A Mystery in Mindanao
Trip Start
Nov 15, 2006
1
68
228
Trip End
Jul 15, 2008
Barobo, Mindanao,
Philippines
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Barobo, Mindanao, Philippines
Today we're taking our flight to Butuan on the island of Mindanao. From there we take a bus to San Francisco and another to Barobo. We don't have a telephone number for our friends Lee and Grace because we left it in our Philippines travel book which we had forwarded to us in Darwin. Unfortunately Darwin has extremely bad mail service and even though it was sent a month earlier by our friend and neighbor Suzette, it still had not arrived by the time we left Darwin. But if they are in town we should be able to find them. Actually, they live outside of town and we'll have to take a boat to get to their place. When they visited us last we got on Goggle Earth and found the location of their house, although the satellite photo was taken before it was built. So we have a pretty good idea where we were going.
10-01
We just hope they are at home. Lee is about 67 years old and in 2000 he had met Grace, a Philippina who would now be about 31, in Cebu through some kind of international bride agency. We met them in 2003 and they were a very happy couple planning their first trip back to the Philippines. When they returned to the US the next spring they told us they had bought land on the east coast of Mindanao, south of Barobo towards Rizal. These are real backwater towns, and now that we've arrived we are wondering what the heck drew them here. To us it seemed the next place just short of the heart of darkness. They returned to the Philippines again the following year and built a house on the property. They've shown us photos and we were amazed that they were able to build such a nice house in only 6 months. It's even more amazing when you consider that there are no roads to their property and everything had to be brought in by small outrigger boats. Even the sand for the cement had to be brought in that way, in canvas bags, from the only beach around which is on Turtle Island. So when we got to the bus station in Barobo we piled everything into a motorbike sidecar and told the driver to take us to where we could see Turtle Island. He didn't seem to know our friends, but took us to what he called a tourist area south of town called something like Dopdop. There are three or more rickety covered wooden jetty's sticking out into swallows of Lianga Bay. The whole thing is very primitive and it doesn't look like any tourist spot we'd ever seen
11-02
. It looked more like they had slapped up the places in the hopes someone would come. The driver took us to the Balahay Hotel and Seminar [GPS 08 32.191N 126 08.403E]. Our driver said this is the best place around and is indescribably wretched. We are the only tourists here. It was near dark so we took a room with a bath down the hall for 200 pesos. The shower was a plastic waste can of water with a ladle so you could pour the water over yourself. We asked the caretaker if anyone knew Lee and Grace and described where they lived. There was some conversation among the locals that had gathered around to see the strangers. When he turned back to us he said he thought our friends were not there any longer and that the man's body was found floating in the water. He thought the man had died last week, someone else said last month, but the body was still on memorial in San Francisco. We are shocked and think there is a mix-up; they are talking about someone else. Lee was a good swimmer even at 67, but then he did tend to drink and smoke as much as he could. However, when we saw him last summer he seemed healthier than we'd ever seen him. He had lost weight building the house and looked in good shape. But you never know when you're going to go. So maybe he had a stroke or heart attack while swimming. He was also blind in one eye, which might some how be a factor. The people all agreed that the body was found by fisherman and the police were investigating the situation
11-03
. Then the caretaker said "we don't know about the situation there". The word situation seemed odd. Was it just his limited English or something ominous? Sometimes we've found that things get confused in the translation, so tomorrow morning we're going to hire a boat and driver to take us down the coast to Lee and Grace's house and hope they are both healthy and happy to see us. We are the only guests here and the place is really eerie at night.March 11, 2007 Sunday,
We are woke up early by the caretaker telling us our boat is ready and that we must go now because it is high tide. We gingerly climb into a motorized outrigger canoe and try to find something comfortable to sit on. We travel past some interesting fishing shanties on stilts and strange staked out areas that look like they may be fisheries. About 30 minutes down the coast we recognize the house Lee had been so proud of and it was very nice. It was almost the only concrete construction we saw along the coast; we had only seen one other between here and Dapdap, or whatever it is called. It was very isolated. We noticed that the water even at high tide was shallow all along our boat ride; maybe no more than two meters, shallower near the shore. Our boatman beached the boat and we waded out
11-04
. The place was deserted and quiet. [GPS 08 31.359N 126 12.686E] The only things in the house were a chair and sofa. Outside, under the over hanging deck was a work table and an empty bottle of plastic furniture varnish. It also looked like Lee had started to paint the side of the house yellow over the original white; it was half finished. We think the yellow would have been perfect. We were very sad and the boatman crouched in respectful silence near the waters edge as you would in the presence of the dead. We decided to go into town and get whatever information we could from the police. Maybe they would have Grace's phone number so we could talk to her and give her our condolences. The assistant investigator took us into his office and he found the file which wasn't hard because it was the only one in the filing cabinet drawer. The officer confirmed that the body had been found by fishermen on January 3rd, about 1 km from Lee's house and may have been carried there by the currents, which are very slow. The report was all in English. Arvid looked down at a page the investigator had stopped at and amid all the typing the word 'victim' stood out. We asked for Grace's phone number and he said they didn't have it. He said that maybe her attorney knew, but that she was in hiding.
The assistant investigator said that we could learn more from his supervisor and he drove us to the chief inspector's house, a very nice house, spacious compared to the others in town
11-05
. He was obviously a man of importance. We learned that Lee was fully clothed, even wearing his shoes when found. A pack of cigarettes were in his shirt pocket. So he wasn't out swimming. The autopsy report by the Philippine FBI showed drowning as the primary cause of death, with secondary causes being a blow to the side of his face and the back of his head. Grace was reportedly not home at the time of the death but was in the home of her paramour. She has since gone into hiding. We were also told that Lee had told people that his friends, Arvid and Irina, were coming to visit in March and how happy he was about that. We are then introduced to friend of Lee and Grace's known as Jing Jing (not her real name). We go to her family's humble but clean home and hear more of the story, while we are feed dinner. We heard how Grace run off to stay with her lover and would only come back to Lee maybe once a week. How Jing Jing and her family looked after Lee. How generous Lee was to everybody he met. How he had started a piggery on his property and would give pigs to families that were in need. How Grace dressed indiscreetly in this conservative town. How Grace had bragged that she would be a millionaire when Lee died. How Grace and her family in Cebu City would manipulate to get more and more money from Lee. Even a bazaar incident when Grace called Lee's sister in the States and told her he had been kidnapped by terrorist and she need $8,000 US for ransom. Most damning was that she had cleaned out Lee's bank account before Christmas. When he found out he finally decided he would fly back to the USA on January 25 to file for divorce and get her name off his will and property there. Jing Jing says she feels guilty because she told of his plan. Lee will never get back to the States. He will be cremated in San Francisco.
After hearing all this and more we go back to our hotel, pack our bags and take the bus back to Butuan. There's nothing we can do here.
