After serving in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry in the early 1900s, Leakey's father became a farmer at Nyeri Station, west of Mount Kenya in Central Province, Kenya, about north of Kiganjo and about north of Nairobi. His father was an honorary Kikuyu tribesman known as Morungaru (tall and straight); he was kidnapped and brutally murdered by the Mau Mau in October 1954, and his second wife Mary was also killed.