Who killed Shenese?

A Republic Bank employee, Banfield left her workplace at Independence Square last Monday to shop at Pennywise and IAM & Co Ltd but she never made it back to her Santa Cruz home. On Thursday, her decomposing body was found on a shelf in a store-room on the third floor of IAM & Co Ltd’s Charlotte Street outlet, covered with cardboard boxes.

Shenese, who worked at IAM on Charlotte Street, Port-of-Spain, went missing on January 24, 2015.

Her family said she left home to attend a job interview with a businessman as she was on three weeks vacation without pay. She too never returned home.

A week after her disappearance, a male passer-by found Shenese’s body along a trail off Macqueripe Road in Chaguaramas with her hands bound behind her back.

However, because of the advanced stage of decomposition, formal identification was done via dental records and her mother eventually identified the body in June of that year.

Speaking to Sunday Newsday at their Lopinot Road, Arouca home yesterday, Shenese’s parents, Sinatra and Paula Samuel said their hearts went out to Banfield’s parents as they knew exactly how the other family was feeling. They advised Banfield’s family to pray to God to help them through the ordeal, and said the Samuel family would be praying for them as well.

“By the time I saw that girl missing on Monday, I carried the (news)papers to my wife and told her, ‘You see this girl? The same way Shenese gone, this girl gone.

This looking as if it’s the same people that take her.’ I started to pray for the family one time. That mother would go down in her grave and never forget this,” said Sinatra.

Almost two years later, Sinatra said he does not sleep properly, he has difficulty concentrating at work, every day his family feels the pain and emptiness of Shenese’s loss, and now, the story of Banfield stirred up those feelings even more.

“She was too special. She was loving. Just different. Time could never heal that wound. Even though I buried a body, I still felt as if she was alive somewhere but with this (Banfield) now, it hit me that she’s really gone,” said Paula.

“To console ourselves a little bit, we tell ourselves that she was too precious for this earth and Jehovah took her back. Who could poor people like us depend on except God?” added Sinatra.

Paula stated that the only visit the family ever got from the police was the night after they reported her disappearance, and the family was not contacted when it was suspected that the body found on February 1, 2015 was Shenese’s.

Sinatra said that very day he found out about the body and went to see if it was his daughter. However, it was so badly decomposed that he was convinced that it could not have been her. And so they continued their own country-wide search for their daughter, even travelling to Tobago on several occasions, including acquiring Shenese’s cell phone records and giving the last number called and received to the Anti-Kidnapping Squad.

Paula said it was six months later, while watching the police talk show, Beyond The Tape, that the host stated that the relatives of Shenese needed to go to the Forensic Science Centre in St James because there was a body bearing resemblance to her. There, Paula identified her daughter by her hair and index finger which had been twice trapped in a car door.

Then, in July a 46-year-old Sangre Grande man was arrested in a police sting operation after he allegedly placed advertisements for models then raped them. The number the man was using was the number that Shenese had called for the interview.

However, since then, they had not heard anything about the investigation.

While reading the stories of Banfield’s murder, several similarities occurred to them. Both women were around the same age, both would call and update their family on their activities, they were both religious, upstanding women, and the IAM connection.

Paula admitted that her daughter’s disappearance and murder did not get the kind of attention as Banfield’s. Therefore, since no one ever visited the family to tell them what happened to their daughter, she hoped Banfield’s death would shine a light on Shenese’s case and possibly motivate the police to do more, and give both families justice for their daughters.