The quiet computer technician’s secret life

Nov 24, 2013 Features / Columnists, Murder and Mystery

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By Michael Jordan
None of us suspected that he might have a secret life. None of us thought that the time would come when his name would be mentioned in the same sentence with unsavoury figures from the Guyanese underworld.
After all, he was Veeran Veerapen, a mild-mannered, middle-aged guy with glasses, who worked in the Chronicle’s Computer Room.
‘Penn’, as most of us called him, was a member of the Rama Krishna Church in Barr Street, Kitty. He was happily married, had fathered two children, had worked at the same job for 25 years, didn’t drink alcohol, didn’t smoke, and never raised his voice.
But on Tuesday, January 12, 1999, something went badly wrong in the life of Veeran Veerapen.
At around nine o’clock that day, the 49-year-old computer technician left his Owen Street, Kitty home after informing his wife, Indroutie, that he was going to GT&T’s Brickdam office to pay the family’s phone bill.
From all reports, he disembarked from a minibus at Regent Street and Orange Walk, and headed towards Brickdam.
And then he simply disappeared.
Night fell, and dawn broke, and there was still no sign of Veerapen. An intensive search began for the missing technician.
On Thursday, January 14, a group of children living in a small community near the Madewini Creek got an unpleasant surprise. Lying on the ground, in a clearing some 100 yards off the East Bank Public Road, was the badly battered body of a man of East Indian ancestry.
Detectives who arrived at the scene concluded that the victim had been bludgeoned to death.
Scouring the area, the detectives also found an empty bottle several feet from the corpse. The bottle smelled of the unmistakable odour of monocrotophos — the deadly insecticide used in the local farming industry.
Suspecting that the victim was missing technician Veeran Veerapen, detectives contacted the missing man’s family. Two relatives immediately identified the body as that of Veerapen’s.
Forensic pathologist Dr. Leslie Mootoo found traces of the insecticide in the dead man’s stomach, but the autopsy revealed that Veerapen died from brutal head blows he had received.
Dr. Mootoo concluded that someone had forced the noxious substance down Veerapen’s throat before killing him.
What, everyone wondered, could this quiet, decent family man have done to come to such a brutal end? Who had wanted him dead?
Detectives attempted to find out just that.
Retracing Veerapen’s movements on the day he disappeared, the investigators discovered that he never arrived at GT&T to pay the telephone bill. The phone bill amounted to $6,000. When Veerapen was found, only $1,000 was in his pocket.
Then the investigation took an even more sinister turn. Veerapen, the detectives were told, was walking along Orange Walk and Croal Street, when three men cornered him and forced him into a white car.
Digging into Veerapen’s background, the detectives found out that the Chronicle computer technician also did computer work for persons with whom he had been acquainted for several years.
Their investigations led them to suspect that Veerapen’s computer expertise had led to him rubbing shoulders with some figures in a ‘backtrack’ ring which provided Guyanese with false documents to migrate to the United States and Canada.
Veerapen, they concluded, had somehow incurred the wrath of key members of a recently-busted ‘backtrack’ ring, and had paid the ultimate price.
Some of the reports also seemed to indicate that the men who had abducted and killed Veerapen had met him at his home a few days before he was slain.
Determined to find possible clues, investigators removed Veerapen’s personal computer and accessories from his home and perused the files.
They found nothing.
They also reportedly sought, and received, assistance from US Embassy officials who had investigated the same ‘backtrack’ operation that was suspected to have ‘taken out’ Veerapen.
But, again, they found nothing. The trail went cold, and has stayed cold.
In fact, no one was ever arrested for ‘Penn’s’ murder.
Throughout it all, Veerapen’s wife, Indroutie, has steadfastly maintained that her husband had not been into any shady business. She stated that she knew all of the persons for whom her husband had done private work.
Her belief, she said, was that the people who murdered her husband had mistaken him for someone else.
Years after her husband’s unsolved murder, Mrs. Veerapen still had a haunted look when I turned up at her home to ask her about the case. Stressing her reluctance to speak about the matter, she told me she has resigned herself to the fact that his killers will never be caught. Their fate, she says, is in the hands of the Creator.
And so it seems that what happened on that fateful January day will remain a mystery, known only to a group of cold-blooded killers and their victim, Veeran Veerapen, the quiet computer technician with a secret life.

If you have any further information on this or any other case, please contact us at our Lot 24 Saffon Street office.
We can also be reached on telephone numbers 22-58465, 22-58491, or 22-58473. You need not disclose your identity.
You can also contact Michael Jordan at his email address [email protected]

 

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