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Immigrant's Death Reveals A Hidden Life

By Julie Wernau
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Published on 7/30/2006


The Groton hotel where Elizabeth Reynes worked and died.



Elizabeth Reynes



Elizabeth Reynes was never supposed to be a headline. She was meant to be invisible, acknowledged by little more than a tip for a maid left on a hotel room nightstand.
Barely 100 pounds and less than 5 feet tall, she traveled along the periphery, pushing a laundry cart and making beds. She'd come to work at the Best Way Inn & Suites from the Philippines to support her husband and two children.

But last month her body was found in a water heater closet behind the conference room at the hotel where she worked. The 46-year-old was strangled to death, according to the medical examiner's office.

On Monday, the man accused of killing her, Jose A. Torres, an ex-boyfriend and now former maintenance worker at the hotel, will appear in New London Superior Court.

Reynes's temporary work visa shows that she was in the

country as an accountant. The temporary visa, signed by one of the hotel owners, Rohit Patel, is meant for workers with specialized skills: Department of Defense employees, fashion models, high-technology workers and such, according to Shawn A. Saucier, a spokesman for Northeast U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in Vermont.

Patel said Reynes spent about 15 minutes a day on the hotel's bookkeeping and the rest of her time cleaning rooms and doing laundry. Most of her paycheck went to her family in the Philippines, Patel said, and when she asked for the money in advance, he gave it to her.

•••••

Rohit Patel shakes his head as he stands sandwiched between the shelves of Jo's Convenient Mart on the Gold Star Highway in Groton. Jo's is less than a mile from the Best Way Inn & Suites and is one of two gas station/convenience stores that he owns with another man of no relation, Umesh Patel.

In the next aisle, workers occasionally call over to him in

Hindi as they scan and stock inventory. Patel answers in his native language, his voice confident, firmer than his English.

“I don't think he can do that, but he did,” Patel said.

Patel is speaking about 45-year-old Torres, who is held on a $1 million bond and is awaiting trial at Garner Correction Institution in Newtown. At arraignment, Torres was on suicide watch and pleaded to reporters for the death penalty as he left the courtroom.

Patel repeats over and over again that he can't believe the killing occurred, and that he wants to ask Torres, 'Why?'”

Torres had been an employee for more than a decade, first at the convenience store and later at the hotel, where he was trusted to pick up the company's payroll. He was a hard worker from Manhattan, with no family to speak of, Patel said.

People used to joke that Torres was like a son to Patel, closer than blood, even when Torres began to drink on the job, leaving without notice, sometimes for days at a time. But he always came back, Patel said, and always said exactly where he'd been, with no fear for the consequences.

“I'm close with all my employees,” the businessman said. “All employees make mistakes. I'm never swearing at nobody. I say to him, 'Fix your problem.' He's been with me long enough. I trust him.”

Reynes started to work at the hotel in 2003, when Patel picked her up from the airport on a flight from Las Vegas, he said. He learned she was looking for a job from a friend, who knows Reynes's aunt, Minda Imperial of Wallingford.

•••••

On July 1, the day after Reynes's body was found, a steady stream of customers dropped their bags in the lobby as they stood in a short line to check into their rooms at the Best Way Inn & Suites. (In the several weeks since the murder, the name of the hotel has been changed to Days Inn.)

The hotel caters to many corporate clients, in on business for their company conventions, said Kamala Thomas, who, until a month and a half ago, was general manager there.

Reynes lived and worked with what Patel said were a total of eight other employees at the 56-room hotel, which has a swimming pool, room service and laundry facility.

Thomas said most of the hotel's workers were illegals and not on the books. They worked sometimes 12 hours a day, seven days a week for $300, she said.

Reynes, said Thomas, “was a very hard worker, and they took advantage of that.”

Long hours were offset by less busy days, said Patel, adding that his employees knew what they were getting into when they were hired. Today, he said, his remaining seven employees have legitimate paperwork. He said he does not hire illegal immigrants.

But Patel made it clear to Reynes that her visa, issued in 2003 and renewed this February, was only good as long as she worked at the hotel, according to Thomas and two other former hotel employees. Those two people — one an illegal immigrant and another a 44-year-old man — requested anonymity for fear of retribution or deportation.

The three friends of Reynes said she feared being deported if she looked for another job and she eventually had to weigh that fear against another: her growing dread of Torres.

Patel said that Reynes never told him she wanted to leave her job or that she was afraid of the maintenance worker now charged in her death.

“She never even mentioned it once,” he said.

•••••

It was 2004 when Reynes and Torres started dating. She hid the relationship from her family, who did not know Torres existed until his arraignment, Patel said.

When the affair began, the two would often sleep in Reynes's hotel room, even though he had his own, said one former employee. They seemed to look forward to spending time together every week when they went to pick up the payroll for Patel.

The three former employees said the 5-foot-5-inch tall and slightly built Torres was a nice man and a hard worker when he was sober. But when he drank, they said, he could fly into a rage, and he hit Reynes where the bruises wouldn't show.

In 2005, Torres was found guilty of second-degree threatening and disorderly conduct, according to court documents. He was sentenced to one-year probation and anger management counseling and was given an order of no contact. The documents do not name the victim or the circumstances. A year before Reynes and Torres met, he was arrested twice for drunken driving.

By the summer of 2005, the fights between the two had increased, the friends said. He sometimes stole her cell phone to see who she had called, and he forbade her from seeing her friends.

“She was telling me things started going bad,” Thomas said. “He was drinking a lot last summer.”

Some of their fights were public, Patel said, describing them as screaming at each other in front of hotel guests. He remembered telling them to keep the fighting outside.

“It's their personal life,” Patel said. “So, I don't get involved.”

Five months ago, Thomas said, Reynes tried to break off the relationship. By then, she had moved into a fourth-floor hotel room with a roommate, who encouraged the split.

Another former worker said she witnessed a fight when Torres broke a lamp over Reynes's head.

The violence took a strange twist on May 31, Torres's birthday, when he tried to take his own life. He called Reynes to tell her the breakup had made him suicidal, Patel said, and then he tried to hang himself behind the Groton Department of Human Services building.

When Torres was released from the hospital, Patel said, it was hard to tell if they were still together.

“A week before (Reynes's death) she bought him a grocery, and he said to me, 'You see that? She still loves me',” Patel said.

Thomas and the two friends have a different story.

“She told (the owners) he wanted to kill her. They didn't do nothing. They said, 'Just keep working. Just keep working,'” the male friend said.

The long hours made it difficult for Reynes to look for other jobs, Thomas said, but she had scheduled an interview at a local Burger King shortly before her murder.

She asked to be hidden, because Torres had a master key to every hotel room, her three friends said, and she was afraid to be alone. When she couldn't be with someone, they added, she would sometimes sit in the lobby for hours.

After Thomas left her job at the hotel, she and others said, Reynes told them that the owners were making her move into the water heater closet, which had just enough room for a cot and a small cabinet.

Reynes fought the move, said Thomas, because Torres had once lived there and knew how to open the door with a screwdriver.

Patel said Reynes never lived in the closet.

A week before her death, he said, Reynes started bringing a new boyfriend to the hotel. That led to more public fighting between her and Torres, he said, so he told Torres to move out.

Torres went to the Windsor Motel, just up the road on the Gold Star Highway.

•••••

It was Friday, June 30, Patel's birthday, and he was stuck in court all day because of a missing sales tax license at his East Gate Mobil business in Waterford. Together, Torres and Reynes called him on his cell phone that morning to wish him a happy birthday, he said. They sounded happy. It was the last time he heard from either of them.

That evening, before he sat down to his birthday dinner with family, Patel called Reynes on her cell phone to ask if she and Torres had made the deposits. She didn't answer. He called Torres and didn't reach him either. Soon after, another employee called Patel to say that Reynes and Torres had been missing for hours.

Then, a bit later, he got another call. He learned the police were at the hotel. He also learned Reynes was dead.

“We never thought that he could go that far,” Patel said.

At 7:35 p.m., Groton Town police were called to the hotel and found Reynes strangled to death in a cabinet. She was hunched over in a seated position, her hands and feet tied with cord, and a wooden cross and flowers were at her feet, according to news reports.

Friends said Reynes wore a little wooden cross every day and hung it above her bed when she slept.

Torres turned himself into police at 10:10 p.m. that Friday.

A small funeral for Reynes was held in Wallingford a couple of days later. Her aunt, Minda Imperial, who is Reynes's only known local relative, did not return repeated telephone calls.

A private investigator who contacted The Day and spoke on condition of anonymity said he was hired by Imperial and is looking into the circumstances of Reynes's death and the situation at the Groton hotel before her murder.