Miss Honduras Maria Jose Alvarado disappeared on November 13, 2014
The dark-haired beauty was to have flown to London on Wednesday to compete in the Miss World pageant — the high point of her reign as Miss Honduras. Instead, the beauty queen and her sister were found shot to death along a remote river bank.
Police said the sister's boyfriend confessed to shooting the women, jealous that his girlfriend had danced with another man.
Bodies believed to be 19-year-old Maria Jose Alvarado and her 23-year-old sister, Sofia, were discovered buried near the spa where they disappeared a week earlier while celebrating the boyfriend's birthday.
At some point during the night of Nov. 13, a heated argument broke out and Plutarco Ruiz pulled a gun, firing first at his girlfriend and then at Alvarado as she tried to flee, said National Police director, Gen. Ramon Sabillon. Alvarado was hit twice in the back.
Their bodies were discovered early Wednesday after Ruiz led investigators to the remote gravesite where he and an alleged accomplice buried them in a mountainous area of Santa Barbara, about 240 miles (400 kilometers) west of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. The accomplice, Aris Maldonado, was also in police custody and authorities were searching for other suspects.
"We had her gown ready and her traditional dress costumes," said television personality Salvador Nasrallah, who employed Alvarado as a model on his TV game show, X-O Da Dinero.
"This is not a crime of passion; this is machismo," added Nasrallah, a former presidential candidate.
Honduras pageant organizer Eduardo Zablah said the country will not compete this year because of the tragic death of Alvarado, who according to her pageant profile played volleyball and soccer and wanted to be a diplomat after graduating universiThe sisters' mother, Teresa Munoz, told Televicentro that Ruiz called her the morning after her daughters disappeared, acting nervous and claiming the young women had left the party in a car with some other people.
She said her daughters were trusting and naive. "They were not very astute about assessing the people around them. They were just friendly," Munoz said. "They were going out with people they hadn't known very long."
Ruiz's brother met a violent end earlier this year, authorities said. David Ruiz Rodriguez was gunned down in a restaurant in San Pedro Sula in February by men carrying AK-47s, according to the police subcommander in charge of the Santa Barbara region, Jorge Rolando Casco.
The shooting deaths of Alvarado and her sister highlight what experts call an alarming trend of violence against women in Central America, fuelled by poverty, domestic violence, street gangs, drug trafficking and a culture of chauvinism.
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