The Judicial Investigation Agency (OIJ) is investigating the death of a 75-year-old U.S. citizen found inside a walled property in Cabo Velas, Santa Cruz de Guanacaste yesterday morning, in a case agents are treating as an apparent homicide that may be connected to a robbery at the home.
According to the OIJ, the report reached the agency at around 7 a.m., after a worker arrived at the property and found the woman, identified by the surname Heaviland, lying on the ground at the front of the house. The property is encircled by a wall roughly two meters (about six and a half feet) high. Agents who responded conducted a preliminary inspection and determined that she had suffered blunt-force injuries to the head.
Investigators who searched the residence found what the OIJ described as signs the home had been gone through, which the agency said indicates a robbery may have taken place. The victim’s vehicle was not on the property when agents arrived. The OIJ later said the car had been located at the Liberia traffic police station, where it was impounded a day earlier at a police checkpoint from a man stopped for reckless driving.
The agency said it is carrying out the corresponding investigation to determine what relationship the person driving that vehicle may have to the woman’s death, and that the case remains open. No one has been detained in connection with the homicide. On a preliminary basis, authorities are examining the possibility that the woman was struck in the head with a stone. Her body was found covered with a towel.
The OIJ has characterized these findings as preliminary and has not established a motive. The body was sent to the Judicial Morgue for an autopsy while agents continue collecting evidence and pursuing the steps needed to clarify what happened. Cabo Velas is a coastal district of the Santa Cruz canton that takes in Playa Grande, Brasilito, Flamingo and Potrero, a stretch of northern Guanacaste with a heavy concentration of foreign-owned residential property and short-term rentals.
The area sits within the same canton where authorities have responded to several violent deaths involving foreign nationals over the past year, and it forms part of the region that has drawn repeated attention from U.S. Embassy security notices in recent months. Property crime against residences in Guanacaste has been a persistent concern for local chambers of commerce, which have pressed for stronger police coverage in a province whose economy runs on visitors.
Business groups and municipal authorities have expanded camera networks across Santa Cruz, Carrillo, Nicoya and Hojancha in an effort to deter theft, part of a broader response to the security pressures facing the province’s tourism economy. Isolated homes behind perimeter walls, often unoccupied for long stretches, have figured in a number of the cases police have handled in the region, including a violent home invasion targeting visitors in the Lake Arenal area in January.
Guanacaste Airport in Liberia, the main international gateway for the area, became the first airport to partner with the U.S. Embassy on the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program earlier this year, displaying information in the terminal that allows arriving citizens to register for destination-specific alerts. The United States currently lists Costa Rica at Level 2, advising increased caution because of crime.
The OIJ has yet to release further details on the U.S. citizen’s identity or how long she had lived at the property, and no charges have been filed. The investigation remains in its early stages, with agents working to establish whether the seized vehicle links anyone to the scene and what took place inside the home before she was found.
