It was the kind of crime that mothers still warn their daughters about.
On Feb. 24, 2006, honors grad student Imette St. Guillen went to a Manhattan bar to celebrate her upcoming 25th birthday — and ended up at the mercy of a stranger with unspeakable thoughts on his mind.
What happened to St. Guillen — and the monster who raped and murdered her — is now the subject of the first episode of a new true-crime TV series “TORN FROM THE HEADLINES: NEW YORK POST REPORTS,” which premieres March 16 at 10 p.m. ET on the Investigation Discovery channel.
The St. Guillen case shocked the nation, and The Post was on the front lines of reporting it as it unfolded — even at one point providing cops with an eyewitness who revealed ex-con bar bouncer Darryl Littlejohn’s chilling words to his victim right before he abducted and killed her.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take you home,” Littlejohn, then 41, assured the boozed-up John Jay College of Criminal Justice student outside The Falls, a trendy bar in Soho, according to the witness.
St. Guillen would be found dead 17 hours later — her nude, strangled corpse wrapped in a blanket and dumped in the weeds off a desolate service road of the Belt Parkway in East New York, Brooklyn.
The dead co-ed had her hands and feet bound, her head wrapped in plastic tape like a mummy — and a sock stuffed in her mouth.
St. Guillen succumbed to asphyxiation, according to Manhattan prosecutor Ken Taub in his opening statements at Littlejohn’s trial in May 2009 — the “most excruciating death because it occurs over a substantial amount of time.”
But even as it became clear that Littlejohn would pay for his crimes, St. Guillen’s mother could only weep, telling the press she simply wished “my baby was home.”
Her 24-year-old daughter had been set to graduate in June 2006, and her mom would attend the commencement ceremony — wearing a locket around her neck with her daughter’s ashes in it, a heartbreaking nod to her child’s shining, and tragically lost, future.
As for Littlejohn — dubbed a “typical classic sociopath” by a judge — he was ordered to prison for life in June 2009, a sentence that is running consecutively with the 25 years to life he got for an earlier kidnapping of a young Queens woman.
