Who killed the peeping tom?

May 25, 2014 Features / Columnists, Murder and Mystery

By Michael Jordan

Radio announcer Matthew Allen loved to tell the story about a notorious peeping tom who roamed the seawalls many years ago.
They called him ‘the moving blacksage’ because he would reportedly cut clumps of blacksage bushes and hide behind them while creeping up on unsuspecting lovers. Bill Rogers even made up a calypso about him.

Victor Ramsabad, called ‘Tun Tun’

But his luck reportedly ran out one night when an irate man caught the ‘moving blacksage’ and beat him with a bull-whip. “And that,” Matthew Allen would say, “was the end of him.”
Like I said, that was many, many moons ago, so let’s turn to another ‘peeping tom’ who met an ignominious end just a year ago.
The Safari Inn at Friendship, East Bank Demerara, is one of Guyana’s oldest hotels. It is where handyman Victor Ramsabad, also called ‘Tun Tun’ worked and sometimes slept.
The Safari Inn is owned by Francis and Yvonne Correia, and 37-year-old ‘Tun Tun’ had been doing odd-jobs at the couple’s hotel since he was a teen.
Yvonne Correia told me that ‘Tun Tun’ was paid $3,000 for a day’s work. He was well treated, and the business couple even put up with his heavy drinking and his habit of stealing alcohol and other beverages from the bar.
It was said that whenever he misbehaved, ‘Tun Tun’ would stay away for about a month, but then return and ask the Correias “for another chance.”
But while they put up with Ramsabad’s pilfering, Mrs. Correia claimed that he had a particularly nasty vice. He was also an incurable ‘peeping tom’.
According to Mrs. Correia and some of her staff, Ramsabad would peep into the bedrooms and into bathrooms of the hotel guests. The businesswoman alleged that ‘Tun Tun’ would even “bore holes” in the bedroom walls to get a view of the guests. As if that wasn’t enough, he would joke with his friends about his escapades.
Mrs. Correia would say: “Tun Tun, stop peeping the customers,” and even complained to his mother. Despite being occasionally caught by guests, and despite pleas from his mother, Tun-Tun apparently just couldn’t stop ‘peeping.’
Eventually, the hotel proprietors ordered their handyman to stay off the premises whenever he was drunk. Nevertheless, ‘Tun Tun’ would still sneak into the unfenced compound.
At around 10 p.m. on Sunday, August 18, 2003, a couple came to book a room at the Safari Inn. A female tenant gave the customers a room key. She then looked outside and saw Ramsabad in the yard.
The tenant reportedly said: “Tun Tun, Auntie Yvonne ain’t say that she don’t want you in the yard after hours?”
It is alleged that the tenant then went inside, so she was unable to say whether the handyman had left. It is believed that he was intoxicated at the time, since he had visited a wedding house in the area earlier in the day.

The passageway where the body was found.

It is alleged that on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 20, 2013, proprietor Francis Correia was strolling in his compound when he spotted his handyman’s motionless body near a passageway at the southern section of the premises. The body bore what appeared to be a gaping wound to the back of the head and lacerations about the body.
Police, who eventually arrived and examined the body, surmised that the handyman had died sometime between Sunday, August 18 and Tuesday, August 20. Because he had found the body, the police took Mr. Correia into custody, while awaiting a post mortem.
Ramsabad’s mother later said she had received reports that her son had gotten into an altercation with someone at the Safari Inn after taking several bottles of beer from a freezer. According to this report, the handyman had taken the beverages under the pretext of giving them to a customer on credit.
This was refuted by individuals at the hotel.
Meanwhile, businesswoman Yvonne Correia had her own theory about how the handyman had died, and she suggested that he had caused his own demise.
Taking me for a stroll around the sprawling compound, she showed me a shed and explained that this was where they had found ‘Tun Tun.’
According to Mrs. Correia, her handyman would often climb onto the shed. From there, he got a good view of the bedrooms of the hotel guests.
Mrs. Correia believed that the heavy-drinking handyman had clambered onto the shed. But this time, the intoxicated ‘Tun Tun’ slipped and tumbled to his death.

The shed from which Yvonne Correia believed the handyman fell.

She suggested that the body was not discovered immediately because the area where he fell was not frequently traversed.
But then a post mortem revealed that Ramsabad had died from a fractured skull and brain hemorrhage. According to the police, someone had murdered the handyman.
But detectives were unable to make any headway in their case. They released Mr. Correia, and, to this day, no one knows how Victor Ramsabad, the peeping handyman, met his end.

If you have any information about any unusual case, please contact us by phone or at our Lot 34 Saffon Street location. We can be reached on telephone numbers 22-58465, 22-58491, and 22-58473. You need not disclose your identity. You can also contact Michael Jordan at his email address [email protected].