Innocent blood…Guyana’s brutal history of child killings

Sep 04, 2017 News

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Last Saturday’s shocking murder of 18-month-old Ronasha Pilgrim is the latest in a line of heinous child murders in Guyana.
Some include the ritualistic killings of children.
One of the most infamous cases occurred in the fifties in the quiet little community of Stanleytown, New Amsterdam.
It allegedly started when a woman, Kathleen Fullerton, dreamed that a demon-like man told her that there was Dutch gold buried in her backyard. The man in the dream told Fullerton that she could get her hands on the gold if she sacrificed a child.
Kathleen Fullerton consulted with her husband, Edward, and her brother, Eric Benfield.
They soon identified their victim: five-year-old Lilawattie, who was the daughter of Eric Benfield’s land-lady.
With the help of his sister, Kathleen and her husband Edward, Eric killed the child and hid her in his apartment.
However, the landlady soon realised that her daughter was missing and a search was launched for the missing child.
One woman, who remembered the case, said that the culprits hid the dead child under their mattress when the child’s mother came to their apartment to see if Lilawattie was there.
When they thought that the coast was clear, they dumped the body in a nearby latrine.
However, suspicion fell on them, and police eventually searched the larine and recovered the body.
For that crime, Eric Benfield, Edward Fullerton and his wife, Kathleen, were all hanged.
But Guyana’s most heinous child murderer was Harrynauth Beharry, 30, a weeder and fisherman. He also went by the name Harry Rambarran, alias Charles Bissoon, alias Charles Pereira, alias Anant Persaud and Maka Anant.
Between 1969 and 1970, he killed at least eight children in every county.
Pretending to be a handyman in search of work, the nondescript man went into villages for his victims. They were then abducted, bound, and thrown into trenches.
All of his victims, except for the first, were boys.
The first victim, eight-year-old Basmattie, of Anna Catherina, West Coast Demerara, was found in a canal in Bushy Park, East Bank Essequibo in April, 1969.
The other victims included an Amerindian child, found in a canefield at Turkeyen; David Bacchus, 15, Mohamed Fazil Nasir, 11; Mohamed Faizal, 12; Jagdeo Jagroop, 14, Mohamed Nizam Ali, ten-year-old Harrinarine, also called Paulton, Orlando Guthrie, seven.
The killer was eventually captured in June 1970, in Charlestown. However, Berharry hanged himself in prison before his trial could begin.
In 1993, a man named was Michael De Noon. somehow got it into his head that he could acquire a US visa if he sacrificed his newborn daughter, Mary, to the ‘spirits’.
Reportedly acting on the advice of a female ‘spiritualist’, De Noon forced his wife to take their baby in the dead of night to a desolate spot at the Lamaha Canal. He then muttered an incantation, threw some money in the still black water, and strangled his baby daughter.
De Noon dumped the corpse into the water. He then forced his wife to accompany him to a city hotel.
But while he slept, the woman sneaked out of the hotel and went to the police. She then took detectives to the spot where Michael De Noon had disposed of his daughter’s body. De Noon was arrested and charged.
He succumbed to illness in prison.
Another suspected and still unsolved child sacrifice occurred in September, 2003.
Nine-year-old Daniel Netram.
called ‘Jackie Chan’, disappeared from his home at Brickery, East Bank Demerara.
He was reportedly last seen alive when he and a brother went to fetch water a short distance from their home. But instead of returning home, Daniel reportedly told his brother that he was going to visit a man known to the family, who lived in Brickery.
The lad’s mutilated body was found four days later in a latrine aback of an abandoned property.
The corpse bore three stab wounds to the chest and one behind the neck. His left arm was severed at the wrist and his head was shaven.
Detectives believe that the boy was murdered by an East Bank Demerara couple, on the orders of an ‘obeah man’, who said that offering the lad as a sacrifice would rid them of an incurable disease.
Police reportedly acquired a statement from a woman who claimed that she witnessed when the lad was killed, mutilated, and placed in a bag.
Acting on this information, detectives arrested a woman, her husband and a so-called ‘spiritual healer’ from Greater Georgetown.
Two people were charged with Daniel’s murder, but the case against them was dismissed.
Then there was 25-year-old Oral Hendricks, who is 1992, murdered three small children: Jason Braithwaithe, seven; Althea George, four; and Travis Bunbury, aged two.
That happened after his reputed wife left him for several months to take care of her three children.
According to police records, on the night of Saturday, December 12, 1992, Hendricks took his reputed wife’s three children to a canal in Depot Dam in Pouderoyen, East Bank Demerara.
It is alleged that Hendricks flung two-year-old Travis Bunbury into the canal and watched the child drown. He then did the same to the boy’s four-year-old sister, Althea George.
Finally, Hendricks dumped seven-year-old Jason Braithwaithe into the canal, but the child managed to swim to the other end.
Hendricks, it is alleged, pursued the child and slit his throat with a knife. He then held the child’s head underwater to ensure that he was dead.
The following day, Hendricks went to a brother’s home in Depot Dam, Pouderoyen, where he told his sibling what had transpired.
Hendricks was charged, convicted and presently remains on death row.

 

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