Viagra, Botox and infidelity: the secret life of Fernando Manrique
To friends and colleagues he was the perfect family man — working hard to support his wife and their two autistic children. Today, The Sunday Telegraph unmasks the secret, sleazy double life of family killer Fernando Manrique.
- Husband was having affair with teen before murder-suicide
- Mum’s tough life before shocking murder-suicide
There had always been something strange about Fernando Manrique. The IT executive, through a long career in Sydney and overseas, seemed awkward and often rude.
“He was probably autistic himself, I think,” said one man who worked with Manrique in his early career in Australia, as he worked his way up in the world of project management and business processing outsourcing: overseeing the external divisions of major international clients.
“He had absolutely no interpersonal or people skills. I have no idea how he got himself into senior positions,” the Australian colleague said.
But in Asia, where he worked during postings between 2015 and 2016, a completely different side of Manrique began to emerge.
Glimpses of the 44-year-old’s double life were laid bare this week in the NSW Coroner’s Court, where an inquest picked apart Manrique’s “evil” plan to murder his entire family in October 2016.
Manrique filled the bedrooms of their Davidson home with carbon monoxide and killed his children, Martin, 10, and Elisa, 11, as they slept. Curled up in bed next to her daughter, Fernando’s wife, Maria Claudia Lutz, also died.
Manrique’s body was found nearby but it’s still undecided whether he intended to die or get out alive.
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Outside of the inquest, The Sunday Telegraph has spoken to businesspeople who worked with Manrique both within Australia and in South-East Asia.
They describe a man apparently swept up in the hedonism and sexual opportunity that comes with being a comparatively rich westerner in the developing world: frequenting bars; using high-price escorts; dabbling in cosmetic enhancements including facial injections; using Viagra; running up enormous credit card bills on partying; communicating with “scores of women” on apps like Viber and WhatsApp and all the while maintaining the facade of a happily married family man with his wife and children back home in Australia.
In reality it was his wife, Colombian-born lawyer Maria Claudia Lutz, who was raising their two children from the family home on Sydney’s north shore.
Described by close friends as a devoted, vivacious and loving mother, everything Maria did was about making her children’s lives better.
She was actively involved in their schooling at St Lucy’s in Wahroonga, studied to be a teacher’s aide and lobbied for $50,000 in National Disability Insurance Scheme funding to support Elisa and Martin, who both had autism.
In the lead up to October 2016, and during his short periods home between travelling for work with Drake Business Logistics, Manrique was disengaged and disinterested.
It seemed his mind was preoccupied with the memories of indulgence and infidelity abroad.
In one email to a friend in Vietnam, Manrique asked for Adagrin pills — a generic form of the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra — to be left at the front desk of his hotel because he was bringing “a friend” back.
“I’m coming with a friend so it’d be great if you could leave the pills in an envelope or similar,” Manrique wrote on April 1, 2015. “It is going to be a fun few days!”
“He was like a kid in a candy store,” one businessman who encountered Manrique in Vietnam said. Manrique formed a friendship with a westerner who lived in Vietnam, who introduced him to a bar called Kim’s Tavern, where beautiful young Vietnamese women party with western men.
“He came to Vietnam a lot and used to drink at a bar called Kim’s Tavern (in Ho Chi Minh City),” the friend said.
“He just went crazy. I don’t think he’d ever been exposed to Asia before, because he just went wild.”
Manrique formed a relationship with a girl who worked in the bar, She moved into an apartment funded by Manrique on the condition she made their relationship sexually exclusive and left the bar scene.
He confided in friends he had bought the woman a motorbike, and was stunned when she announced she was pregnant.
“I said to Fernando, ‘You’re getting played’,” the businessman, whom Manrique introduced to his “girlfriend”, said.
“I said: ‘Everything she’s doing to you, she’s probably done to 20 other people’.”
The implication was the woman was likely to be stringing along several foreigners and that Manrique was an easy mark.
But Manrique responded with only: “I’m a rock star, I know what I’m doing.”
It emerged during the inquest that Manrique told a friend it was OK for him to hook up with multiple women, but “unacceptable” for Maria to move on.
It appears Manrique fled Vietnam to escape the situation, changing his phone number and using Viber instant messaging software to stay in touch with acquaintances.
He went on to pursue bar girls in Bangkok, Taiwan and Japan, as well as having had multiple simultaneous sexual relationships with women in Vietnam.
“He was a predator, to be honest,” one former friend said.
“We worked together at some points during his career but I despised what he was doing; the dishonesty. I hated what he was doing to (Maria) Claudia.”
Later in 2016 Manrique began working in the Philippines, where he had a relationship with another bar girl, a 17-year-old named at this week’s inquest as Jamilyn, whom he had set up in an apartment.
After his death, Jamilyn, who told police Manrique never mentioned plans to move in with her, was still living in the apartment with no means to pay rent.
Back at home in Sydney, Maria was caring for their two children and had accepted the fact the marriage was over.
She had an insight his other life when she spotted a transaction for a strip club on a bank statement and, according to friends, suspected he had been unfaithful while working overseas.
Maria had told Manrique it was over but in late September 2016, he begged her for two more weeks in the family home until he found somewhere else to live. She relented, unaware he set about ordering two carbon monoxide gas canisters under a business account and, according to one personal familiar with the transaction, billed the BOC Gas order back to his employer, Drake Business Logistics.
“That gave him a month before his employers worked out that he’d ordered this gas which he had no legitimate use for,” the person said.
In a bid to avoid suspicion, Manrique had the gas bottles dropped off in separate deliveries a few days apart to the Parklea home of a friend, Jairo Campos.
Mr Campos and his wife were paid $400 to store them after Manrique told them he was running tests for a government contract relating to “gas released by cars in underground car parks”.
Mr Campos and his wife had no idea what Manrique’s real intentions were.
Manrique picked up the gas canisters on October 11, the same day Elisa and Martin returned to school after holidays, and drove them to their Davidson home, where he locked them in the back shed.
“Why would he need to take this elaborate step if Maria was a knowing participant in his evil plan?” Counsel assisting the Coroner Adam Casselden told the inquest as he pointed out that Manrique acted alone.
Manrique went back and forth between Bunnings in Belrose and his home four times to buy supplies to rig up the tubing that would carry the gas through the ceiling.
Former colleagues and friends believe he decided to kill his family when mounting credit card debt saw the Australian Taxation Office pursue him for bankruptcy.
He was also facing increasing demands from various women in Asian cities and was dealing with the possibility of a restructure in his job, possibly involving greater oversight of his expenses. Whether he knew it or not, Manrique had $50,000 in superannuation.
“It’s not clear why he didn’t attempt to access those funds if he intended to keep living,” Mr Casselden told the inquest.
Whatever his deranged reason, one former friend said it was not surprising Manrique had the capacity for murdering his children and wife and even the family dog.
“It’s just so awful because he clearly didn’t give a fig about his family. He didn’t care about them at
all. They (the children) were an impediment to his ego because they weren’t perfect. It all fits with who Fernando was.
“No compromise, ‘you go down with me. I win’.”
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