Episode 59:
Two Men Who Committed Necrophilia Claimed “It Wasn’t Rape” Because She Was Already Dead..?

At dawn, a siren cuts through a quiet residential street in Toronto. Neighbors step outside, all eyes turning to one house, where paramedics carry out a woman's body under a white sheet.

Her name was Rhoderie Estrada — a dedicated nurse who had spent a decade building a life in Canada for her husband and two daughters.

She had been sound asleep at home, in the one place that should have been safest. What happened to her that night would expose failures stretching far beyond a single crime scene.

Every Light Left On

Gerald Aquintey came home near 2 a.m. on May 26 after a long night helping at a family restaurant opening. Every light in the house was on — unusual, since his wife was famously careful about turning them off. The front door was double-locked from the inside, and no one answered his calls. Around back, he found the reason: the door had been torn off its hinges.

His three daughters were asleep and unharmed. The master bedroom was not. Blood covered the headboard, the nightstand, the sheets. Rhoderie's lower garments had been removed, and her face was beaten almost beyond recognition. Gerald shut the door before the children could see, began CPR, and called 911 — but by the time paramedics arrived, she was already gone.

A Trail the Killer Never Noticed

The cause of death was blunt force trauma — at least eight blows from a 5.1-pound crowbar found beside the body, fracturing nearly every bone in her face and skull. Semen recovered from the scene confirmed she'd been sexually assaulted. Investigators cleared her family and found no one who held a grudge against her; this was a stranger.

Whoever did this hadn't been careful. The basement was under renovation, and an open window let the intruder climb in over loose dirt and gravel, tracking muddy footprints from the kitchen to the living room to the master bedroom. On the kitchen window frame, upside down, was a single thumbprint — left when the intruder braced himself to peer inside. It matched Yostin Murillo, a 23-year-old Costa Rican immigrant with over ten prior convictions for robbery, extortion, and assault.

Out on $400 Bail

Murillo was already in custody — arrested for assault the day after Rhoderie's murder, part of a rampage that included attacking strangers, his ex-girlfriend, and even a security guard inside a police station with an iron pipe. He'd been fighting deportation not to stay in Canada legally, but to keep committing crimes. Two months before the murder, he'd been arrested for a violent assault and released on just $400 bail. He broke into Rhoderie's house not long after walking free.

When police searched his stored belongings from the earlier arrest, they found Rhoderie's blood-smeared cellphone — a detail the detention center had somehow missed entirely. His shoes matched the footprints exactly. But when his DNA was compared to the semen at the scene, it didn't match. There had to be someone else.

The Second Man

Murillo's girlfriend mentioned a friend from the homeless shelter — an Asian man he called "Baek." Investigators identified him as David Baek, a 22-year-old Korean-Canadian, and tailed him for days without enough to arrest him. The break came when he discarded a cigarette butt on the street; his DNA matched the scene perfectly.

The two men had met five months earlier and spent their nights on drugs and burglaries together. That night, high and looking for a target, they found Rhoderie's house, saw the basement window left open for construction, and climbed in — Baek keeping watch while Murillo forced the screen. Their accounts of what happened next diverged sharply. Murillo claimed he found Rhoderie asleep, struck her with the crowbar only after she woke and startled him, and had already left the room — alive, he insisted — when Baek arrived and assaulted her. Baek claimed the opposite: that she was already dead when he entered, and that having intercourse with a corpse, however immoral, wasn't legally rape.

Final Thoughts

Neither story held up. Baek's own first statement to police admitted he hadn't confirmed whether she was alive before assaulting her — he only revised the account after meeting his lawyer. And Murillo's version ignored the obvious: a thumbprint on a window overlooking a clearly lived-in house, doors double-locked from the inside, and a victim known to wake at the faintest sound. Prosecutors concluded both men knew someone was home from the start, intending robbery, confinement, and assault from the moment they climbed through that window. Both were convicted of first-degree murder and sexual assault, sentenced to 25 years.

The case shook Canada — one immigrant family that had struggled and failed to settle, destroying another that had spent a decade building something worth protecting. Rhoderie's eldest daughter, Jasmine, who once lay at her mother's feet watching Korean dramas, now studies law with plans to become a prosecutor. Her sister followed their mother into medicine. Whatever David Baek's courtroom argument tried to claim, the family left behind never had the luxury of treating what happened to Rhoderie as anything other than exactly what it was.