The victims have been identified as Alma Rosa Villanueva de Sales, a 60-year-old native of Chapala, and her husband Alfred Paul Mergner Konitski, a German-born U.S. citizen, age 70.
The double homicide was reported to police department at 1:30 p.m. Friday shortly after Villanueva’s elderly mother called a locksmith to open the couple’s residence, located in a small housing complex set out of view behind the Hotel Chapala Haciendas at the city’s northern outskirts. She told police she first became concerned when her daughter failed to show up last Tuesday for customary daily visits to her Chapala home. Repeated attempts to contact her over the next three days had been fruitless. Villanueva was reportedly last seen alive on Monday while carrying out a transaction at a local bank.
A hotel employee told investigators she spotted the couple leaving their home monday morning, but did not see them return before she got off work at 5 p.m. Other members of the staff, and an elderly foreign woman who lives in a bungalow in the complex were questioned but reported they saw and heard nothing indicating a crime was in progress.
Police found Mergner’s body in the living room, while that of his spouse was in the adjacent kitchen. Both were sprawled on the floor, face down. Agents from Chapala’s Ministerio Publico (MP) prosecutor’s office were called to take charge of the crime scene and full investigation of the case.
According to MP office superintendent Gabriel Sanchez, preliminary examination of the corpses revealed that the pair had died three to four days earlier, apparently succumbing to severe heads wounds caused by a heavy instrument. Results of the official autopsy are still pending.
Crime scene investigators discovered a hammer in the living room as well as bloody fingerprints and shoe tracks inside the dwelling. The drawers of some furnishings had been ransacked, while a television set, other electronic devices and the couple’s automobile were left intact, suggesting the perpetrators intended to steal cash and other small valuables, Sanchez says.
He indicated that the Chapala MP has handled at least a half dozen local robbery complaints this year, with similar modus operandi reported by the victims. If forensic experts match fingerprints and other evidence with clues collected in previous cases there is some hope that the murderers may soon be identified and captured.