Seares: “Murder” in Lapu-Lapu evokes disgust, sets off theories

THE killing and possible rape of Christine Silawan, 16 and Grade 9 student of Bry. Bangkal, Lapu-Lapu City could be unique.

Much of her face was disfigured, almost no longer recognizable. Her mother identified Christine by her birthmark and what was left of her clothes. And her body, found last March 11 at about 6 a.m. on a vacant lot in sitio Mahayahay, bore multiple stab wounds.

Record for Bangkal

The face-skinning is what makes it rare. Initial police forensic finding, however, says it is possible Christine was doused with “a corrosive material,” such as acid.

A possible case of another face-skinning was reported by CDN Digital: a farmer named Trening Batucan, 62, of a mountain barangay in Danao City was found murdered last Jan. 11. The details, however, didn’t include any specific medico-legal finding. Maybe none was made, particularly on how Batucan was stripped of his skin from the chest up to his face. Christine’s skin from the neck up was sliced off or corroded.

In South Africa, in Welkom near the province of Virginia, a face-skinning murder was reported in 2011. Forensic psychology professor Dap Louw, who studied the killing, said then he could not find in state records another similar case. He looked up “thousands of resources” at the University of Free State and talked with three international crime experts: no incident of face-skinning among the victims. “The uniqueness of the case must be mentioned. Totally unheard of and rare,” Louw said. That was eight years ago. Nothing else has been reported and recorded since then in today’s sources of quick information, though body-skinning comes up occasionally in crime films streamed by Netflix.

Bangkal, Lapu-Lapu could be setting a record of sort, if the face-skinning would be clinically confirmed.

“Gruesome” and more

Already, adjectives that police and media reserve for the basest crimes are seen in news reports: “gruesome,” “brutal,” “ghoulish.” Even if it was acid that destroyed Christine’s face, the rape-killing was still savage.

In the South African incident, the body was cut up and the parts were found in a number of places: at the cemetery, where the killing took place, in a barn nearby, and in the fridge, where the sliced-off skin, the eyes and the ears were stored. Silawan’s body was not dismembered but the disfigured face, with the stab wounds (20), has set off theories among amateur psychiatrists and crime analysts.

Theories of the crime

The favorite theories include these:

*The perpetrators enjoyed killing and often “indulged in acts of sadism and perversion, including necrophilia, cannibalism and drinking of the victim’s blood.”

*They could not resist the compulsion to collect “trophies” of the crime, such as hair, nail clippings, feet, heads, and skin. At least one such rapist-murderer, referred to by Dr. Erick Hickey in his 2010 book “Sexual Murderers and Their Victims,” would use the skin of his victims for lampshades, utensils and clothes.

*The rapists and murderers were high on drugs and one or all of them must have been so crazed as to inflict the unnecessary cruelty. That spin doesn’t rule out a passion crime, out of revenge or the odd brew of love and hate, but drugs must explain the excessive violence.

Argument for killings

The Silawan murder has evoked disgust and horror among many people, which in turn resurrects the “knee-jerk” clamor for the death penalty. And, unavoidably too, those who wage the war on illegal drugs are using the crime as argument for gunning down more drug suspects on the streets and in their homes. “See, they deserve to die.”

Those who govern the nation—the high public officials and legislators who craft the country’s policies—cannot be clear-eyed and wise if they decide by just looking at the defiled corpse of Christine Silawan. If you didn’t know, Christine’s image, in another kind of ghoulish perversion, is being circulated on the internet.

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