The Philippines: The Case of the Missing Groom

Who kidnaped President Marcos’ new “son-in-law”?

The couple dined quietly two nights before New Year’s at Manila’s cozy Las Conchas restaurant. Later, Maria Imelda (“Imee”) Marcos, 26, said good night and, escorted by a motorcade of security men, returned dutifully to Malacañang Palace, bastion of her father, President Ferdinand Marcos. Meanwhile the man she had secretly wed on Dec. 4 in Arlington, Va., Tomas (“Tommy”) Manotoc, 32, amateur golf champion and basketball coach, drove off alone in his 1977 white Mitsubishi Galant Sigma and disappeared.

Four days later, a message offered to free Manotoc in return for the release of four jailed leaders of the Philippine Communist Party and the payment of $2.5 million. The government insisted that Manotoc had been kidnaped, and officials promised a relentless search. But the efforts turned out to be so casual that a full week after Manotoc’s disappearance, not a single agent had gone to the restaurant where the couple had dined. Rumors began to spread through Manila that the government knew more about the kidnaping than it was saying. The President’s wife Imelda had been bitterly opposed to the marriage. For one thing, the family was Roman Catholic and Manotoc was divorced. For another, she did not think that the good-natured jock was worthy of her daughter.

Less than 24 hours after Manotoc vanished, President Marcos phoned the young man’s father to ask him to be “discreet” and contact neither the press nor the police. But Carmen Manotoc, the missing bridegroom’s mother, spoke out, blaming the Marcoses directly for the kidnaping. Said she: “I couldn’t think of anything else but them. I kept warning him, ‘You’re playing with fire, you’re way over your head.’ ” President Marcos angrily denied the charges and denounced what he called “wild and false speculations insinuating the involvement of the President and the family in the matter.”

Manotoc seemed an unlikely victim for a kidnaping. He had no real wealth of his own. In 1971, he married Aurora Pijuan, then 21, a sugar planter’s daughter who had a year earlier won a beauty contest title: Miss International. The couple had a son and daughter, but had become estranged by the time Manotoc met the President’s daughter last February. Imee and Tommy started seeing each other at public events and later sneaking away to a condominium in Makati owned by a relative of Imee. Both families knew what was going on and the presidential arm was long. During a tryst in a private home, Tommy told a friend, they were interrupted by a phone call from Marcos himself.

In October, Manotoc got a quickie divorce in the Dominican Republic and later slipped away to the U.S. with Imee to be married. While the two were in Washington, TIME has learned, Marcos called them, urging the couple to return to the Philippines to work things out. “Mrs. Marcos is extremely angry,” Marcos allegedly told Manotoc. “I can help you better here.” The President’s wife was indeed angry. Meeting the couple in early December in New York City, the mother went “berserk,” Manotoc said later. He claimed he had never in his life been abused so violently.

Upon returning to the Philippines in mid-December with his bride, Manotoc was bound by the country’s law, which does not recognize divorces. He and his wife each lived with their parents but continued to meet nearly every day. Since her husband disappeared, Imee is known to have done two things: she called Manotoc’s lawyer and arranged for the return to the palace of her marriage certificate, and she phoned Manotoc’s brother Dini to tell him that she had given one of Tommy’s shirts to a psychic to meditate over. The psychic, she said, had declared he was well and with friends.