he wanted, and he just wanted more and more.”
“He didn’t seem to care about me. He started driving me nuts and I realised that this was just a marriage of convenience for him. I moved a mountain for him, but I knew that he wouldn’t move a molehill for me.”
According to Cheryl, she began to have similar thoughts shortly after the pair was married, but she felt pressured to continue the relationship because she wanted to show that they could be happy in spite of the belief that they couldn’t and that she was a lousy mother and wife.
She said, “Things became very toxic between us, I realised that I had made a big mistake, but I had to continue putting the effort into the relationship.”
She claimed that she has been reflecting more and more on the issues in her relationship with Daniel in recent years.
She added, “There was just too much pressure on both of us and too many cultural differences. I think it was all too much for him in particular. Combine that with the doubts that I had over why he wanted to marry me and if he really loved me and things were never going to end well between us.”
As she recalled her early years, Cheryl broke down in tears, disclosing that she had been sexually abused for years and had grown up in a troubled London home with alcoholic parents.
She was struggling with despair and suicidal thoughts when she met Daniel. A friend who was in the same church choir as her encouraged her to take a vacation to Kenya. Together, the two had the vacation that transformed Cheryl’s life.
Cheryl said, “I suffered a lot of trauma in my childhood and that’s something I’m still dealing with. When I went to Kenya I was at a really low point in my life; trapped in an unhappy marriage and suffering from mental health problems.”
“In Daniel, I was looking for healing, inner peace and spirituality and thought that I had found all of that in him because in Kenya, he had all of those qualities. But sadly, that didn’t last.”
“I thought I was in love with him but really I was just trying to escape my unhappy life and cope with my trauma.”
Cheryl has been diagnosed with PTSD and continues to receive therapy for her childhood trauma. Daniel, who works at a supermarket and stayed on the Isle of Wight after they split up, is not in contact with her.
Asked about what she regrets the most about her time with him, Cheryl is quick to point out: “The impact all this had on my children. Having a Masai warrior as a father was not easy for them. Daniel was trying his best, but he could never understand the Western ways and couldn’t be the dad that they needed.”
“The children missed out on having a proper father, not just with Daniel but also my other two husbands. All of them were useless, bad fathers and I was too mentally unwell to be a good mother and made a lot of bad life decisions because of this.”
“My children deserved stability and love, but I was not able to provide them that, not with any of my marriages. That is my biggest regret, but we all have them and that’s just life.”
Cheryl added: “Any parent wants their children to have a loving, stable home but all I gave them was chaos and uncertainty and that still hurts. I went from one disastrous marriage to another.”
Cheryl insisted that she has positive relationships with all of her children and sees them frequently, despite her regrets about them. The ‘one nice thing’ that has come out of her marriage to Daniel, according to her, is her 27-year-old youngest daughter, Misti.
Steve, her oldest son, is currently 43 years old, and Tommy, his brother, is 41. Chloe, her daughter, is 34 years old.
She added, “I love Misti and all my other children to bits. I’m very proud of them all and they’ve grown up to be fantastic adults. Misti reminds me that not everything with Daniel was negative. She’s grown up to be a very intelligent and articulate woman.”
After three “disasters,” Cheryl stated that she now prefers the tranquil life and has no plans to get married again.
Asked what advice she would give any woman who goes on a break and finds a ‘holiday husband’ she warned, “Be careful what you wish for and be aware of what you’re getting into, or you could up regretting it for the rest of your life.”
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