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Long-wanted US murder suspect nabbed after getting passport in PH
Associated Press
2:09 am | Sunday, September 22nd, 2013
US Embassy in Manila, Philippines. AP FILE PHOTO
PHILADELPHIA—Twenty years after he allegedly gunned down his wife’s friend in a Philadelphia restaurant, a fugitive “spiritualist” who sold religious artifacts around the world is in custody after visiting the US Embassy in the Philippines.
Santiago Pedroso, 71, applied for an emergency passport in Manila on Sept. 6, prompting a routine criminal check. The 1992 murder charge soon popped up, leading the FBI to compare an old file photo with one submitted to the embassy.
“Just looking at the two photographs, we knew immediately it was him,” said FBI special agent David E. Carter of Philadelphia, one of two agents who greeted Pedroso on Wednesday when he returned to US soil in Los Angeles.
The murder warrant charges Pedroso in the June 1992 death of 41-year-old Delores Alvarez. His estranged wife had recently moved in with Alvarez when he ran into them in a restaurant on Father’s Day, according to newspaper reports at the time.
Pedroso allegedly shot Alvarez five times just after she ordered dinner, as his teenage daughter begged him to stop, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported at the time.
Pedroso walked out of the restaurant and disappeared, investigators said.
Authorities in Manila arrested him outside the embassy on Sept. 9. He is now in custody in Philadelphia, where he was arraigned Friday on charges that include murder, illegal possession of a firearm and reckless endangerment.
The 1992 Inquirer article described Pedroso as a “spiritualist” who ran a religious bookstore. Detectives said Pedroso was enraged by the friendship between Alvarez and his estranged wife, 44-year-old Maria Gomez.
A naturalized US citizen from Cuba, Pedroso traveled widely after that, selling religious wares around the world, the FBI said Friday. The FBI believes Pedroso was in the Philippines by 1996, perhaps landing there as a cruise ship stowaway.
Fugitive Santiago Pedroso has been charged with a 1992 murder in Philadelphia. (Philadelphia District Attorney's Office)
Last updated: Friday, September 20, 2013, 1:04 PM
Posted: Friday, September 20, 2013, 11:20 AM
A man has been apprehended in the Philippines in connection with a 1992 slaying in Philadelphia.
Investigators had been searching for more than 20 years for 71-year-old Santiago Pedroso, charged in the June, 21, 1992 killing of Delores Alvarez in Philadelphia.
The FBI said this morning that Pedroso was taken into custody earlier this month outside the U.S. Embassy in Manila. He was deported to the United States and handed over to Philadelphia authorities on Thursday.
The District Attorney's Office said Pedroso was arraigned overnight and is being held without bail.
Alvarez, 41, was gunned down at the Hathaway Inn in Germantown, just after ordering a meal, according to a 1992 Inquirer account.
Detectives said at the time that Pedroso was a "spiritualist" and owner of a Hunting Park religious-goods store who killed Alvarez out of jealousy, because his estranged wife was living with her.
Alvarez worked for Hughes Aircraft Corp. in California and became friends with Maria Gomez, Pedroso's wife, after she arrived in Philadelphia shortly before her death.
The night she was killed, Pedroso and his daughter had eaten dinner together at the Inn, the Inquirer reported. As the pair was leaving, they saw Alvarez and Gomez enter.
Pedroso left his daughter and returned a few minutes later, armed with a handgun.
He fired four bullets into Alvarez's head, and one more into her body.
Pedroso walked out of the restaurant. A warrant was issued for his arrest the next day.
But he remained on the run for the next 20 years.
"We've tracked him all over the world," Jerrold Kane, a Philadelphia police homicide inspector, told the Inquirer in 1996. "We had him in Spain, in Mexico City. When they have resources, they're a little harder to track."
The previous year, a real estate agent discovered a human skull, demonic figures on walls, an altar and animal bones in the Germantown house Pedroso owned before he fled.
He eventually made his way to the Philippines, slipping into the country in December 1996 after absconding from a cruise ship, according to the country's Bureau of Immigration.
The bureau said Pedroso was detained Sept. 9 when he went to the embassy to renew an expired U.S. passport.
The FBI had been seeking him on a federal unlawful flight to avoid persecution warrant, but officials said today that offense is expected to be dismissed so he can be prosecuted on the murder charge.
