Alone and 7,000 miles from home, the last thing Debbie Remorozo saw was the face of her furious killer

Unsolved murder: her killer stabbed the 26-year-old Filipino nurse repeatedly in the chest and neck

The final moments of Debbie Remorozo, a 26-year-old coronary care nurse, must have been terrible. She was looking directly into the face of her killer who was stabbing her repeatedly in the chest and neck, her short life ebbing away in her grim 7th floor flat in Oldham 6,800 miles away from her family in the Philippines.

Before leaving, her attacker laid Debbie’s bloodied body out in a crucifix position on the floor of her lounge and covered her face with a tablecloth. Her murder was so furious and idiosyncratic that detectives believed she must have known her killer who appeared to have been motivated by uncontrollable anger.

Debbie, who was known as a hard-working and dedicated nurse, had been happy to let her killer into her flat at Summervale House on Vale Drive in Werneth. The visitor murdered her right there, knifing her repeatedly in the neck and chest in what appeared to be a fit of rage.

Almost a quarter of a century has elapsed since then but it still remains one of the most shocking unsolved murders on the books of Greater Manchester Police. Her killer remains at large.

When police were called followed the murder on December 7, 2002, what they found in her flat suggested a crime of passion. The attack had been ‘brief but frenzied’, according to detectives. She was stabbed several times with two knives from her own kitchen. There was no evidence it had been a robbery or a sexually-motivated attack. Her killer was angry about something. But what?

Police speculated that the killer was motivated by jealousy or hatred. Whatever had inspired her murder, the strong suspicion among detectives was that her killer came from inside or at least had intimate knowledge of the tight-knit Filipino community in the UK.

Debbie was pretty and had her suitors but wasn’t so interested in boyfriends. She tended to keep them at arm’s length although she is said to have had a relationship with a Filipino man working at a hospital in Birmingham. She had what many would consider to be old fashioned views about courting. Her life was austere. She dedicated herself to her work so she could send money back home to her parents in the small village of Kinalasan in the Philippines, population just 1,500.

She had arrived in the UK some two years before her death and worked as a coronary care nurse at Royal Oldham Hospital, one of 30 Filipinos who had travelled half-way across the world to help the NHS in Oldham. Her father Dionisio, a rice farmer, and mother Alicia, a teacher, believed she would be safe.

“Debbie was only doing this for a better life for us. Now I have lost her. I really miss her,” Alicia told the M.E.N. a year after the murder.

The detective who initially led the investigation, Steve Heywood, remarked at the time: “What is startling is the simplicity of her life. She would get up, go to work, work 12 to 14 hours, come home, make a meal and go to sleep. She did not socialise much but did go to church. Her sole purpose was to generate cash for her family back in the Philippines.”

Some 24 years after her murder police are no nearer getting justice for her family, although the M.E.N. understands detectives who worked on the case are convinced they identified the killer but couldn’t get enough evidence to press charges.

Her brutal murder was headline news here in the UK and in her homeland but it has long since become an official a ‘cold case’ for Greater Manchester Police.

A year after the murder a DNA profile officers believed belonged to the killer was recovered from the flat at Summervale House. Officers returned to Royal Oldham Hospital to interview staff there for a second time. Years later, following a review of the forensic evidence, a file of evidence was prepared but the Crown Prosecution Service wouldn’t authorise a charge. Senior CPS lawyers decided the prospect of a conviction was unrealistic and the investigation team was left frustrated.

“I’m 100 per cent sure I know who’s done it. And people out there will know who’s done it.” one former detective who worked on the case told the M.E.N. in 2016.

On the day of her murder, she had turned up for work at 7am for her morning shift. She had been due to finish at 3pm but stayed longer – as usual – to write up her notes. Just before leaving work, she took a call which colleagues said had left her ‘distressed’. CCTV captured her leaving Royal Oldham at 3.27pm wearing her nurse uniform and a distinctive orange bobble hat.

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At about 3.55pm, she arrived at Summervale House. She used a key to get in. The investigation established that Debbie let her killer into her seventh-floor flat during the early evening of December 7.

Friends and colleagues at the hospital raised the alarm when she failed to turn up for work on ward C2 on the morning of the next day, December 8. They phoned Debbie and her flat to no avail. Her friends obtained a spare key and found her dead in the flat.

Fellow Oldham nurse Estrellita Villacamea told an inquest into Debbie’s death: “It was dark in her flat when we went in. We found her lying on the floor. There was lots of blood on her clothes. I felt for a pulse but there was none. I ran out and called an ambulance.”

Other witnesses described Debbie as a devout Catholic who was gentle, humble, endearing and loved by colleagues at Royal Oldham.

A few weeks later her body was flown from Manchester Airport to Heathrow before takings its final journey to Manila and then onto the village where she had been raised to be buried. The investigation took detectives to Filipino communities in the UK and in the Philippines.

They travelled to Debbie’s home village. They distributed posters written in both English and the Filipino language Tagalog in north Wales and at Filipina Barrio Festa, a Filipino festival in Hounslow, west London.

On April 8, 2003, a 26-year-old man and a woman of 31 were arrested in connection with Debbie’s murder. They were interviewed and bailed until the following month when they were released without charge. Despite numerous public appeals since her death, the case remains unsolved and a £50,000 reward for information leading the killer is unclaimed.

Speaking to the M.E.N. in 2016 from the Philippines, Debbie’s brother Dennis said talking about the murder was ‘still very hard for us’ as it brought back ‘sad memories of what happened to my sister’.

He continued: “We are still hoping though that with the help of scientific approach and new technologies now, justice for my sister will be served soon. Fourteen years has passed (and) we never heard again from the Manchester police and investigators. We’ve been hopeless and frustrated since then not knowing where and how we can get results of the investigation and the reason why someone killed my sister.”

Martin Bottomley, of GMP’s Cold Case Review Unit, told the Manchester Evening News: “No case is ever closed. We encourage anyone who thinks they may have information – no matter how big or small – to come forward and speak to us. We will listen to you.