Two people have been detained in Belize after the bodies of a 52-year-old Toronto woman and her 36-year-old American boyfriend were discovered by local authorities strangled in a sugar cane field, reports from news outlets in the Central American country say.
These reports have yet to be confirmed by authorities. CP24 has reached out to Belize police in the country’s northern Corozal district, where Francesca Matus and Drew De Voursney were last seen, but has yet to receive a response.
Belize News Media indicates one person has been detained by police and another is being questioned.
This development comes one day after their bodies were located in Chan Chen Village, also in Corozal.
The couple had been missing since last Tuesday when they were last seen leaving a local bar around 11 p.m. This was one day before Matus, a mother of two twin sons, aged 22, was scheduled to fly back to Canada.
But when her friend, Joe Milhoen, went to pick her up at her waterfront property in Corozal, near the Mexican border, she was nowhere to be found.
This prompted nearly a week long search for the pair, where dozens of Canadian and American expats scoured beaches, waterways and brush in hopes of finding their friends alive.
On Sunday afternoon, police found Matus’ white Isuzu Rodeo SUV abandoned in a different sugar cane field near the village of Paraiso, also in Corozal.
Matus’ mother, Mafalda Rino told CP24 on Tuesday she was originally from Sault Ste. Marie and moved to Toronto after college, nearly three decades ago where she worked as a mortgage broker.
She recently moved to Keswick, Ont. along Lake Simcoe where the snowbird spent her summers and falls.
Her boyfriend, De Voursney was a former Marine from the Atlanta area.
Belize police told CTV News Toronto yesterday they believed the couple were victims of a robbery gone wrong.
