Stories After Dark

Stories After Dark is a narrated podcast about Philippine true crime and mystery, and it sticks to Filipino cases and Filipino stories. The crime episodes put a year in the title. Taken together, those titles cover high-profile Philippine cases across the 1980s and 1990s: The Murder of Elvira Manahan (1986), The Vizconde Massacre (1991), and OFWs Sentenced to Death Abroad: Flor Contemplacion and Sarah Balabagan (1995). The narration is dense with names, ages and dates. The overseas workers episode introduces two domestic workers who were sentenced to death for murder, one in Singapore and one in the United Arab Emirates, and notes that only one of them escaped execution. The Contemplacion material sets out claims that she was drugged and given electric shock treatment. Then it gives the Singaporean Home Affairs Ministry's reply: the allegations were baseless, she had only been given EEG tests, and embassy officials had visited her nine times. It notes that President Ong Teng Chong found no basis for a stay of execution. Then it turns to her children, who came every day before the hanging and were not allowed to touch her. The official record and the family's loss get the same careful attention. The Vizconde Massacre episode covers the killing of a mother and her two daughters in an upper-class village in Metro Manila, a case that led to the trial of the century and later to three films. It goes through a witness account in hard detail, including sexual violence. It closes on a possibility instead of a verdict: if the accused were framed, the real killers might still be alive somewhere. Elvira Manahan's story starts far from the crime scene. She is described as a socialite, fashion icon, TV host and movie star, famous for her wit, who knew Hollywood stars and whose show Two for the Road drew viewers for her jewelry and clothes. The episode names her realtor, Jaime Balatbat, as the man who killed her inside her home in Forbes Park, Makati, and opens with a listener discretion warning. Quoted sources are marked aloud with quote and end quote throughout, which keeps witnesses, officials and the narrator clearly apart. The show's mystery material includes readings of older fiction. Two episodes read short stories by Sargent Kayme, first published in 1901 and available through Project Gutenberg. Both are about the anting-anting, which the narration describes as a talisman or amulet, also called agimat, believed to grant protection, supernatural powers or even immortality. One story is set after a battle between American forces and Tagalogs. The other features a small polished stone said to glow at night when danger was near. A two-part reading of a Nick Joaquin story based on true events follows a controlling father who could not bear to lose his daughter to the man she married, and its title credits The Asian Madness Podcast. Episodes end by pointing to a website that lists the references used and invites listeners to suggest cases or send personal stories.