A Kenyan woman with a chequered past in both Kenya and the United States is once again at the centre of a transnational fraud scandal after Arizona authorities arrested her for allegedly posing as a registered nurse and treating hospice patients using another woman’s professional licence.
Christine Nyambura Muturi, 41, who has been using the name Christine Lewis in the U.S., was arrested at her home in Mesa after investigators uncovered what they call a deliberate scheme to impersonate a qualified nurse across multiple hospice facilities.
She is now facing an array of felony charges including forgery, fraud schemes, identity theft, practising without a licence and computer tampering.
Muturi was first hired in August by Northern Arizona Hospice in Cottonwood after presenting herself as an experienced hospice triage nurse with years of service in Las Vegas.
She submitted a Colorado nursing licence that, at first glance, appeared genuine and allowed her to begin shadowing colleagues.
Court records show she even conducted a solo patient visit during her short stint at the facility.
Suspicion grew when administrators discovered that the licence number she provided had been issued in 1980, four years before her birth.
The real licence holder, a Colorado nurse nearly three decades older, confirmed she had never heard of Muturi.
When confronted, Muturi resigned abruptly but not before securing a second job at a hospice in Mesa.
A tip to investigators triggered a deeper background check that revealed Muturi had never been licensed to practise nursing in Arizona, Nevada, Colorado or any U.S. state.
On November 13 an undercover agent from the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, posing as someone planning to open a new hospice, met Muturi in Mesa.
She repeated her claim of holding an active licence. That meeting led to her arrest earlier this week.
Her criminal history in the U.S. includes past arrests in Las Vegas for domestic battery and a fugitive-from-justice case in Los Angeles.
Those records contributed to the court’s decision to deny her bail.
The Arizona case has revived scrutiny of Muturi’s troubled history in Kenya, where she previously faced charges for allegedly running an unaccredited nursing training operation.
As director of a company known as Westwick Institute Limited, she was accused in 2023 and 2024 of deceiving students out of nearly Sh2 million by offering uncertified nursing assistant courses and promising overseas job placements that never materialised.
Victims told Kenyan investigators they paid as much as Sh250,000 each for training that was not recognised by the Technical and Vocational Education and Training Authority (TVETA).
Kenyan courts charged her with multiple counts of cheating, fraud and offering unlicensed training services. She was released on a cash bail of Sh300,000 while the case proceeded.
The similarities between her Kenyan scandal and her new U.S. charges are striking. In Kenya she was accused of exploiting the ambitions of young people hoping to join the healthcare sector.
In Arizona she is accused of exploiting the healthcare system itself by inserting herself into hospice facilities as a nurse she was never qualified to be.
Arizona investigators say they are reviewing her employment history and interaction with patients to establish whether additional charges should follow.
Her next court appearance in the U.S. is expected later this month as prosecutors piece together what appears to be a pattern of deception stretching across two continents.
