Expat Crime

The former 'King of Pavones' has been denied entry into Costa Rica again, complicating his quest to regain all the beachfront property that was once his in the idyllic hamlet in the country's southwest corner.

OIJ officials say they've solved the January case of a Dutch couple and Nicaraguan laborer who were found brutally murdered on their Puntarenas farm.

David Strecker, aka Cuba Dave, will begin trial Wednesday for accusations that he violated Costa Rica's Sex Tourism Law by "promoting the country as a destination for sexual tourism."

U.S. fugitive John Saatio escaped from an immigration detention center in Hatillo on Sunday night after being arrested in Jacó earlier this month.

The long, strange ordeal that Cyrus Sepehr refers to as "something out of a movie" took a turn for the worse Thursday when a San José court convicted him on five counts of fraud in a failed real estate deal.

When Cyrus Sepehr was thrown into a preventive prison in Costa Rica under suspicion of fraud, he could still walk. But in just four months he's been relegated to a wheel chair, and the left side of his body is now paralyzed.

A Dutch couple and one of their employees were found dead Monday on a hardwood plantation in Puntarenas near Costa Rica's central Pacific coast.

Suzye Lawson, who owns the Villa Alegre bed and breakfast in Playa Langosta near Tamarindo, says she was assaulted again by intruders on Saturday, just eight months after three men broke into the hotel, beat her husband -- who later died -- and stole tens of thousands of dollars.

Reza Ray Ehsan, a 57-year-old family physician from Los Angeles, California, is being charged in Costa Rica for soliciting sex from a girl under 18 years of age.

Agents from the Judicial Investigation Police (OIJ) arrested the suspect Saturday afternoon at Juan Santamaría International Airport, outside San José, as he attempted to depart Costa Rica on a flight to the U.S.

Three of Robert Stewart's acquaintences told police that the missing man had been acting strangely in recent days, had stopped taking his prescription medication and voiced his intention to commit suicide.

Laidy Bonilla, an archeologist with the National Museum’s Department of Cultural Heritage Protection and who was involved in the raid, told The Tico Times the collection is very large, making up more than half of the 148 artifacts seized so far in 2014. The collection included ceremonial and domestic items such as ceramic vases, pendants, metates — mealing stones used to grind corn and seeds — mortars, and grinding stones from Costa Rica’s Pacific northwest dated between 300 AD and 700 AD.

A 20-year-old male suspect, identified with the last names Jiménez Torres, called police after the incident and is in custody. According to the suspect, Kropf raised Jiménez since he was a boy and allegedly sexually abused him.

U.S. real estate developer Patrick Hundley, 46, is speaking out from his jail cell in Pérez Zeledón, where he has been incarcerated for over four months since his arrest in February for allegedly defrauding Michigan investors of $7 million dollars.