January 12, 2002, The Philippine Star, Cebu City: Surigao Solon Denies Son's Role in Wife's Murder,

January 12, 2002, The Philippine Star, Cebu City: Surigao Solon Denies Son's Role in Wife's Murder,

Cebu City, Jan. 12, 2002 (STAR) Surigao del Norte Rep. Glenda Ecleo is not letting her son Ruben return to Cebu where police say he is a possible suspect in the killing of his wife.

Instead, the congresswoman is doing the clearing for her son, a former mayor of San Jose town on Dinagat Island and head of the religious sect Philippine Benevolent Missionaries Association.

Ruben returned to Surigao last Tuesday, ostensibly to look for his wife, Alona Bacolod, there, the same day her body was found in a black garbage bag bound by masking tape at the bottom of a ravine in Dalaguete.

Ruben and Alona had been living in Cebu where she was a senior medical student at the Southwestern University and was supposed to graduate in March. Proper forum Ecleo denied that her son was involved in any way in the killing. She told radio station dyLA that she would only present him in the proper forum to answer the charges, if any are filed.

In the meantime, she said she does not want Ruben to be publicly scrutinized.

The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) has taken over the case on request of the Dalaguete police.

An autopsy on Alona showed she had been beaten up and then strangled to death. Her brother Josebil identified her through the jewelry she wore.

The possibility of Ruben being considered a suspect stems largely from suspicions harbored by Alona’s family and from a statement he made shortly after Alona disappeared on Saturday that she might simply have gone out with friends.

But Amor McClintock, leader of Alona’s internship group at Southwestern University, said they never had any outing on that day nor had any recently.

"We are medical interns and we have duties everyday, Mondays to Sundays. So, hundred percent, we did not have any outing," McClintock said. Internship duty Alona was assigned to the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department of the Cebu City Medical Center. Records there show that that fateful Saturday was the first time Alona reported for internship duties at the hospital, and as events turned out later, it was to be her last.

Alona was supposed to spend the first two months of this year as an intern at that hospital.

She logged in at 7:29 a.m. that Saturday and logged out at 11:30 a.m. She was supposed to go on 24-hour duty the next day.

The Bacolod family considers Ruben a possible suspect because of the way he had allegedly treated her. They claim that fights between the couple had a tendency to turn violent with Ruben sometimes threatening Alona with a gun.

They also allege that Ruben was involved in drugs.

But Rep. Ecleo denied this charge, saying that, on the contrary, the Bacolod family members are the ones notorious in Surigao as being involved in drugs.

She said her son should not be held responsible for Alona’s killing because he had, in fact, been saddened and disappointed by the allegations that he was behind the murder. Public scrutiny Rep. Ecleo said her son actually wanted to go back to Cebu to see if the body found in Dalaguete is really Alona’s but she advised him against it to avoid public scrutiny.

She said she herself expects Alona to be alive and to return to their house in Forest Hills in Banawa, claiming this is not the first time she disappeared.

She denied that the marriage of Ruben to Alona was on the rocks, saying that the Bacolod family was just making up stories to destroy the Ecleos’ reputation.

Alona’s brother Ben alleged that Ruben has a mistress and may have killed Alona to free himself from her.

Ben also suspects that Ruben’s allegedly having a mistress is the reason for the disappearance of the nanny of Ruben’s four-year-old daughter.

Ben believes that the nanny knew too much about Ruben’s alleged extramarital affairs. — Freeman News Service