Cavite girl’s‘rapist-killer’ finally falls

Ten-year-old Mary Joy Jimelo left home to hear Mass on Aug. 5 last year. She went missing, and turned up dead three days later, strangled and sexually molested, her body placed in a jute sack dumped in an irrigation canal.

Finally after nearly seven months, her suspected rapist-killer, Eduardo Naldo, fell. He did not resist arrest when cornered by agents of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) in Naic, Cavite last Friday.

Naldo was nabbed on the strength of an arrest warrant issued by Cavite Judge Napoleon Dilag. He was charged with rape with homicide.

Several witnesses, now under the CIDG’s custody, have tagged Naldo as the suspect. "Our efforts finally paid off," said Director Nestorio Gualberto, CIDG chief.

Police said Mary Joy was strangled to death and her hands and feet tied with nylon cords. The jute sack containing her decomposing body was clogging the iron railings of the irrigation canal in Naic when it was found. — Jaime Laude