A man has confessed to killing Miss Honduras, Maria Jose Alvarado, and her older sister after the latter, his girlfriend, was caught dancing with another man, the Irish Times reported on Thursday.
Alvardo, 19, and her sister Sofia, 23, were found dead and buried near a spa in Santa Barbara, Honduras, where they were last seen partying with the confessed killer, Plutarco Ruiz, Sofia's boyfriend.
Alvardo was killed just days before she was scheduled to compete in the Miss World pageant in London after being crowned Miss Honduras.
After Ruiz confessed, police said he led them to a remote area in the mountains of Santa Barbara, where he and an accomplice buried the bodies. Ruiz start firing at his girlfriend and Maria Rose Alvarado as she tried to run away after an argument at some point of Nov. 13, according to the national police director General Ramon Sabillon
Police are searching for other suspects, but the alleged accomplice, Aria Maldonado, is in custody.
The women's bodies were wrapped in brown plastic bags and loaded onto a truck bed just hours before Maria would've been on a flight to London.
"We had her gown ready and her traditional dress costumes," said television personality and former presidential candidate Salvador Nasrallah, who hired Maria to be a model on his TV game show "X-O Da Dinero." "This is not a crime of passion; this is machismo."
The women's distraught mother said they were friendly and sometimes too trusting of other people.
"They were not very astute about assessing the people around them. They were just friendly. They were going out with people they hadn't known very long," Teresa Munoz said.
She said Ruiz told her the following morning that the sisters had left in a car with strangers that night before and was acting nervously, according to the Daily Mail.
Honduras has the highest murder rate of any country not at war, and is notoriously violent toward women. The Central American nation has seen 328 women murdered this year. San Pedro Sula, roughly 30 miles from where the two were killed, is the murder capital of the world and sees more than 1,200 killings out of its roughly 1 million residents each year.
