FATED LAST HOURS OF IMETTE

CO-ED'S BEST PAL RELIVES GIRLS' NIGHT OUT THAT ENDED IN HORROR

BEST friends Imette St. Guillen and Claire Higgins had happily collapsed on the couch in Hig gins' Morningside Heights apartment, exhausted after their flight home from a Florida vacation with family and friends.

If ever a Friday night called for a quiet evening in front of the TV, this was it.

But St. Guillen would be turning 25 in a few days, and the young women found their second wind, determined to enjoy a night on the town.

Less than 24 hours later, St. Guillen, a shining student at John Jay College, would be found strangled and raped, her body trussed and tossed near a desolate service road in Brooklyn.

The events of that fateful night on Feb. 24, 2006, have been pieced together from police transcripts of interviews with Higgins and obtained exclusively by The Post. It's the most comprehensive account yet of the evening that led to St. Guillen's murder, allegedly at the hands of ex-con bar bouncer Darryl Littlejohn.

Lounging in Higgins' apartment, St. Guillen paged through her New York City bar and club guide looking for just the right spot to enjoy her pre-birthday frolic. She picked the Pioneer Bar, a cavernous pickup spot on the Bowery in a neighborhood with a growing reputation with the moneyed bridge-and-tunnel crowd.

Higgins, 27, recalled how St. Guillen looked sexy and casual in her sleeveless turquoise top and beaded necklace that cold February night. It showed off her tan lines from the Florida sun. Over the blouse she wore a white hoodie and tucked her jeans into a pair of 3-inch spike-heeled, knee-high boots. On her wrist she wore her prized gold Cartier watch.

St. Guillen buttoned her gray wool Larry Levine coat, threw her black Coach bag over lher shoulder and the pair, along with Higgins' older sister, Carmel, 28, jumped into a cab heading downtown at around 11 p.m.

At the Pioneer, the trio made a beeline for the front bar, and St. Guillen ordered her first of many rum and Diet Cokes.

The bartender started to flirt with St. Guillen, but she wasn't into it.

"She was rude to him, so we got in an argument," Higgins recalled. "I thought Imette was snobby and had an attitude. I guess we were just getting on each other's nerves from being together all week in Florida."

The women drifted toward the back of the spacious downtown bar and wandered into an engagement party being thrown in the back room.

Higgins struck up a conversation with a guy, a fellow Boston native, but the encounter went nowhere. The girls kept drinking - St. Guillen had had four or five rum and Diet Cokes by then, Higgins told police.

"We were all drinking the same amount of drinks, but Imette seemed more drunk," Higgins said.

By 1:30 a.m., Higgins' sister split and caught a cab across town to meet some friends in the East Village.

The night was shaping up to be a bust.

"We were only approached by a couple of guys. Nothing was out of the ordinary," Higgins insisted. By 3 a.m., she had had enough.

"I'm really tired from the trip," Higgins told her friend, but St. Guillen wanted to keep partying. "Imette said, '20 minutes.' "

Higgins waited for her friend, so the two could go home together, but she refused.

"I got upset and said, 'You kept me here for another 20 minutes, and that's not fair,' " Higgins recalled.

"I noticed that she had been text-messaging someone, and she had spoke about [name redacted by police] earlier in the night. I said, 'Did you text [name redacted]' and she said yes."

Finally, St. Guillen agreed to leave. They got their coats and left the bar.

But when the pair hailed a cab, St. Guillen told Higgins, "You get this one, and I'll be right behind you."

"I said, 'No, I'm not leaving you.' We stood there arguing about leaving," Higgins recalled.

"Then Imette started walking down Bowery toward Kenmare [Street], and she was very drunk," Higgins told cops. "After more arguing about leaving her by herself, she kept saying that she wanted to stay out."

The two women made such a spectacle that a stranger pulled up in a car and asked if the squabbling friends were all right.

They waved the woman off and kept arguing about St. Guillen wanting to stay out alone.

"Finally, I couldn't keep arguing with her, so I got in a cab and went to my apartment," Higgins said.

She immediately regretted it.

Five minutes later, she called to check in on St. Guillen.

"She answered and she sounded happy - like we had not been fighting," Higgins said. "The background sounded like she was in a bar. So I asked her where she was, but she wouldn't tell me. She said she didn't know that name of the bar. I asked her the cross streets, and she said she didn't know, but I think she didn't want me to know where she was. Then she hung up."

It was the last time they would speak to each other. St. Guillen had vanished.

Her distraught family filed a missing person's report with police the next day, Sunday.

That day, Higgins' fears had grown. She canvassed the Bowery and SoHo bars with a photo of her friend, asking if anyone remembered seeing her.

Higgins had stopped into The Falls on Lafayette Street to ask if they had seen her when St. Guillen's sister, Alejandra, phoned her to say her body had been found.

In a follow-up interview with police, Higgins recalled that the bar's manager, Danny Dorrian, emerged from the back office as she took the call, tears streaming down her cheeks.

She said she turned to the pub scion and said, "My friend was missing, but they found her body."

Unmoved, Dorrian folded his arms and said, "New York can be a tough town," according to Higgins. Little did she know that Dorrian was one of the last people to see St. Guillen alive when he ordered his thug bouncer Littlejohn to throw her out of the bar at closing time, 40 minutes after Higgins had left her, according to press reports.

Police said Dorrian lied to them for days before finally coming clean, admitting that St. Guillen had been in the middle of her second drink at his bar. He admitted that St. Guillen had demanded her money back because she couldn't finish her drink, but Dorrian ignored her. He said he heard St. Guillen outside the bar yelling at Littlejohn, who is expected to stand trial tomorrow in Queens for allegedly abducting a York College student in October 2005.

Three weeks later, the hulking bouncer was charged with her savage murder and is expected to be tried in Brooklyn in late October.


'Finally, I couldn't keep arguing with her, so I got in a cab and went to my apartment.'- Claire Higgins , recalling her final night out with murder victim Imette St. Guillen


NIGHTMARE: Imette St. Guillen was last seen at The Falls in SoHo, where she was booted by the now-defunct bar's bouncer, Darryl Littlejohn (inset). He is accused of raping and strangling her and dumping her corpse.



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