From the EDSA revolution to the tumultuous first few years of a post-Marcos democracy, Filipinos of the late ‘80s to early ‘90s were in a strange place. Although they were free from decades of dictatorship, crime continued to rise — multiple coups against former President Corazon Aquino plagued the Palace while petty crimes and murder cases were rife on-ground. The ‘90s were far from the nostalgic sanctuary of boy bands and morning cartoons that millennials and Gen X-ers link their childhoods with. It is the decade where the uphill battle for peace that many Filipinos dreamed of had just begun, and Manila’s streets were hardly the safe idyll promised by new players in power.

Was this to be expected? According to Christine Abrigana, the host of true crime podcast “LAGIM,” the signs were simply waiting to manifest, but reflect bigger issues festering in the nation’s underbelly. “A spike in crimes never just occurs in a vacuum,” Abrigana says. “We still bore witness to political instability, high incidence of poverty, income inequality and high population growth, just to name a few. We were coming out of the ‘80s, which were dubbed as La Decada Perdida, the lost decade, and a recovery from those turbulent years was never going to be straightforward or easy.”

Abrigana also mentions that despite the seeming rise of crimes covered in the news post-EDSA, they weren’t more heinous than anything that occurred before them. “They were just magnified because technology was much better at that point — showing crimes, brutality, and violence. There was barely any control of such content on primetime, so it was fed to us [almost constantly], and when we think back on it, it seems crazy that young kids were allowed to just look at all these images.”

With heightened coverage came something the general public was not prepared for — an emboldened criminal community began to emerge. The team behind the PH Murder Stories podcast believes that criminals took advantage of the political turmoil. “Some would argue that more criminals during the early ‘90s appear to have taken advantage of the government’s transition period at the time,” they say. “In short, these notorious criminals didn’t fear the law enforcement agencies and the justice system.”

Below, Abrigana and the PH Murder Stories team share what they believe are the most horrifying Philippine true crimes from the ‘90s. Read on to find out why their gory details still haunt us to this day.

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