There are, the hit man said, many ways to kill.
A string tied between two sticks strangles with a tug of the wrists. A butcher’s blade, long and thin, slices into the heart.
Edgar Matobato said he fed a man to a crocodile, but only once. Mostly, he said, he ended people’s lives with a trusted weapon: his .45-caliber Colt M1911 pistol.
“For almost 24 years, I killed and disposed of many bodies,” Mr. Matobato said of his time with a death squad in Davao City, in the southern Philippines. “I am trying to remember, but I cannot remember everyone.”
“I’m sorry,” he added.
We were sitting in the outdoor kitchen of Mr. Matobato’s secret refuge in the Philippines. A fierce rain sent water skittering into the room. Mosquitoes followed. He slapped one dead, its body oozing someone else’s blood.
Mr. Matobato was in hiding. He has been for a decade, ever since he confessed to his crimes and divulged who ordered the bloodletting: Rodrigo Duterte, the mayor of Davao City, who later became president of the Philippines.
Mr. Matobato, now 65, says he killed more than 50 people for the man he called “Superman,” pulling in a salary from City Hall of a little more than $100 a month and receiving envelopes of cash for successful hits. He rarely hid his identity as he kidnapped and killed, he said, because working for the mayor gave him impunity.
Mr. Matobato knew that breaking the omertà of what came to be known as the Davao Death Squad made him a marked man. He was given sanctuary by priests and politicians, who hoped his confessions might be used to one day hold his former boss to account.
When I first met him last year, Mr. Matobato was waiting for the International Criminal Court, or I.C.C., to take him as a witness in its inquiry into whether Mr. Duterte committed crimes against humanity. In 2018, international prosecutors began investigating Mr. Duterte, who was president from 2016 to 2022, for overseeing extrajudicial killings, in Davao City and later across the Philippines, he justified as part of a law-and-order campaign against illegal drugs and other societal ills. No exact tally exists of how many people were victims of his drug war — a killing spree that included far more than drug pushers and petty criminals — but low estimates are at 20,000.
By the time we met, Mr. Matobato had a new name and a new job shearing sheep and feeding chickens — no killing anymore, he said. At least two other members of the Davao Death Squad had already made their way overseas to be witnesses for the I.C.C. He was aching for his chance, too.
His declining health added urgency. Though Mr. Matobato cannot read, he understood the irregular jags of his electrocardiogram, signs of a troubled heart.
For people in the Philippines who are keen to bring Mr. Duterte to account, the testimony of hit men like Mr. Matobato is crucial. But they also recognize that granting these killers any kind of legal protection, much less forgiveness, is a necessary evil.
While another former hit man says he secured immunity in exchange for his testimony at the I.C.C., Mr. Matobato told me he was not seeking the same. If the I.C.C. wanted to punish him for the killings he had committed, so be it.
“For almost 24 years, I killed for Duterte — 24 years, 24 years,” Mr. Matobato said, repeating the number like a mantra.
“I will face what I did,” Mr. Matobato said. “But Duterte, he must be punished by the court and by God.” He just hoped his recounting of his crimes would lead the former president to prison.
‘Chop-chop’
At 5 feet 2 inches, Mr. Matobato is used to being underestimated. He grew up poor, his father killed by Communist rebels, he said. Barely able to write his own name, he worked as a security guard before a policeman offered him the chance in 1988 to join a group of enforcers cleaning up a crime-ridden city.
Their corps was eventually called the Heinous Crimes Unit. Mr. Matobato said he was a “force multiplier,” a low-ranking hit man often drawn from the ranks of security guards or dropouts from rebel militias.
“This is no joke,” Mr. Matobato said. “I may be small, but I know how to kill very well.”
Over many months, I checked hundreds of details in Mr. Matobato’s recollections with testimony from several others who said they had also been members of the Davao Death Squad. While there were small points of divergence, the vast bulk of their memories matched.
The Davao Death Squad developed its own code and methods. “Trabajo” meant a hit. A towel emblazoned with the words “good morning” hanging over the shoulder of a spotter would signal the positioning of the target to be killed. Brown packing tape kept the victims’ screams from posing a distraction.
The men often worked at the Laud quarry, on the outskirts of Davao City, each cave and hideaway swathed in tropical green. There, the squad dismembered and buried hundreds of bodies over a quarter-century, according to statements from five men who said they were members of the group. Mr. Duterte sometimes presided over the torture, executions and grave digging, they said.
Mr. Matobato said that at the quarry, which was owned by a policeman who was a founding member of the Davao Death Squad, he specialized in body disposal. He grew practiced at the geometry of butchery, turning a human into a package of flesh and bones fit for a compact burial space. It was also important, he said, that the corpses not be easily identifiable.
Mr. Matobato said he would slice through the thorax, remove the vital organs and lop the limbs. Then he would cut off the head and place it in the cavity the innards had occupied. He would pour engine oil over the butchered body to stanch the smell.
Cutting off the ears, he said, was for no real reason. But once he started, it was sometimes hard to stop.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mr. Matobato told me, his hand mimicking each motion of dismemberment. “I was very good at chop-chop.”
After busy days at the quarry, Mr. Matobato and the other hit men would often drive to the Vista View restaurant. They took over a favored cabaña overlooking the Laud quarry. They feasted on seafood and halo-halo, a kind of Filipino ice cream sundae.
At least once, though, Mr. Matobato ate at the quarry. According to Mr. Matobato and one other member of the squad, the hit men set up a barbecue. Mr. Matobato sliced a chunk of thigh from a fresh corpse. They grilled and ate the flesh, each bite tightening the bond between the hit men, Mr. Matobato said.
“He would come home with blood on his clothes, but he always said it was from cock fights,” said Joselita Abarquez, Mr. Matobato’s common-law wife. “I had to wash a lot to get the clothes clean.”
On one occasion in 2009, Mr. Matobato crouched in a limestone outcropping, not with a curved carving blade, but with his Colt. He said he had been given orders to shoot dead a woman who was going into the Laud quarry to find evidence of extrajudicial killings.
Mr. Matobato said he didn’t question the hit. This many years in, he admitted, he knew he was no longer just killing “trash,” as he referred to petty offenders.
“When we started, we were proud that we were neutralizing criminals, drug pushers, thieves, making Davao safe,” Mr. Matobato said. “Then it changed, but we kept following Superman’s orders.”
The hit list came to include businessmen who challenged the interests of Mr. Duterte’s sons, politicians whose spheres of influence pressed against Mr. Duterte’s, journalists who pointed out Mr. Duterte’s public prescience in who would soon turn up dead. On that day in 2009, the list also included Leila de Lima, the head of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights, who had been leading a monthslong investigation into the rising body count in Davao City.
Armed with a search warrant, Ms. de Lima and her team pinpointed a couple of places in the Laud quarry where another hit man had confessed to her that human remains were buried.
At the first spot, they shoveled and found bones and a skull. By that time, the sun was setting. There was no time to explore the other suspected mass grave, near where Mr. Matobato hid with his gun cocked.
“We waited, but she never came,” Mr. Matobato said. “We failed in our mission.”
Not long after her Laud quarry investigation, Ms. de Lima’s tenure at the human rights commission ended. Her Davao City findings languished. An associate of Mr. Duterte’s said that the skeletal remains her team found were those of Japanese soldiers from World War II.
But Mr. Matobato didn’t forget Ms. de Lima. When in 2014 he decided to confess his crimes and go into hiding, the woman who had been on his kill list helped arrange his escape and public confession.
Waiting for Confession
Two years later, in 2016, under the guidance of Ms. de Lima, Mr. Matobato gave his Senate testimony about the Davao Death Squad. He spoke of witnessing Mr. Duterte shoot a weapon. His performance was halting. Some senators grilled him in English, a language he barely spoke.
Mr. Matobato’s handler on the death squad, Arturo Lascañas, a senior police officer, was called as a defender of Mr. Duterte. In crisp English, Mr. Lascañas rejected Mr. Matobato’s accusations entirely.
In 2016, Mr. Duterte was inaugurated president with a resounding mandate. Mr. Matobato remained in hiding. For one five-year stretch, he and his wife were confined to a house, unable to leave because of the perceived threats from the president of the Philippines.
“We ran out of tears,” Ms. Abarquez said of that period of isolation. “We almost went crazy.”
Mr. Matobato said he wanted only to stay in a darkened room. Images of those he killed floated past his closed eyes. The memory of the young ones, the girls, especially, made him feel like he had to throw up, a queasiness that had never affected him during all those years in Davao.
One night while sequestered in that house, he tied some linens together and decided to hang himself.
“I couldn’t live with myself, with all that I had done,” he said.
But he found he couldn’t kill himself, either.
A year after the Senate inquiry, Mr. Lascañas made his own public confession. His health was failing, and he was seeking absolution, he said. Everything Mr. Matobato had said at the hearing was true, Mr. Lascañas finally admitted. He had been Mr. Matobato’s boss. He had executed hits as a leader of the Davao Death Squad. And he had been personally instructed by Mr. Duterte to kill.
Not too long ago, Mr. Lascañas quietly left the Philippines and came under the protection of the I.C.C. Mr. Matobato acknowledged that Mr. Lascañas could neatly diagram the complex hierarchy of the death squad, Mr. Duterte sitting at the very top. He knew that Mr. Lascañas’s sworn statement was many pages longer than his own. Still, Mr. Matobato had confessed first, and he could not understand why the I.C.C. didn’t want him, too.
“I am ready to tell all my crimes,” Mr. Matobato said.
By then, Mr. Matobato and Ms. Abarquez had secretly moved into a Catholic Church compound, under the protection of priests. They had more space and animals to tend, fruit trees to nourish them, too. Mr. Matobato took video calls with I.C.C. investigators.
“I told them everything about what I did on Superman’s orders,” he said. He raised his hand to his head in a salute.
In the spring, there were rumors that Mr. Matobato would follow Mr. Lascañas into overseas exile under the court’s protection. But the weeks kept slipping by.
“I have to be patient,” he told me, sighing. “I am good at following orders.”
Nervous energy kept Mr. Matobato’s legs jiggling, his toes barely reaching the ground. Even though Mr. Duterte left the presidency in 2022, the family’s continued grip on power — his daughter is vice president, his son is Davao City mayor, and Mr. Duterte himself is making noises about wanting to reassume the mayoral position — made Mr. Matobato all the more desperate to leave the Philippines.
I was preparing to visit Davao City with the photographer Jes Aznar, and Mr. Matobato told me he was worried for us, the muscles in his jaw twitching. The extrajudicial killings in Davao have not stopped. In one spate earlier last year, seven bodies were found on city streets.
“With Superman, life is cheap in Davao,” Mr. Matobato said. “One bullet, two bullets.”
He formed a pistol with his fingers and pointed at my heart, before laughing, although not for very long.
A culture of fear still pervades in Davao City. I met with a mother who lost three children to the drug war, one in 2013, one in 2016 and one in 2023. We spoke for hours, and she trembled as she described each son who was killed: Vivencio Jr., 19, who was watching basketball when the gunmen pulled up on motorcycles; Veejay, 21, who was taken into an unmarked van and shot dead as he tried to escape; and Harry Jay, 32, whose corpse with two bullet wounds she claimed from the hospital.
When Jes and I arrived at the Laud quarry, at a shooting range that operates on the fringes of the property, we were followed by two men, one of whom filmed us on his cellphone. We left quickly, wondering whether we were imagining a threat. But when we later showed the two men’s photos to Mr. Matobato, he confirmed that they were members of the Davao Death Squad.
The Escape
The day started with a farewell to the sheep, goats and chickens that Mr. Matobato had cared for while in hiding. His turn to flee the Philippines and tell of his crimes had finally come.
The family — Mr. Matobato, his wife and his two stepchildren — loaded a van with suitcases packed with Filipino snacks and Catholic talismans. Over his shoulder, Mr. Matobato carried a black laptop case, the same one in which he used to keep his Colt pistol. He has never owned an actual computer.
Mr. Matobato had managed to obtain a new identity with a new passport and a new job description: gardener. He practiced saying his new name, first, middle and last, but the syllables came out funny, with a question mark hanging over them. His thick hair had been shaved, and he wore large glasses and a gray goatee. A mask covered part of his face.
Still, Mr. Matobato, with his compact but coiled energy, worried that he was recognizable. One of the sons of the owner of the Laud quarry had worked as a police officer at the airport in the Philippine capital, Manila. The priests and politicians arranging Mr. Matobato’s escape worried that he was being targeted for a hit.
The throng of travelers at the airport disoriented Mr. Matobato. It had been a decade since he had been in a crowd. Back when he killed in Davao City, he said, he never bothered to conceal his identity. He could shoot someone in broad daylight and stroll away. Now, he was desperate not to be seen.
As he waited in line at immigration, Mr. Matobato’s lips moved soundlessly. He was not praying, he later said, but repeating his new name. The immigration officer had no questions, and Mr. Matobato’s new passport received an exit stamp. As the plane took off for Dubai, he cradled a figurine of the Virgin Mary in his hands. This time, he said, he was invoking God. Flying filled him with fear.
Shortly after the flight’s takeoff, he downed a beer but he was still jangly, he said. He was in the middle seat of a middle row in economy class. Next to him slept two Catholic priests who had negotiated his long escape from the Philippines.
Mr. Matobato diverted his attention by watching “The Beekeeper,” a movie about a hit man.
“Very good,” he told me, giving two thumbs up. “Very realistic.”
At the Dubai airport, Mr. Matobato, who had eaten everything served to him on the nine-hour flight, was still hungry. The priests led him and his family to a Five Guys for hamburgers. A server from the Philippines smiled at the clergymen and offered them free fries. Mr. Matobato chewed his burger in silence, taking big bites and wiping his fingers clean. Then he put his face mask back on.
“I don’t think anyone recognizes me, but you can never be sure,” he said, his eyes scanning the restaurant. “Superman is powerful. He has his spies everywhere.”
On the next flight, another long-haul, Mr. Matobato watched more movies about hit men. Bullets flew on the screen. At the duty-free shop in the country that is his new home — The New York Times is not identifying his whereabouts for his security — Mr. Matobato gazed at the fully stocked liquor aisles. There was Johnny Walker in blue and black and green and double black — more labels than he had ever seen, he said. He glanced at the priests, and one picked up a bottle for a celebration.
“The pursuit of justice is long and arduous, but with Edgar out of the Philippines, we are one big step closer to bringing Duterte to account,” said the Rev. Flaviano Villanueva, who helped form a kind of church witness protection program for penitent members of the Davao Death Squad. “We have to tell the world, tell the Filipino people that ours is not a society that accepts wanton violence, that ignores extrajudicial killings, that glorifies a president who boasts about murder.”
For speaking out against the violence of Mr. Duterte’s drug war, Father Villanueva and another Catholic priest were tried for sedition. They were acquitted after Mr. Duterte left office.
In a car for another drive to another safe house, Mr. Matobato fell asleep within minutes. It was as if a decade’s worth of tension in his body had uncorked.
Over the next few days, Mr. Matobato would experience the dislocation of being a permanent exile. He did not understand the language, the people or the culture. Still, he was free to walk around, unmasked and unrecognized. At a superstore, he maneuvered a large shopping cart through the aisles, staring at the unfamiliar foods. He prayed at a cathedral. He went on walks with his wife, just the two of them. They held hands.
“I know what he did is wrong, but he is my husband,” Ms. Abarquez said.
On that first night in his new home, drinking Johnny Walker Blue Label decanted in plastic cups, Mr. Matobato said he felt free for the first time in decades. Superman’s men, he said, could not come after him anymore. He raised his glass. Tears trickled down his face.
His family went to bed, jet-lagged and disoriented. But Mr. Matobato did not want to sleep. Killings once submerged in his memory surfaced.
“Did I tell you about the time we killed the girls?” he asked me.
He had, back when we were in the Philippines. That was the first time I had seen Mr. Matobato cry. Sitting with his wife, he had described how he and other death squad members kidnapped three young women around 2013. They were told the women were drug dealers, but Mr. Matobato didn’t think they were. The hit men bundled the women into a van.
At a quiet bend, where Gold Street meets Ruby Street, several men stayed in the back of the van and raped the women, Mr. Matobato said. He said his role was to act as lookout, standing outside the vehicle to ward off any passers-by. The women were killed in the van, then their bodies were swathed in packing tape and dumped in a patch of forest, Mr. Matobato said.
“They were so young,” he said. “They weren’t criminals. I don’t even know their names.”
Ms. Abarquez had been listening to her husband speak. She stood up and walked away.
There were so many unidentified corpses that turned up in Davao City back then that I was not able to confirm with certainty Mr. Matobato’s account. One police officer said there were at least three instances of multiple female bodies found in Davao City around 2013.
It’s like that with many of the extrajudicial killings, both in Davao City and nationwide. Evidence is hazy. People are still afraid to talk. In the end, it’s unlikely that most of the death squad members will ever face prosecution.
Back in his new home, I told Mr. Matobato that he had already described the deaths of the three young women to me. His eyes glistened.
“In my nightmares, I see the girls, and they are screaming,” he said. “They were so young, so innocent. They didn’t deserve to die.”
Mr. Matobato swallowed more whiskey. Then he smiled, his teeth small and white.
“I haven’t told you about these ones before,” he said. “You can write it down.”
For an hour, and then another, he related more killings he said he committed. My hand hurt from writing down every death, every instrument of killing: a knife, a .45 Colt, a rope, a heave into the sea.
Mr. Matobato sipped his Johnny Walker. He was still awake. Absolution eluded him. So he told me one more story, just one more, of a man he says he killed for Superman.
Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.
