Sandra falls into hands of serial killer | Local News

The world changed for everyone after Ramkissoon Rajkumar, aka Ramki, killed his small and beautiful wife Milly, and himself one day in June 1975.

At the sunset hour in October 2024, one of Ramki’s sisters remembered her niece, Sandra Rajkumar-Costilla, whom serial killer Rex Heuermann mutilated, killed and threw away like trash.

Ramki’s murder-suicide is still a mouthful.

Sandra’s aunt calls it “the incident”.

“We lost contact with her (Sandra). She was between 10-12 years old when the incident happened. After the incident she was taken by her maternal grandparents to live with them on Quesnel Street, Arima. Then they got legal custody of them. We tried to see them but there was lots of opposition. We had police escort us to see them too. We cared enough to do that. They deliberately kept them from us.”

Sandra and her younger brother Manny were entitled to a monthly Government grant that was part of their father’s employment benefits. Ramki’s sister says the young orphans were a meal ticket.

“They took the children to get access to resources, to finances. The children were a meal ticket, a passport, so the care, compassion, guidance wasn’t much there. That’s my take on it.”

Manny says so too: “We had pension money from the Government to look after us till we turned 18. We were the grab bag, the meal ticket.”

They lived with their grandmother for the next seven years. Sandra was by then in secondary school, Arima Senior Comprehensive (now Arima North Secondary), and Manny in Five Rivers Secondary.

“When she was around 16 years old, she came to visit us. She was with school friends and just popped by to say hello. She was a beautiful girl,” says her aunt. “We cannot turn back time. We always say if and but, but if circumstances were different, if they had lived with us, who knows if they could have had a different outcome. We are sad.”

By 1982, the children’s maternal grandmother was ailing. Anthony, their half-brother in the US Army, dutifully decided to adopt them. Together, Sandra, 17, and Manny, 14, left Trinidad on a flight to New York. They stayed there with their half-sister Ruth for a few days before flying to Hawaii where Sandra married and Manny enrolled in Waipahu High School.

Sandra’s best friend, Nicky (not her real name), remembers when Sandy—as she calls her—flew away from Trinidad, leaving her high school boyfriend behind. She also remembers when Sandra briefly returned to Trinidad four years later.

“She came back home for her boyfriend, sometime in 1986. When she was to return to the US with him, she missed her flight and stayed with me for a few hours before catching the next one. She was brilliant. Very smart, intelligent. She worked hard to provide for herself at a very young age. She left me here but I eventually migrated too. In 1988. When I got to the US, we stayed in touch. I think I was the last one to speak with her before she died,” she said.

By the time Sandra returned to America with the love of her young life, Manny had lived in North Carolina and then New York. Sandra and her love stayed with Ruth for a bit then went to stay with Manny. Sandra became pregnant.

“She had a kid. They came to my home in Gates and Cornelia, in Queens,” says Manny. By then, Manny was already living dangerously, a member of a Bronx gang, and doing drugs. For Sandra and her brother, life was a grind, hard as nails inside the big, red apple.

“We bounced around New York a bit: Ozone Park, Queens Village. We had a few addresses. The kid came with us. Then they (Sandra, her boyfriend and their son) moved out and they lived on their own but they weren’t doing very well financially and I helped out a lot. She was very focused on the relationship (with her boyfriend),” her best friend said.

When that relationship fractured, Manny saw his sister begin the descent.

“In my opinion, he (Sandra’s boyfriend) destroyed my sister mentally. When he came into the picture, everything changed. The relationship wasn’t what she expected and she was disappointed. She started drinking. She drank Boca Chica. Bottles and bottles were in the house. She was headless out there after (her boyfriend). He did that. And this is where she got picked up (by the killer). I believe she was in a bar somewhere drinking. Absolutely that’s how it happened,” he stated.

Manny says Sandra worked hard to sustain herself and her infant son. Through employment agencies she sourced payroll and bookkeeping jobs. Through those jobs, she met affluent business people in Manhattan. She dated one or two of their sons, Manny says. He denies she was a sex worker like all the killer’s other victims.

“We didn’t live lavishly but she didn’t exchange sex for money. There was none of that at any time. Sandra was a real gullible person. She was blind to people. She couldn’t see people for what they truly are. So it’s probably just by chance this guy happened by her in a bar, picked her up and perhaps said, ‘I have a house in Long Island; let’s take a drive; there’s a beach there…’ and she fell for it and this happened. I guarantee you that’s how it happened.”

Sometimes, he says, she would disappear for a day or two but she would always call him to say where she was. These were the days before cell phones; she used public pay phones to call him.

“She was drinking heavily. She would call from wherever she was and had access to a phone. She would also call collect from pay phones. She would be in the Queens neighbourhood or in Brooklyn. She seldom stayed out past one day.”

‘I waited and waited for her to call’

One cold day in November 1993, when Sandra was 28, she asked a neighbour to babysit her son and left home. Manny was laid up, his leg in a sling from a gunshot injury. No one knows what happened after that.

Her friend from Trinidad, Nicky (not her real name), was by this time living in Massachusetts. She says she received a call from Sandra on Saturday, November 13, 1993.

“She called from a payphone. We talked. She was in a bad way. Things were not going well for her. She told me she had a boyfriend and the relationship was not good. I told her to come by me, that she could make a fresh start, that I would help her. She said ok. I asked if she had money for the bus ticket. She said yes. She was to be on a bus the next morning to come stay with me. I waited and waited for her to call and say she was at the bus stop so I could go pick her up. She never called.”

Manny, too, unusually, was not hearing from his sister. After a few days, he telephoned their half-sister Ruth who reported Sandra missing.

One week after Nicky spoke with Sandra, police telephoned her in Massachusetts. They had found Sandra’s body in the North Sea area of the long, long island. Police recovered hairs on her, one of which matched the big man who enjoyed hurting small women.

Anthony, Sandra’s half-brother who had dutifully taken her to the US and arranged for her to marry a soldier in Hawaii, arranged her funeral.

“I managed to get in touch with Ruth and I went to the funeral,” Nicky remembers. “It was a closed casket. I touched it and told her that whenever I see her son, it would be her seeing him through my eyes. I think some of her family were ashamed of her. They were condescending, dismissive at the funeral. My friend did not deserve to die like that.”

Nicky visited Sandra’s boyfriend and his new partner. She met Sandra’s son there. “He was about two years old. I bought him a toy. They called him Chrissy,” she says.

Manny frayed even more when his Popo died.

“I was a mess. They cremated her. I tried to open the casket but they pulled me off…”

He said Ruth cared for Sandra’s baby boy for a while until his father took him.

The big man who hurt small women was arrested in 2023 and charged with Sandra’s murder in 2024. Between 1993 and 2024, Manny’s head rumbled with possibilities about how his sister could have been killed and by whom.
“I’m from the streets. I told the police the only way he (the killer) could have encountered her was through some public place. He is an architect, maybe she stepped foot into that business place or in an elevator somewhere…he could have just seen her somewhere…”

Last Wednesday Heuermann pleaded guilty to Sandra’s murder.

He said he strangled her.

Sandra’s son would be 35 years old. His whereabouts are unknown.

“She asked me to promise that when the time is right, I will let her son know how much she loved him. I’ve been looking for him for years to deliver that message,” says Nicky.

Sandra’s half-sister Ruth lives in Florida. She has not returned calls to her cell phone. Her half-brother Anthony was arrested for larceny in North Carolina in 2022. Her younger brother, Manny, is before the courts in Trinidad.

When Heuermann is sentenced on June 17, only Nicky might be there on Sandra’s behalf.

“Sandra was about to start a whole new life. I told her come, I don’t care what you have done in the past, whatever it is we can fix it,” remembers Nicky hauntingly.