Tahnee Shanks case advances after missing in Mexico for two months
A Whitsunday mother due back in Australia this month has now been missing for eight weeks. Hope she will be found alive has diminished but the prosecutor in charge says he has made a key development in the case.
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The winter day a Queensland family was meant to reunite with their missing loved one has now passed and they are still waiting for answers.
But a Mexican prosecutor in charge of the case says there is a strong development in the two-month investigation.
Eight weeks have now passed since Whitsunday mum Tahnee Shanks was last seen on May 2 in Cancun in Mexico.
“That was a tough day – she was meant to be flying out on the 18th from Mexico and getting home on the 20th,” Tahnee’s brother Daniel, from Conway Beach, said.
“Having that day come and go was pretty hard.
“Mum, and everybody, is starting the grieving process now.
“We’ve been putting it off for so long focusing on the investigation.
“But now that the time (when Tahnee was supposed to come home) has come and gone, and now the investigation is coming to an end, we’re getting to that stage where we are starting to grieve.
“You think ‘she should be here, she should be with her family’.
“She was supposed be up here (in the Whitsundays this week); we were going to do all this stuff together.
“It’s just horrible.
“There’s always hope but it’s pretty diminished now.
“It’s eight weeks (today) when I got that call about Addy (being dumped at a church in Cancun).”
“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.
“Not that anything will! But I just want to keep that as a backup.”
In other texts she talks about locking herself in Addy’s room because Jorge is drunk and yelling.
“I can’t be part of it anymore. I’ve asked my dad for more money to be able to pay rent and live until I come home,” she wrote.
“Because I just can’t be under his control anymore. He uses it against me and is very verbally abusive.
“I don’t want to wait until it gets physical.
“I need to calm down too but I can’t be around him anymore.”
Quintana Roo general attorney Óscar Montes de Oca Rosales has told media in Mexico that there have been developments in the case.
He said he had been in touch with the Shanks family through the Australian consul but he would not share anymore while there was an active investigation.
Mr Montes de Oca Rosales said the advancements in the case could be shared once the investigation had concluded.
He has previously said there were 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”.
“It could be just retaliation for the criminal groups that he was involved with,” Mr Montes 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.
“What I can say is well maybe they were being followed and that’s why they turned around and took the secondary road.
“(Jorge) had been threatened before and he even had hired a bodyguard … and he was afraid for his life.”
The Shanks family requested the police files be handed over to a private investigator they had hired amid fears the case was not being investigated properly.
They cannot release any of the information to avoid jeopardising the investigation.
But after getting a brief on the 1200 pages in the police file, Mr Shanks said he was now confident the Mexican police were on the case.
“After our private investigator perused the files, they confirmed the Mexican authorities have done a very thorough and good job on the investigation to date,” he said.
“We are now hoping to engage with police to liaise with our private investigator.”
Little Addy is returning to the Whitsundays this week with her grandmother Leanne.
Mr Shanks said she was adjusting well in Australia with her extended family despite her parents still missing.
Adelynn was dumped outside a church in a dangerous part of Cancun.
After photos of her went viral on social media, her family recognised she was in the same clothes from photos Ms Shanks had last posted of the family weekend away from Merida where they were living.
Brother Ben Shanks, from Mackay, and his mother Leanne made a mercy dash to Mexico to rescue Adelynn while police searched for her parents.
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Originally published as Tahnee Shanks case advances after missing in Mexico for two months
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