Belize - Francesca Matus, 52, & Drew De Voursney, 36, murdered, Corozal, 25 Apr 2017

May 6, 2017 Officials said the remains of an American man and his Canadian girlfriend were found in a sugarcane field but a motive is not known.

Click to expand...

DirtyDR said:

https://www.google.com/amp/people.c...-murders-drew-devoursney-francesca-matus/amp/

Click to expand...

Within the last few weeks, she says, she learned authorities “had a person of interest that was in the U.S.”

She says her family has had basically no contact with either local investigators or with the FBI, but they receive updates through the State Department.

Click to expand...

“This FBI agent had been over there recently and doing some investigating,” Char tells PEOPLE, adding, “It sounds like they’re just not going to let it go cold.”

“I feel sure that if it’s this one person, that one person couldn’t have done the actual murders,” she says. “One person could be assigning it or asking for it to be done. … But if there’s one person that they’re looking at right now, it’s whoever put the hit on or however you want to say it, that’s my conclusion with this information.”

Click to expand...

Deshaies was never charged in connection with the murders and it went below the radar. It seems that he has now been cleared as a suspect.

In an online article published on Friday, People magazine revealed that a person living in the United States has been identified as “a person of interest” by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), which has taken interest in the matter because an American national was killed.

Click to expand...

These updates have only come through the State Department because neither Char Devoursney nor her family has had contact with Belizean investigators or with the FBI. When the matter was raised in the Police Media Group on Saturday, police officials simply ignored it.

Click to expand...

The FBI is hunting a person of interest in the U.S. in the mysterious double murder of Francesca Matus and her American boyfriend in a Belize sugar cane field last May.

Click to expand...

In the last several weeks she said the FBI has developed a person of interest that lives in the U.S.

Click to expand...

Belize police have suspected the slayings may have been triggered by a real estate transaction gone awry.

“I feel sure that if it’s this one person, that one person couldn’t have done the actual murders,” DeVoursney’s mom told the magazine. “One person could be assigning it or asking for it to be done…But if there’s one person that they’re looking at right now, it’s whoever put the hit on or however you want to say it, that’s my conclusion with this information.

Click to expand...

dotr said:

http://www.nugget.ca/2017/12/11/fbi...rmer-sault-woman-and-her-boyfriend-in-belieze
Dec 11 2017

Click to expand...

Kamille said:

With this information, I wonder which one was the actual target. I believe they both owned property in Belize. Still wondering what is happening with their respective properties.

:waitasec:

Click to expand...

The United States State Department issued a travel advisory for Belize on Wednesday, January 10th, warning American citizens to exercise caution when in the country. The advisory states that violent crime, such as sexual assault, armed robbery, and murder are common in Belize and local police lack the resources to respond effectively to serious criminal incidents. Despite this warning, hoteliers and other members of the tourism sector on Ambergris Caye continue to report good business. They regret the advisory, which puts a black eye on the country but they encourage visitors to continue visiting Belize and the island for a memorable getaway.

Click to expand...

The issuance of such negative advisory for Belize is raising speculations that it could be linked to unresolved murder cases involving American Nationals..

Click to expand...

The most recent murder of an American national was on December 16, 2017, after the discovery of the body of Kimberly Stephen in Placencia in southern Belize. Stephens was a regular visitor to Belize and owned a home in Maya Beach. Her body was found on a vacant lot off the Placencia road laying behind a grey SUV vehicle with a cell phone cord around her neck. To date, police have no suspects in the murder or have established a motive.
The Belize Police Department who has been following both cases only commented that they are still working on them and hope to soon come up with some positive results.

Click to expand...

Man wanted in Belize murder case charged after northern Ontario drug bust

Click to expand...

SUDBURY, Ont. — Police say a drug seizure in northern Ontario resulted in the arrest of a man suspected of murder in Belize, as well as other crimes in Toronto.

Click to expand...

A check on the man’s identity, which was not released, found he was wanted for a number of alleged crimes further afield.

Click to expand...

Bacchus is also wanted by cops in Belize for the brutal killing of Melvin Almendarez in May 2016.

The San Pedro Sun has reported the 31-year-old local athlete was shot to death and then run over by a golf cart.

Click to expand...

[h=1]One year later: Inside look at unsolved murders of Canadian and American in Belize[/h]

Click to expand...

May 1, 2018 3:32PM EDT

It has been one year since the bodies of Francesca Matus and her American lover were found tangled together in a sugar cane field in Belize.

The urn holding the Canadian woman's ashes now sits in a niche at Toronto's Highland Memory Gardens, across from the spot where her 80-year-old mother will be buried one day.

"So we can always look at each other," said her mother, Mafalda Rino.

Click to expand...

Their murders remain unsolved. There are no suspects, and a person of interest, a Canadian man arrested shortly after the bodies were discovered, has been cleared.

"We're never going to know who killed my sister," said Matus's 50-year-old brother, Tony Rino.

Click to expand...

The murder investigation is ongoing, but the families say there have been no developments. A Canadian who was considered a person of interest in the case has also been cleared.

John Deshaies, of Barrie, Ont., who was renting the ground-floor apartment in Matus's house with his girlfriend, was arrested shortly after the bodies were discovered and spent 10 days behind bars.

"I thought I was going to die in there," the 54-year-old said in a phone interview from Belize.

Click to expand...

Walter McKay, a policing and security expert, said the government's ability to help in such murder cases is limited.

"They have no powers of authority," McKay said. "My advice is don't expect any help ... don't expect justice, because you won't get it."

Click to expand...

By all accounts, Matus loved spending time in the country. She grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., in a large Italian-Canadian family, and after college moved to Toronto, where she eventually started investing in real estate. She owned five houses in the Toronto area, where her 23-year-old twin sons still live, and one in Belize — a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Click to expand...

Just how scarce those resources are became evident soon after the bodies of Matus and DeVoursney were discovered by a farmer on May 1, 2017 — six days after the pair had disappeared.

Joe Milholen, an American who was friends with the pair, remembered being called by police to identify the bodies.

When he showed up at the field late in the afternoon, a detective told him to wait until a pathologist arrived.

“We had to wait all night for the pathologist,” he said in an interview from Corozal, in northern Belize. “This guy was telling me how busy they had been ... there was a rash of murders and suspicious deaths.”

The pathologist arrived around 5:45 a.m., said Milholen, but he had no supplies — no body bags or something to cart the bodies out of the bush.

“So I got to figure out where the hell do you get a body bag,” he said.

Milholen went to the local hospital, but they didn’t have any. He managed to secure two body bags from someone with ties to the U.S. embassy in Belize who knew Matus.

When he returned to the field, Matus lay on an old wooden door while DeVoursney was being carried out of the bush on a large piece of plywood.

“I can’t lie, it was one of the most difficult things I’ve gone through,” Milholen said, his voice trailing off. “I was frazzled — I’m still frazzled, man.”

Milholen, a former deputy sheriff from Georgia, was one of the la

Click to expand...