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Island recovering from missionary murder

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The World’s Mary Kay Magistad reports on the murder of a young American missionary on the Pacific island of Yap. Many Yapese and those who worked with the missionary are still recovering.

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  A murder mystery is playing out on the tiny pacific island of Yap.  Yap is part of Micronesia and it’s known primarily for its indigenous traditions.  Murder is rare in Yap and that’s why the killing of a 20-year-old American missionary has so shocked the islanders.  Missionaries from many faiths have gone to Yap.  They’ve generally been welcomes for the education and services they bring.  The last fall Kristin Wolcott was killed.  The World’s Mary Kay Magistad visited the school where she was teaching.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD:  Kristin Wolcott took a break last year from her studies at Southern Adventist University in Tennessee to come here to teach.  She quickly made a positive impression. She was a gifted singer, a generous cook and – -

STERLING SPENCE:  She was a great friend.  She was always helpful and she would always like, have a smile and a joke, she was a good person.

MAGISTAD: That’s 19-year-old Sterling Spence, a fellow missionary who started teaching at Yap Seventh Day Adventist School about the same time.

SPENCE:  A lot of us, we didn’t come knowing exactly how to teach and stuff, she came in; she just was the model of what you would think a second grade teacher was.  She had all the games for her kids, she had all these materials and the kids loved her.

MAGISTAD: Among Wolcott’s second grade students was Emma.

EMMA:  When Kristin was here, she help us when we cry and she help us.

MAGISTAD: Another second grader told me that she was sad that her teacher had been hit by a car.  That’s not exactly what happened, but the reality might be hard for many second graders to process.  Wolcott was out for her usual pre-dawn run on a rainy November morning.  She didn’t come back.  Search parties were organized says the school’s Principal, Nicholas Fonseca.

NICHOLAS FONSECA:  And they found her by the side of the road naked, stabbed in about seven or eight places and slit here and cut on the neck.

MAGISTAD: Police quickly arrested a suspect who had been seen in the area, a repeat offender for burglaries who had tried at least once before to break into a Seventh Day Adventist teacher’s apartment.  The suspect is now in Yap’s prison for breaking parole and for attempting to escape when he was arrested on suspicion of murder.  Victor Nabeyan is Yap’s attorney general.

VICTOR NABEYAN:  It’s very shocking for almost everybody here because homicides very seldom happen, just about maybe one or two cases every three years or so.  So this was pretty shocking, not only because of whom the victim was, but the manner of this and also that it was done.

MAGISTAD: Nabeyan says the FBI is helping in the investigation, including doing DNA analysis.  He expects to get results in four to six months.  If it matches the suspect’s, a trial will commence.  Meanwhile, many people are still in shock.  They’re ashamed this happened on their peaceful island and they’re worried it might make international tourists think twice about coming.  There’s also the fact that almost all of Yap’s 12,000 residents are, at least, nominally Christian.  About half Catholic, thanks to Spanish Colonialists who came to the island in the 1700′s and half Protestant, thanks to a wide range of missionaries who have come more recently.  While many remain attached to their traditional culture and animist beliefs, there seems to be appreciation for the services these foreign missionaries provide.  Still, Principal Fonseca says there have been a few troubling undercurrents, like the time the flowers on the site where Wolcott was killed were found to have been deliberately shredded and scattered.

FONSECA:  I hear some people are happy for what happened to one of the teachers here.

MAGISTAD: People were happy about something like that?

FONSECA:  Well that’s what some people told me praising this guy for doing that.

MAGISTAD: Most of the students at the school are not Seventh Day Adventists and the teachers here say they’re under no pressure to convert.  Although they do have Bible studies every morning.  If that’s caused resentment in the community, Fonseca says, it hasn’t been obvious.  And you’d have to reach back to the mid-1700′s to find the last time Yapese murdered a missionary.  This case may even be unrelated to Wolcott’s work.  Still, Fonseca is asking his teachers to be more careful when they go out.  These days the school is, on surface, functioning as normal.  When Kristin Wolcott was killed, three of the other 13 missionaries went home.  They no longer felt safe.  Three more came, including Andrea Keele.  She worked at Southern Adventist University which Wolcott attended, and helped process her paperwork for Yap.

ANDREA KEELE:  I came almost because of my job in a way.  I felt like I helped send her out.  You always feel a little bit responsible when something like this happens and it never has happened, but God needed somebody else to come in and fill in after she was done.

MAGISTAD: So Keele has taken over teaching Wolcott’s second grade class.  Continuing, as she sees it, God’s work and perhaps completing a circle she didn’t know she was starting when she handed a bubbly 20-year-old her ticket to come here.  For The World, I’m Mary Kay Magistad, Yap.

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