Nation Gripped by Mystery of Missing Florida Woman Who Went to Start New Life Overseas
MADRID—FBI officers in blue and yellow jackets and Spanish police have painstakingly searched the countryside outside Madrid, Spain, for the body of a missing Florida woman, Ana María Henao Knezevich.
Police are thought to believe that she was killed by her estranged husband, her body stuffed in a suitcase and dumped somewhere outside the Spanish capital.
As part of the search, officers waded through water under a bridge in Medinaceli, in Soria, a rural province north of Madrid.
So far, they have found nothing. Spanish police told The Daily Beast that they have “not found any sign of the body.”
The absence of a body raises questions: Was Ana María really murdered? If so, is her estranged husband David Knezevich the killer?
On the other side of the Atlantic, David Knezevich is languishing in a cell. He was arrested at Miami International Airport last month, when he arrived on a flight from his native Serbia.
Knezevich, an American-Serbian businessman, has been charged with kidnapping.
His lawyer insists he was in Serbia, thousands of miles from Spain, when his wife disappeared on Feb. 2, and that he is an innocent man.
The search for the missing woman has gripped Spain, where newspapers and television have followed every twist and turn in the case.
Ana María, a U.S. citizen who was born in Colombia, moved from Fort Lauderdale, U.S., to Spain in December, as she was in the middle of a messy divorce, friends said.
She was said to have sent messages from Spain to friends, saying she had met someone and was very happy.
But friends told police it did not sound like Ana María, and investigators say these were, in fact, sent by her husband.
Court papers filed in Florida allege that the day after Ana María went missing, the defendant asked a Colombian woman he had met on a dating app to translate a message into Spanish for him in the style of a Colombian character, which he claimed he needed for a script he was writing.
The last image of her alive showed her walking into her rented Madrid apartment with a bunch of flowers.
The marriage was breaking down and a friend reportedly suggested Ana María feared her husband.
Knezevich has had a successful business career as CEO and founder of EOX Technology Solutions, which provides IT and technological services to businesses.
The couple’s business assets, which reportedly amount to millions of dollars, were the reason for the acrimonious divorce after Ana María proposed sharing the assets, friends say.
But what of the evidence to link him to the scene of the alleged crime?
Suspicions grew around Knezevich after he refused to come to Spain to take part in the hunt for Ana María.
Spanish police say a man wearing a black motorcycle helmet who spray-painted security cameras in the apartment block where Ana María was living was the same man who ended her life.
The images show a stocky man with a distinctive way of walking that matched Knezevich’s gait, detectives say. Security images from a Madrid hardware store allegedly show the same man buying spray paint and gaffer tape on the day of Ana María’s disappearance.
A grand jury in Fort Lauderdale has returned an indictment charging Knezevich with one count of kidnapping.
Chief magistrate Judge Edwin G. Torres ordered Knezevich to be detained pending trial.
The mystery deepened this week when court papers in Spain revealed that police believe her 36-year-old husband had driven across Europe to kill his wife.
According to the case papers published by Spanish news agency EFE, Knezevich drove 7,677 kilometres (4,770 miles) from Belgrade in Serbia to Madrid days before his wife vanished.
Police believe he planned the alleged crime carefully, disguising a car he had hired as he traveled. When it was returned to the car hire office, court documents allege the windows had been tinted and there were signs of the license plates having been replaced.
At about 6 p.m. local time on Feb. 2, police believe a blue Peugeot 208 car was parked outside number 67 Calle Francisco de Silvela, in the upmarket Salamanca area of Madrid. Inside the car, police believe, was Knezevich, who then went into the building.
An hour later, a figure emerged from the house carrying a suitcase.
Police claim that the body of Ana María was in the suitcase.
Security cameras picked up images of the same Peugeot 208 on roads in Madrid, Guadalajara, Soria and Zaragoza. The images date from the time David allegedly left the house into the early hours of the next day.
The FBI and Spanish police have searched for any sign of Ana María or the suitcase along the roads where cameras picked up the Peugeot.
So far, investigators have failed to turn up any evidence to link Knezevich directly to his wife’s kidnapping, raising the possibility that police have been barking up the wrong tree.
Are they are pursuing the wrong suspect?
The case took an international twist when police tried to track Knezevich’s alleged return journey, from Spain to Serbia.
In a joint operation with police in France, Italy, and Slovenia, they attempted to piece together his probable route from the Spanish capital to Belgrade.
Initially, no trace was found of Knezevich on roads across Europe, casting doubt over whether he ever made the journey.
Spanish police now believe that to avoid showing up on roadside cameras, he used at least two stolen number plates.
A judge in Madrid has now asked Serbian authorities for permission for Spanish officers to travel to Knezevich’s own country.
“The investigation continues. We have so far not found any sign of the body of a 40-year-old American woman,” a spokesman for the Spanish police told The Daily Beast.
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