Tahnee Shanks: Mysterious 8-hour gap before Qld woman vanished
Mexican authorities have confirmed possible cartel links as they investigate the disappearance of a Whitsunday mum whose daughter was dumped alone at a church in Cancun one month ago.
Mackay
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Confirming possible cartel links, Mexican authorities fear missing Whitsunday mother Tahnee Shanks has been caught up in “retaliation” from crime groups her estranged partner was allegedly involved in.
Law enforcement in Quintana Roo, the state where the 32 year old was last seen alive, have been using the state’s 2000 surveillance cameras, mobile phone data and licence recognition technology to piece together her bewildering last movements with daughter Adelynn, 2, and former partner Jorge Luis Aguirre Astudillo on May 2 in Cancun.
Quintana Roo general attorney Óscar Montes de Oca Rosales says investigators are looking at two lines of inquiry.
The first is that Ms Shanks has suffered domestic violence and Mr Aguirre Astudillo is now in hiding or on the run.
The second is “that Jorge is a criminal with links to Mexico’s notorious cartel and the couple’s disappearance is payback for Jorge’s dirty dealing”, 60 Minutes reported on Sunday night.
“It could be just retaliation for the criminal groups that he was involved with,” Mr de Oca Rosales said.
“According to the law, we consider them as alive and that’s the way we look for them until something is shown to be different.”
Tahnee’s brother Daniel Shanks, from Conway Beach, says his sleeping hours are filled with nightmares he deems worse than the possibility his sister could be dead.
He says a mysterious turn on a Mexican toll road and an eight-hour window could be central to finding the mum and working out what has happened to her.
Ms Shanks has not been seen since she was captured on a toll highway heading back to the Yucatán city where she was living on the country’s eastern peninsula.
A camera snapped her in a white Toyota Tundra at a police checkpoint on the toll road between Cancun and Merida before they turned around.
Mr Shanks said there was footage showing his sister and Mr Aguirre Astudillo leaving a hotel in Cancun about 11.30am and passing through a toll road checkpoint before they turned around.
He said they must have returned to Cuncun via a different route because their return trip was not clocked on the toll road footage.
“There’s an eight-hour period from them going through that toll and Adelynn being dropped off in Cancun at that church,” he said.
“Then her phone stopped pinging pretty soon after that.”
On Sunday night, the Channel 9 program said Tahnee had been cleared of criminal links but “Jorge is an alleged fraudster who is accused of selling fake holiday packages”.
“What I can say is well maybe they were being followed and that’s why they turned around and took the secondary road,” Mr de Oca Rosales said.
“(Jorge) had been threatened before and he even had hired a bodyguard … and he was afraid for his life.”
When asked whether Jorge was a cartel member, Mr de Oca Rosales said that was their suspicion.
“Apparently and according to what we have seen, he could be,” he said.
Mr Shanks, who has offered a $1 million peso reward ($70,000), said he had received “not one email, not one phone call, not one WhatsApp message” about his sister’s disappearance on Monday May 2.
“All the authorities said I would be swamped and it was a bad idea.”
Mr Shanks acknowledges the lack of response could mean Tahnee is dead but that could be better than the alternatives running through his mind.
“We need closure. If she’s dead, we need a body,” he said.
“I just can’t leave it like this because all I can think of is that something worse than being murdered has happened, like she is being trafficked.
“It’s in my nightmares. That if she is alive, she’s not in a very nice place and what are (the authorities) doing about it? Nothing.
“This is why we need answers.”
Mr Shanks said he understood Australian authorities had put in a formal request for information on the investigation into his sister’s disappearance.
“They have asked what is happening and what are the next steps going into the future,” he said.
“We just want to know what have they found out, what have they done?
“They’ve given us nothing.”
But Mr Shanks said Tahnee’s daughter Adelynn, who is in Brisbane with her grandmother Leanne and Aunty Leela right now, was adapting well to life in Australia.
Before Ms Shanks went missing, she sent a strange text message to a friend about Mr Aguirre Astudillo.
“I know this is gunna sound weird but keep (his) name. Jorge Luis Aguirre Astudillo! Just in case anything happens to me they can go after him,” she said in a text message to one friend.
“Not that anything will! But I just want to keep that as a backup.”
Mexican authorities have declared both Ms Shanks and Mr Aguirre Astudillo as missing persons in their investigation.
The family trio had been on a mini vacation, visiting beach locations like Rio Largatos and El Cuyo across the Riviera Maya — the journey documented through social media for family and friends to see.
Ms Shanks told family they were heading to Tulum but they then booked accommodation in Cancun.
After checking out, they were spotted on the toll road heading home before turning around and heading back towards Cancun where Adelynn, 2, was dumped alone outside the Chapel of the San Archangel on the evening of May 2.
About 45 minutes later, the Tundra was then found burnt out in Puerto Morelos with the number plates removed and serial numbers ground off.
The shadow of four numbers enabled Mexico police to confirm it was the vehicle Tahnee and Jorge had been driving that weekend.
It was a connection to Tahnee’s former boyfriend, now back in Australia, who raised the alarm with her family when they recognised the abandoned girl was Adelynn.
The quest to rescue Adelynn
Yucatán Giving Outreach founder Kimberley Davin Degraff was at a book club in Merida when Tahnee’s Spanish teacher reached out about whether she could help the Shanks family.
Tahnee’s brother Dan has described her as the family’s lifeline as she leapt into action to help them get Adelynn back to Australia and has continued to help ever since.
Ms Davin Degraff, also known as Kimmy Suki, began her volunteer foundation to help children’s shelters but there are now nine programs under its umbrella.
The AMPAY program helps support domestic violence victims and children caught up in sex trafficking.
“I work with all of these different agencies under the umbrella of the foundation as a volunteer,” she said.
“I’m also the head of the SSP committee of crimes against victims (Municipal Council for Public Safety and Social Crime Prevention for the state of the Yucatán).
“Normally I would hand off the case to one of my advocates, but because it was so complicated, you really needed to pull some strings.
“What hit on my heartstrings was a two-year-old being dumped in Cancun.
“Cancun is a Mecca for bad things and so all of my bells went off.
“I love children. I have four children. I have 25 children who call me mum.
“I have all of these children who call me mum who are now 18, 19, 20.
“I have a graduation this week, one of my kids from an orphanage he’s 20 and he’s finishing high school finally.
“Kids are my passion, and to find out a kid had been dumped on a street in Cancun, was what pulled me in.
“Then to find out the mum was missing …”
Ms Davin Degraff filed a missing persons report for the family and helped connect them to the right people to get Adelynn safely back to Australia.
She has been keeping in touch with authorities for updates on the investigation into Tahnee’s disappearance ever since.
Ms Davin Degraff said she had a team of criminologists, criminology students and police willing to volunteer their time to search for Tahnee if she could pinpoint the exact area she went missing.
She said no one knew what made them turn around before returning to Merida.
“I know she was in El Cuyo, I know she went to Cancun. From Cancun, she came on the road back into the Yucatán, she was actually seen on the cameras at the police checkpoint coming back into Merida where they turned around together and then that was the last physical evidence of her being seen from what I understand,” she said.
“On the carraterra (the toll highway between Merida and Cancun) there are maybe 200 little villages, maybe more, and a lot of little side roads but I’m not privy to the information to know if she was positively identified back into Quintana Roo.
“I know she has been positively identified as getting to the police checkpoint and turning around and heading back.
“That is the last information I have on her positively identified.”
Mr Aguirre Astudillo, also 32, has also been declared missing and an alert issued.
Tahnee’s inner circle
Covid lockdowns were isolating for Tahnee with a newborn baby living in a new city, having moved to Merida from Cancun – almost four hours away — after Cancun became too dangerous.
She set up the mother’s group that would meet several times a week, setting regular playdates at playgrounds, restaurants and parks.
“All the expats who come here, often they do not have any friends and nowhere to take the kids to play,” one of those women, who considers herself a “very close friend” of Tahnee, said.
She described the Aussie girl as real, honest and funny and said the pair ended up working and socialising together.
Ms Shanks had not long broken up with Mr Aguirre Astudillo after he cheated on her and got his new girlfriend was pregnant.
In the wake of the couple’s disappearance, authorities have confirmed Mr Aguirre Astudillo was deported from the United States for attacking a police officer there and another woman had made domestic violence complaints against him.
However, Mr de Oca Rosales said while Mr Astudillo’s background would be a line of investigation, he was being treated as a victim.
“We already talk with Tahnee’s family, they will give us some details about the couple’s lifestyle, their work and social environment,” Mr de Oca Rosales said.
“At this time, both are victims, they are missing persons, later maybe we can determine if he is responsible for something, so far he is a victim.”
Ms Shanks’s friend described the relationship with Mr Aguirre Astudillo as on-again off-again since they broke up, but they were no longer living together.
The young mother said her and Tahnee were close, speaking daily.
The pair spoke so frequently that when Ms Shanks went radio silent for “a couple of days” late in April she got worried.
“The last time I spoke to her was Sunday May 1, almost night time, around 7pm,” she said.
“I talked to her because we had a couple of days where we were not speaking and it was pretty weird because we speak daily.
“So I wrote to her on Sunday morning and she told me she was on vacation.
“I said ‘that’s so nice, with who? By yourself?’.
“She didn’t answer me that question.”
The friend said Ms Shanks told her she had tried to go to Holbox but then decided to go somewhere they could drive their car in the Riviera Maya.
After a second prompt, the friend said Tahnee admitted she was with Jorge.
“About two hours after that, she sent me a message saying ‘Hey, I’m just seven weeks from going to Australia,” she said, referencing what is believed to be one of Ms Shanks’s final texts before she disappeared.
“She was trying to tell me she would not be with Jorge because she was just about to return to Australia with her daughter.”
Tahnee had flights booked to return to Australia in late June with her daughter.
Compelled to help
Ms Davin Degraff, a former firefighter-paramedic who visited Mexico 18 years ago to learn Spanish and never left, is supposed to be taking a step back from her volunteer organisation after her brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
But she said helping the Shanks family get Adelynn back to safety in Australia became a priority for her.
“I didn’t sleep for three days when that was all going down and they were arriving,” she said.
“Once they had the child I cried, I was so relieved.”
Ms Davin Degraff said helping spread the word about Tahnee’s disappearance in the hope she could help reunite them was at the forefront of her mind right now.
“Everything I hear about the type of mother Tahnee is, I don’t think she would be gone this long from her child,” she said.
“I’m not saying she can’t pop up somewhere or someone didn’t take her for trafficking, there’s a lot of other scenarios that could play.
“But it’s a pretty hot case, with a lot of media coverage, I have a hard time believing they would have kept her for trafficking, they would have dumped her on a street somewhere in my experience.
“That has happened, we have picked up kids dumped on the side of the street and they don’t remember what’s happened for the past month.
“Not to mention you have the Australian consulate involved, you have Cancun police and Yucatán police who have a reputation for being pit bulls.”
The men who originally put out the alert on social media to find Addy’s parents after they were found at the church have since walked back their conviction that it was her father Jorge that left her at the church and police have their doubts too
“We don’t find any sense in Jorge having left her there,” Mr Montes de Oca Rosales said.
“It makes absolutely no sense.
“We would like to assume they are the same people involved in this event and they wanted to safeguard the wellbeing and physical integrity of the minor.
“That’s what we believe because of the time of the day.
“We can assume the intention was to safeguard her.”
The Shanks family has asked anyone with information to email them on bringtahneehome@gmail.com or phone +61 475 775 859.
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