GENERAL SANTOS CITY, Philippines—For six months since April, the eight children of Nimfa Dajay had been searching and asking where she might be.
Their father, Fermin — before he was arrested on a charge of raping one of their aunts—would give alibis, such as that she had gone home to Arakan, North Cotabato.
The children’s desire to locate their mother heightened when she still failed to come home after their youngest sibling, Marlon, died in a road accident three weeks ago.
But last Saturday morning, according to the account of two of the children and another relative, the search for the missing woman ended in an old and abandoned septic tank outside the house of a relative where they had lived before in GenSan’s Barangay Ligaya.
Nimfa’s remains were recovered through the help of village officials and the police.
Darlyn Dajay told the Inquirer in an interview on Tuesday that her mother appeared to her in a dream and told her she was buried near their old house.
Bizarre at it may seem, the owner of the house, Alejandro Amoy, a relative, said he, too, dreamed of the missing Nimfa. He said she was very specific about where her body had been dumped.
“Two weeks ago, Nimfa appeared in my dream and asked me to open the septic tank,” he said.
Amoy said he brushed off the dream but on Saturday, he received a call from Darlyn, who told him about her own dream.
It was then he decided to act. With some relatives he went to the septic tank, opened its cover and found a decomposed body.
Amoy said he then called up village chair Romy Pagaduan, who, in turn, called up the police, and they retrieved the body.
Nimfa was positively identified by her children through her clothes.
“We were suspecting that something bad happened to our mother because she failed to return home despite the death of her youngest son,” Gerald said.
He said they had no other suspect but their father, who had physically abused their mother.
PO2 Angel Marquez, investigator of the Lagao police station, said investigation showed Nimfa had supported the filing of a rape case against Fermin by a younger sister. Fermin also allegedly raped one of Nimfa’s nieces.
This, Marquez said, may have angered Fermin and led him to kill Nimfa.
“He committed a crime, he should pay for it. He should have told us what he did to our mother so we can give her a decent burial,” Gerald said.
Marquez said the police were now readying charges against Fermin for the death of Nimfa.