Ferdinand Marcos, 18 at the time of the shooting, was a star marksman on the ROTC shooting team. He became a prime suspect in the killing immediately but wasn`t arrested until four years later.
A court convicted Mr. Marcos of murder and sentenced him to 10 to 17 years in prison, a relatively mild sentence, because of his youth.
While in jail, Mr. Marcos finished his legal studies and passed the bar exam with what at the time was the highest score ever. That score, the political nature of the killing and Mr. Marcos` emerging oratorical skills made his case front-page news.
Mr. Marcos handled his own defense and, in the process, built a reputation for brilliance that lasted a lifetime. At one point during arguments before the Supreme Court, he was asked by the justices if newspaper reports were true that he could recite the Philippine constitution backward. He could, and did.
In October, 1940, the Supreme Court overturned his murder conviction after one of the justices, Jose P. Laurel, in a personal appeal to his colleagues, said the country desperately needed young people with the leadership potential and intellect Mr. Marcos had just displayed.
The court decision granted Mr. Marcos a new lease on life and changed the course of Philippine history. It was a strange twist of fate that 45 years later, Salvador P. Laurel, son of the Supreme Court justice who saved him, would reluctantly join forces with a dynamic housewife to topple Mr. Marcos from power.
Mystery, controversy, deception and coincidence followed Mr. Marcos all his life.
He was born on Sept. 11, 1917, to Josefa Edralin, the daughter of a Filipino merchant and a Chinese woman.
In ``The Marcos Dynasty,`` published in 1988, author Sterling Seagrave recounts rumors that Mr. Marcos` real father was Ferdinand Chua, a Chinese judge who later played an important role in convincing the Supreme Court to overturn young Ferdinand`s murder conviction. The man Mr. Marcos` mother married (although perhaps not Mr. Marcos` father) was Mariano Marcos, who was executed by Filipino guerrillas during World War II for collaborating with Japanese occupiers.
Ferdinand Marcos, too, was accused by some guerrillas of collaborating with the Japanese, but he dispelled those allegations. After the war, when he became politically powerful, he was able to perpetuate a reputation as a wartime hero.
By the mid-1960s, Mr. Marcos was billing himself as the most-decorated guerrilla leader of World War II and proudly displaying a sheaf of medals including the Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star and Purple Heart.
Alfred W. McCoy, an American professor working in Australia, later proved most of Mr. Marcos` medal claims were fraudulent, but not before U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger had presented Mr. Marcos with duplicates of some of the awards he claimed to have won.
Mr. Marcos earned a special place in the heart of the U.S. defense establishment for his strong support of the United States during the Vietnam War.
The U.S. maintains its largest overseas military posts, Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base, in the Philippines. During the Vietnam War, supplies for American fighting forces were shipped through those bases, just across the South China Sea from Vietnam.
U.S. warplanes that bombed North Vietnam took off from Guam, rather than Philippine bases, to avoid any Vietnamese retribution against the Philippines. But Mr. Marcos allowed the United States to refuel its planes secretly on the southern island of Cebu on the return leg of their missions so they could carry more bombs on their outward journey. To this day, Cebu airport has some of the longest and the best runways in the region.
From his first days in office, Mr. Marcos promoted himself as an ardent anticommunist, which was perhaps the chief reason Bush hailed him as a guardian of democracy. But his corruption and strong-arm political tactics contributed to the staggering growth of a home-grown communist insurgency during his regime.
On Dec. 26, 1968, the anniversary of the birth of China`s revolutionary leader Mao Tse-tung and less than two years into the Marcos regime, 11 Filipino radicals formed the Communist Party of the Philippines, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government. A little more than 17 years later, when a civilian-backed military uprising chased Mr. Marcos from power, intelligence experts estimated there were more than 20,000 full-time and part- time communist fighters roaming the countryside.
Mr. Marcos had come to power in 1966 with the campaign promise that
``this nation can be great again.``
He lost power 20 years later when a generation of Filipinos who never knew greatness took to the streets shouting ``Sobra na, tama na!`` (``Enough is enough!``).
A still-grateful U.S. military helped Mr. Marcos and his family flee, shuttling them aboard helicopters and jet planes to Hawaii and pulling Navy ships up to the back of the presidential palace to haul off piles of personal treasure.
