DAVAO CITY, Philippines—“Nobody wanted this to happen.”

That was the only statement that Corazon Donato gave reporters when she was asked about the death of her British-Australian boyfriend, Philip Andrew Aitken.

Donato, 30, was arrested last Wednesday for murdering Aitken, 45, and burying his body in the front garden of their rented house in Guadalupe Village here.

She confessed to conspiring with three men to beat Aitken to death with metal pipes, police authorities said.

Police exhumed the body from a shallow grave in the couple’s home last Wednesday.

All the suspects were arrested, save one, who remains at large.

Senior Supt. Francisco Villaroman, chief of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) for Southern Mindanao, said Aitken was possibly murdered on Oct. 20, the day he failed to board his flight for Manila. He was to have taken another flight to Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, where he worked as a mechanical engineer for a US company.

When Aitken failed to return to Dubai, his employers and family in Australia called British Embassy authorities here who reported Aitken as missing.

Telltale smell

Police said that when they first visited the couple’s house, Donato denied that Aitken had been there.

When they returned last Wednesday, police said they found a telltale foul smell from the garden. When they started digging, they found Aitken’s decomposing body.

An autopsy report said Aitken had been stabbed several times and hit with hard objects on the head and body.

Villaroman said Donato broke down under questioning and immediately admitted to having had her boyfriend killed and that three local men had helped her.

Donato, who was previously married to a German, said she and Aitken started living together in 2003. The couple have a 4-year-old son.

Serious disagreements

She told police that she and Aitken had serious disagreements and that in 2006, he had found another girl.

She said Aitken started making threats to leave her and take their son with him to Australia.

Insp. Johanna Lagundi, the leader of the CIDG team that went to the couple’s rented house, said that it appeared that Aitken had already firmed up his decision to leave Donato for good on Oct. 20.

She said Donato had told investigators that “he just dropped by to say goodbye.”

What prompted her to have her boyfriend killed was her boyfriend’s threat to take their son, Lagundi said.

Donato contracted a certain Jay R for the job and paid him P35,000.

After burying him, the suspects cemented the grave over to hide the body but the smell gave them away, Villaroman said.

All the suspects have been charged, “only one of them remains at large,” Villaroman said, referring to Jay R.

The three male suspects “admitted to having used iron pipes to kill him after he was hogtied,” he said.

Donato will be charged with murder and conspiracy to murder and the three men will all be charged with murder, police said. With Agence France-Presse