Body of missing bank teller found in shallow grave in Angeles

Photo posted by relatives and friends of Tania Camille Dee that circulated in social media. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

ANGELES CITY—A week after Tania Camille Dee, a bank teller in Binondo, Manila, went missing, her body was found in a shallow grave at the backyard of a house in a subdivision in Barangay Balibago here early on Sunday.

Photos of Dee, 33, a mother of two, have been circulating through social media since June 21, a day after she went to this city to meet with her former husband, Fidel Sheldon Arcenas, and never returned home.

At 9 p.m. on Saturday, Regina Dychioco relayed to the Pampanga Criminal Investigation and Detection Team (CIDT) the information she received from her daughter, Angela, that Dee might be dead and could be buried at the backyard of the house she has been renting out on Lilian Street in Sta. Maria Subdivision here. Angela is the girlfriend of Arcenas.

Dychioco told CIDT personnel that her daughter and Arcenas borrowed the keys of the house a few weeks ago. The house was unoccupied because its tenant left three months ago.

Dychioco said Arcenas returned the keys on June 26.

On Saturday night, after getting Dychioco’s permission, personnel of CIDT, the police’s Scene of Crime Operations and the Angeles City police’s crime laboratory office went to the house to search and dig in the backyard.

At 1 a.m. on Sunday, they exhumed the body of a woman from the grave, about a meter deep, at the back of the house. The woman was wearing denim pants and striped shirt, and her head was wrapped in a towel and plastic garbage bag.

Dee’s relatives went to this city on Sunday and identified the body.

They told the police that Dee had agreed to meet Arcenas here on June 20 after the latter told her that he would give her a car.

CIDT personnel went to the house of Arcenas at Carmenville Subdivision in Barangay Cutcut here after exhuming Dee’s body to invite him for questioning but they were told that he was not home.

Arcenas is a son of Fidel Arcenas, a former adviser to Angeles City Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan from 1992 to 1998. The older Arcenas also served as adviser to former Pampanga governor and now Sen. Manuel “Lito” Lapid and acted as provincial administrator of former Pampanga Gov. Mark Lapid, the senator’s son.

Chief Insp. Ferdinand Aguilar, Pampanga CIDT chief, said police are tracking down the younger Arcenas, who is believed to be still in the country and is considered primary suspect in the case.