Two burnt bodies, one missing husband

Jul 17, 2016 Features / Columnists, Murder and Mystery

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By Michael Jordan

At around nine o’clock on the evening of Tuesday, July 18, 2006, John Elquemedo Hernandez took his new girlfriend, Fayon Williams, to meet his parents at their Bagotstown, East Bank Demerara home. Four hours later, John and Fayon were both dead. How it happened, no one knows for sure…except, maybe, one man. The only problem is that he’s vanished.
Michael Dey has not been seen since his estranged wife, Fayon Williams, a 22-year-old computer technician, and her lover, 30-year-old driver John Hernandez, perished under quite sinister circumstances.
It was at around 01.30 a.m. on Wednesday, July 19, 2006, that an explosion awoke residents living near to Nursery School Road, Soesdyke, East Bank Demerara.
On looking outside, they saw that the two-storey, Lot 33 Nursery Road house in which Hernandez and Williams lived was on fire.
Terrence St. John, a cousin of Fayon Williams, lived next door and was one of the first on the scene. He tried to kick the front door open, but it was firmly bolted from the inside.
St. John and his brother ran to the back door. They found it unbolted. Using a bucket, St. John tried to douse the flames, but the fire spread quickly and the smoke and intense heat drove him back. Other neighbours and firefighters soon joined them, but by then the fire had gutted the building.

When the smoke finally cleared, the firefighters found two charred and unrecognizable corpses in the lower flat. The bodies had apparently fallen through the burnt top floor.
What puzzled detectives was the fact that the occupants had apparently made no attempt to flee the burning building, and that no one had heard them scream.
Had someone killed them and then set the house ablaze?
An autopsy on the shrunken and burnt remains only revealed that John Hernandez and Fayon Williams had died of smoke inhalation. Nevertheless, investigators suspected that someone had set the house alight while the lovers slept. But who could that someone be?
‘STRANGE BEHAVIOUR’
One person who came under suspicion was Fayon Williams’s estranged husband, Michael Lloyd Dey. He was a 29-year-old taxi driver and Cheddi Jagan International Airport employee.
Dey and Williams had married on April 1, 2005. But by May, 2006, they had separated. Relatives of the young woman alleged that her husband had become physically abusive. There were reports that Dey had threatened his wife and Hernandez.
Williams had reportedly changed the locks of her home shortly after Dey moved out.

According to news reports at the time, Williams’s mother, who was living overseas, claimed that her daughter had repeatedly expressed concern about her husband’s ‘strange’ behaviour.  She said that during a telephone conversation, her daughter had attempted to reveal something about her husband, but never got the chance to do so. Detectives immediately tried to track down Michael Dey, but he had not turned up at work at the airport; neither was he at home. But police received reports that Dey had crashed his vehicle shortly before his estranged wife and lover were found dead. It is alleged that a friend was with him, and the friend was treated for injuries.
Shortly after, police issued a wanted bulletin for Michael Lloyd Dey. The bulletin stated that he was wanted for questioning in connection with “the unnatural deaths” of Fayon Williams and John Hernandez. They have failed to find him.
ALL TOO AWARE
The parents of John Hernandez and Fayon Williams are all too aware of the approaching date of Monday, July 18, 2016 (tomorrow). It would be exactly ten years since the baffling deaths of their children.
“We think of him all the time,” Lorna Hernandez said. She recalled that they would know when their son had come home by the screeching of the front gate. “Now, when it screeches, we still expect him to be coming in. John Hernandez is survived by two sons, including one who his mother says “is the splitting image of him.”
She ponders on the last time she saw her son alive. That was when he had come to the family’s Bagotstown house, some four hours before his death, and introduced his new girlfriend to them.

STILL CANNOT ACCEPT
When she spoke to me on Friday, last, Orlene Barker-Williams said she still cannot accept that her only daughter, Fayon, is dead. What makes it harder to accept is the fact that there was practically nothing left of their daughter after the fire.
“We didn’t see a body. We put her picture on the casket. That is all we could have done.”
Her husband, Lyndon Williams, recalled that he had raised Fayon, his step-daughter, from the age of nine months.
“I am very angry. It bothers us. It hurts.”
Like his wife, and like the parents of John Hernandez, he wants one key question answered: Where is Michael Dey?
”Why would he run if he is not guilty? Why wouldn’t he turn himself in, even if you come in with a lawyer? You are innocent until you are proven guilty. Come in and prove your innocence.”
When I contacted a sister of Dey’s by phone, she said her sibling has not contacted the family since his disappearance. She insisted that her ‘big brother’ is innocent and opted to go on the run because he feared that “all the blame would go on him.”
What would she do if her brother contacted her?
“I would tell him to come in and sort out this matter; let everybody know what the truth is once and for all.”
If you have further information on this case or any other, please contact us at our Lot 24 Saffon Street, Charlestown office or by telephone.
We can be reached on telephone numbers 225-8465, 225-8491 or 225-8458. You need not disclose your identity.
You can also contact Michael Jordan at 645-2447 or at his email address mjdragon@hotmail.com.

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