Woman mutilator: The story of a modern-day ‘Bluebeard’

Feb 09, 2014 Features / Columnists, Murder and Mystery

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By Michael Jordan

Remember that children’s tale about the man who butchered his wives and hid their bodies in a special room in his castle?
You may think such monsters only exist in fairy tales, but Emily Bollers’ children believe that their mother was terrorized, and finally murdered, by such a man; a type of modern-day, Guyanese ‘Bluebeard’, a man who seemed to relish using a knife on his lovers; whose close relatives would become anxious every time he started a fresh relationship.

Most of us first learnt of him last year after he allegedly put over 20 knife wounds in a teenage girl. But this trail of violence may have begun much earlier.
Prison officials say that he served a ten-year stretch around 1991 for trying to murder a woman. He was also twice remanded for stabbing two other women. It is said that one of the victims was a policewoman, and that he attacked her in a nightclub.
What is almost certain is that he’s killed at least two women.
In 2000, he started a relationship with an attractive woman named Emily Ann Bollers. He was 51 and drove a minibus; she was a 37-year-old licenced caterer who worked at a food establishment.
Along with Bollers’s 15-year-old daughter, Oneika Baptiste, and 12-year-old son, Lexton Williams, the couple moved into the bottom-flat of a house at Lot 130 Fourth Street, Agricola, East Bank Demerara.
From what the landlord told me, the couple was constantly arguing, and the landlord developed a fear of his male tenant, who allegedly threatened him when he asked for his rent.
Bollers’s two small children were also terrified of their mother’s companion, and could only watch on helplessly as their mother was subjected to an almost daily dose of violence.
“I used to be so afraid of this guy…I watched that man literally try to break my mother’s jaw,” the son, Lexton Williams, told me.
“I recall one time the neighbours called the police and they locked him up for the night. He beat my mother every day and she was afraid of him.”
Williams’s 15-year-old sister, Oneika Baptiste, appeared to have narrowly escaped the man’s clutches.
It happened one day when she was home alone with her mother’s boyfriend.
“He was being verbally abusive to me and saying things that would make you believe that we were in a relationship.”
She alleged that the man shut the front door in an attempt to corner her in the house. She managed to flee through the back door with only one of her shoes on. She never returned to the house.

Neighbours would also later claim that the lover would beat Ann Bollers practically every day, while accusing her of having an affair.
Ann Bollers had reportedly once worked as a caterer for an Ambassador, but was at the time employed as a cook with another establishment. Her live-in boyfriend reportedly tried to track her every movement.
It is alleged that the obsessive man would often accompany Bollers to her workplace and even wait there until she was ready to go home. It was said that he would sometimes even sleep on a bench when she was working late.
On the night of Wednesday, February 21, 2001, the boyfriend began quarreling with Ann Bollers. At around 3.00 a.m., on Thursday, February 22, 2001, as the argument continued, Ms. Bollers left the home. This apparently further incensed her male partner, who reportedly began cutting up her clothing and other belongings. The boyfriend left the home shortly after.
Ann’s son, Lexton, remembers that night well.
“I saw her leave the house and I never saw her back.”
At around nine a.m. on February 23, 2001, a group of children walking along a dam some 200 yards from Ann Bollers’s residence noticed two hands sticking out of a nearby trench.
Alerted by the commotion, neighbours rushed to the scene and pulled a woman’s body out of the trench. The victim’s body bore marks of violence and her throat had been slit. The dead woman was Ann Bollers.

Police immediately sought to question the slain woman’s paramour, but he was nowhere to be found.
But the suspect had contacted an employee at Bollers’s workplace by phone on the very day that her body had been found. According to reports, the man enquired about the caterer’s whereabouts, and then queried whether the workplace had caller’s ID.
Eventually, police located Bollers’s boyfriend. The reports of his violent nature and the fact that he had argued with the victim and had followed her on the night of her disappearance, made him the prime suspect.
But that was not enough for the cops to pin a murder charge on their suspect. After 72 hours, police were eventually forced to release him.
To this day, Boller’s children are convinced that this man killed their mother and got away with it.
But maybe, not quite.
Last year, someone butchered a teenage girl in a depressed community.  Emily Ann Bollers’s former paramour was arrested and charged for that murder.
At the time, he’d been involved in a relationship with the victim’s mother.
Those who know him well hope that he never sees the outside of a prison again.

If you have any information about this unusual case, please contact Kaieteur News at our Lot 24 Saffon Street, Charlestown location. We can be reached on telephone numbers 225-8458, 225-8465, 225-8491 or 225-8473. You need not disclose your identity.
You can also contact Michael Jordan at his email address: [email protected]

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