Trial court clears Bella Ruby of 2011 kidnap-killing of schoolgirl

While the camp of Bella Ruby Santos was rejoicing over her acquittal, 43-year-old Renante Pique (below) was in deep grief.

Three years after a 6-year-old school girl was snatched by strangers riding a Pajero, a Cebu court acquitted the woman who was accused of kidnapping the child and killing her.

The criminal trial is over for 38-year-old Bella Ruby Santos.

The case was dismissed by a judge, who said the prosecution was unable to show beyond reasonable doubt that Santos was the one who kidnapped Ella Joy Pique when the little girl was walking home from school with friends on Feb. 8, 2011.

Santos’ British boyfriend, Ian Charles Griffiths who was also accused of the crime, remains in London, out of reach of Philippine courts.

Judge Ester Veloso of the Regional Trial Court in Cebu City dismissed the criminal charge against Santos for insufficiency of evidence.

A copy of the decision, dated Oct. 8, was received by the parties the next day.

A teary-eyed Santos, who now manages a salon in her hometown in Naga City, expressed her joy over the dismissal.

“To the witnesses who falsely testified against me and Ian Charles, do not do that to anyone anymore.

Your lies will haunt you forever,” she said reading a statement with her defense lawyers by her side.

A heartbroken Renante Pique, father of the slain girl, sobbed hard when he learned from CDN that the case against Santos was dismissed.

The court decision is final and cannot be appealed.

The judge granted the demurrer to evidence filed by the defense lawyers.

CHILD WITNESS

The prosecution’s case rested on the eyewitness account of an 11-year-old schoolmate who said she saw Ella Joy accept a stranger’s offer to hitch a ride in a dark Pajero vehicle about 4 p.m.

The pupils were dismissed from Calajoan Elementary School in Minglanilla town in south Cebu and walking home when the vehicle stopped by the road.

A woman with long hair and “Intsikon” eyes but not fair skin called out to Ellah Joy, and asked what her mother’s name was and where she lived, then offered to take her home, according to the child witness.

Ellah Joy boarded the vehicle and sat on the front seat on the woman’s lap. A white male foreigner drove the Pajero.

The next day, the girl’s body was found wrapped in a blanket and dumped off a cliff in Barili town, over 45 kilometers away in southwest Cebu. An autopsy showed that Ella Joy was killed with heavy blows to the head. Her upper body showed dark bruises indicating that she was gripped forcefully by her assailant.

The judge lifted and set aside the Hold Departure Order (HDO) it earlier issued against Santos. A P500,000 cash bond Santos deposited in court before her release on bail in April 2013 will be returned to her.

In her Oct. 8 ruling, the judge said the case rested mainly on the “eyewitness account” of the child who was the only one who claimed to have see the actual abuction but the testimony was not reliable.

The judge disregarded other prosecution witnesses because they could not pinpoint with absolute certainty Santos as the kidnapper.

Neither did results of a search warrant and DNA tests on suspected blood samples in the house of Santos show anything that would prove she was guilty, said the court.

NOT RELIABLE

More importantly, the judge was not convinced by the child witness, a grade 6 pupil.

“The court is not convinced of the reliability of the child’s identification of the accused Bella Ruby Santos.”

“By the time she had been taken as a witness, there had already been a previous mistaken identifications of another woman named (Karen) Esdrelon by the child’s companions,” the court said.

She was referring to a bungled police investigation early in the case where authorities arrested Norwegian visitor Sven Erik Berger and his fiance Karen Esdrelon, a Cebuana nurse, as the first set of suspects in the well-publicized case. Police had to release them later after accepting the mistake.

“The prosecution has not established why this child’s (witness) identification would be better and more reliable than that of the other children who were also with her at that time,” said the judge, “and why she was not even initially considered a witness by the police.”

Judge Veloso also noted that none of the poilce who investigated the child were presented in court to shed light on how the girl was questioned and how the investigation was conducted.

When the girl witness testified in court, she admitted that she had been watching news on television where she first saw Santos. The witness further said that she was only informed by a neighbor that it was Santos who killed Ellah Joy.

“Such exposure to the media coverage could have possible influenced the chld into making such identification (of Santos),” Judge Veloso said.

“In every criminal prosecution, the identity of the offender must be established by proof beyond reasonable doubt,” said the judge, who stressed that the first duty of the prosecution is not to prove the crime but to prove the identity of the criminal.

In the end, the prosecution did not overcome the “presumption of innocence” of the accused.

“The intervention of any mistake or the appearance of any weakness in the identification simply means that the accused’s constitutional right of presumption of innocence,until the contrary is proved, is not overcome, thereby warranting an acquittal, even if doubt may cloud his innocence,” said the decision.

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