Bocas, where Americans go to get whacked

[dropcap type="circle" color="#ffffff" background="#e53b2c"] W [/dropcap]hat is it with the province of Bocas del Toro? First the archipelago was the scene of a plethora of scams and frauds and pedophiles. Then we got the murders, with the serial killings of Wild Bill and his wife being the highlights, but not the only ones: Before that we had cases like expatriate Kim Crofts being killed during a burglary (with the little nazi Don Winner then blasting all over the internet that it was the victim's own fault because there were drugs involved - which was not true but entirely made up by that insufferable egomaniac).

And now, locals have found a green bag with bones and a skull and some clothes, and the authorities - as well as everybody else - assume that this sad find is what's left of Yvonne Baldelli, a Southern California woman who went missing from the island two years ago:

Baldelli disappeared in November of 2011 from a guest house where she lived with her then-boyfriend Brian Brimager, a former marine who was arrested in June on charges of obstructing justice in connection with her disappearance. The two had moved together to Panama earlier that year.

Much is made of that green bag, and while DNA tests will have to establish if the bones and the skull are indeed of Mrs. Baldelli, even a bag is an invitation to some to just wildly speculate. Aforementioned Don Winner, for example, breathlessly reports that it is a military bag, and that this is of the utmost importance, even though he hasn't even seen the bag himself, because the main suspect, Brian Brimager, used to be a marine. Writes the Wanker:

The police detectives who responded to the scene found the bag, which they described to me as a "green military style" backpack. This is potentially important because Brian Brimager is a former US Marine. There was a "skull and some of the bones" in the bag, but the investigators indicated at this point they do not think they have recovered a complete skeleton.

They do not think they have recovered a complete skeleton? That is just hogwash; of course they know that. What this sentence really means is that Don Winner doesn't know if they found all the bones, because either they didn't want to tell him or he hasn't really talked with the police investigators at all.

In any case, it should be noted that Bocas del Toro somehow attracts all kind of weird military types, as we've seen recently as well. And killers - as far as that isn't the same thing. The backstabbing among expats on these Caribbean islands is not just limited to local gossip and bickering on Yahoo groups; one might want to be careful when invited to spend some time in Bocas or "come see the hole I dug in my garden"....