Michael Adrián Salmerón Silva, 24, is behind bars in Nicaragua, the Tico Times newspaper reported, Costa Rican police say he is the main suspect in a Feb.16 massacre that ended with the deaths of Dirk Beauchamp, 56, his Costa Rican wife Jessica Durán, 38, and three of the couple’s children, ages six, eight and 12.
Two more children, one aged four and the other seven months, survived with injuries and were hospitalized. All seven victims, discovered at a home they apparently shared with the suspect, had stab wounds, police told reporters.
Police, along with Durán’s mother, believe the crime was the result of a love triangle between Beauchamp, Durán, and Salmerón, who lived on the family’s property in Matapalo, a small community on the Pacific Coast.
“The husband of my daughter was the gringo,” Duran’s mother Ana Rosa Guerra said, in a reference to Beauchamp, Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa reported. “The Nicaraguan was her lover. My shameless daughter brought disgrace on the home because she brought her lover to live at the house with her gringo husband.”
It is unclear what will happen to Salmerón, whose father said he turned his fugitive son in to Nicaraguan police after he fled Costa Rica. The father, Adrián Salmerón Vega, said his son confessed to the the killings “our of jealousy and under the effects of liquor and drugs.”
Nicaragua’s constitution prohibits the extradition of Nicaraguans, but citizens of that country can be tried at home under a criminal code that allows for prosecution of “crimes committed outside national territory.” Costa Rica has asked Nicaraguan prosecutors to try Salmerón for homicide.
Nicaraguan investigators have asked their Costa Rican counterparts for fingerprints, blood, and hair samples found at the crime scene and said they will make a decision on whether to put Salmerón on trial after examining that evidence.
