On
August 20, 2019, when the naked body of a young woman was found
stone-cold dead inside Room C4 in City Rock Hotel, Maraba, Nasarawa
State, there was pandemonium, fear and uncertainty. All that was known
was that the young man that lodged in the room the previous night
brought her in to spend the night with him. By morning he had vanished,
leaving the management of the hotel in a quandary. Unravelling the
mystery of the dead body in the hotel room, therefore, was a job for
detectives.
Enter the IRT operatives. In time, the pieces were
glued together. The dead body was identified as 22-year-old Favour Edoh,
an alleged sex worker; the suspect, 27-year-old Augustine Ohimai, a
member of the National Youth Service Corps, was tracked down to Benin
City where he was arrested on January 17, 2020; and from his confession,
detectives tied up the loose ends. What emerged is a story of illicit
sex gone awry.
For the young man, his poor and immoral decision
to pick a prostitute from the street came back to haunt him. Now he has
to face the nightmare: when sex ends in death, punishment is
inescapable.
Led to doom by his libido
A tearful Augustine
Ohimai soberly recounted the story of the night his life turned upside
down, the moment what he thought would be brief hours of enjoyment
became a tragedy.
Up till that fateful evening, his life was in
order: a young man from Benin City who has successfully completed his
education at Auchi Polytechnic where he studied Computer Science, en
route to Bauchi for his National Youth Service.
“On my way to
Bauchi, I stopped at Maraba in Nasarawa State because the journey was
very far. I asked a commercial motorcycle driver to take me to an
affordable hotel. He took me to City Rock Hotel. Because I had only a
few hours before boarding another bus to Bauchi, the receptionist agreed
to collect N2, 500 from me.
After I checked into a room, I went
out to look for water and something to eat. Some prostitutes hustling
in the vicinity of the hotel approached me and asked if I’d need their
service and I was interested. They asked for N5, 000, but one of them,
who later told me her name was Favour, agreed to take N2, 000 for the
night. She said that there was no customer and the day was already
over.”
Having paid the sex worker, she followed him to his hotel room.
“I
took my bath and we started making love, I was still on the first round
when I discovered that her body was no longer moving. I checked her and
I realized she was gone,” he recounted.
“I was scared. I
moved her severally to see if she would wake. I decided to run away
because I knew no one would believe my story.”
At 6:30 am, he sneaked out of the hotel premises and took the first bus out of the city.
After
three weeks at the NYSC orientation camp in Bauchi, he thought the
tragedy was behind him. Redeployed to Delta State, he began his service
to his fatherland. Every weekend, he’d travel to Benin and stay in his
sister’s house, at Eme-Ora West Road, Evboriaria. That was where police
arrested him on January 17, 2020.
Now he must account for the crime that happened inside a hotel room in Nasarawa on the night of August 19, 2019.
On
why he succumbed to the lure of paid sex that night, Ohimai could only
offer a lame excuse: “I have never slept with a prostitute before.
Although, I have a fiancée who I am planning to marry at the end of my
NYSC programme, I wanted to know the difference; I wanted to have a
taste of sex with a prostitute.”
Still trying to make a sense of
what happened, he claimed neither he nor his partner took sex drugs. “I
am sure she was sick because I did not do much before she died,” he
said. “I do not take drugs or alcohol. I ran away only because I was
terrified.”
The suspect debunked the insinuation that he killed
the victim for ritual. “I do not do Yahoo Yahoo. I am a dedicated child
of God. You can go to my church and ask about me. I did not take
anything from her, even the money that I gave her was still in her purse
when I left,” he claimed.
He concluded his story on a pleading
note: “I want to use this opportunity to beg her family to forgive me.
The devil took advantage of my weakness to put me in trouble. If God
save me from this problem, I promise to be a pastor and serve God all
the days of my life.”
The case of missing bra and panties
The
manager of the hotel, Emmanuel Paul Agbocheni, who spoke with Saturday
Sun over the phone, refuted some aspects of the suspect’s story.
For instance, he alleged that the deceased was discovered stark naked with her clothes, including undies, missing.
“He
came to our hotel on that day at about 11 pm. He was alone and
requested for a room. After filling the data form, he paid N2, 500, the
price for the cheapest room. We asked him if he was staying alone and he
told us his girlfriend would soon join him. As a matter of policy, we
do not allow two men to sleep in a room for fear that they might plan
and execute bad thing from there” Agbocheni narrated.
According
to him, the guest returned a few minutes later with a young lady. The
next morning, there was a heavy rainfall from 4 am till 9 am, delaying
the cleaning of the rooms. When the housekeeper decided to clean the
empty rooms and discovered that Room C4 was locked, she assumed the
occupant was yet to check out. She found the room still locked at 12:30
pm, which was past check out time and promptly drew the attention of the
receptionist to it. They took a spare key, opened the door and to their
horror discovered the naked body of a woman on the bed. They raised an
alarm and the hotel management subsequently alerted the police at the
Maraba station.
The hotel manager claimed the victim’s belongings cloth, pant, bra, money and phones were missing.
“It was only her makeup kit that was seen inside a green purse that we assumed belonged to her,” he affirmed.
He
could hardly hide his relief at the arrest of the suspect. “We are
grateful to God that police have found that young man,” he said. “This
will prove to the world that we had no hand or knowledge of the
incident.”
Detectives are currently rounding off their work on
the case. They are awaiting the outcome of an autopsy to ascertain the
cause of death which could either corroborate or contradict suspect’s
claim that the victim died naturally during their sex romp.