Two American men were found guilty Tuesday of murdering a Quebec couple on the small Caribbean island of Dominica nearly three years ago.
Jonathan Lehrer and Robert Snyder Jr. were convicted of killing Daniel Langlois and his partner, Dominique Marchand, who were found dead in December 2023 inside a burned vehicle close to a luxury hotel they owned on the island.
A jury deliberated for two hours before delivering a guilty verdict from a courthouse in Roseau, the capital of Dominica.
The men will be sentenced at a later date.
The two men, who were arrested shortly after the killings in 2023, pleaded not guilty to the murder charges. The trial began last month, more than two years after the couple was found dead.
Three foreign nationals and one Dominican were arrested on the same day police found the Canadians’ bodies, according to the BBC and The Guardian.
Police described Snyder Jr. as Lehrer’s “accomplice,” the BBC added.
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According to media reports, Lehrer owns a property adjacent to the couple’s hotel in Soufrière, a village on the southwest coast of the island, and had been embroiled in a legal dispute with Langlois over the use of a public road that crossed onto Lehrer’s estate and was the only accessible route to Langlois’s resort.
The couple were respected philanthropists in Dominica, where they had lived since 1997 and built and ran the eco-hotel Coulibri Ridge, overlooking the Caribbean Sea, as well as other development projects in the area.
Langlois also founded the animation software firm Softimage. His technology has been used in films including The Matrix and Titanic, the BBC reported.
Lehrer is a millionaire chocolate maker from New Jersey, whose father previously described him to the Journal de Montréal as a ” successful businessman, not a murderer.”
“I have a hard time believing it … He was fed up with illegal crossings on his route and it bothered him a lot, but it had been a while since I had any news,” he told the Quebec outlet in 2023.
Langlois reportedly organized a demonstration against Lehrer over the road dispute after the American attempted to block it with rocks, by digging a trench and starting a fire, the Journal says, adding that Langlois had suggested building a second road, but courts decided to go ahead with mediation in the hopes of finding a solution agreed upon between the owners.
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