‘Life never boring with Francesca’
“Her goals of being financially secure, to help be able to take care of them, was her priority. “She always put them first.” Matus and her boyfriend, Drew DeVoursney, 36, disappeared after leaving a bar in the northern Belize town of Corozal on April 25.
Their bodies were found, with their wrists duct-taped, in a sugar cane field on May 1. Belizean police and the FBI continue to investigate the deaths.
In eulogies, friends of Matus described her “radiant smile” and “contagious laugh.” They said she “exuded confidence” yet was always eager to learn something new.
“Life was never boring with Francesca. Everything was an adventure. She would make the simplest tasks something more fun to do,” Kurnath said, adding that Matus was a very youthful woman and always full of energy.
“Francesca was the life of a party. It didn’t matter where we were and what we were doing, but she would be able to show up and it would just be like instant chemistry,” she said. “I just connected with her energy so much . . . She worked very hard, she played very hard and loved very, very hard.”
Kurnath said she looked up to Matus, who like her, was a single mother.
“It’s as if we were soul sisters,” she said. “I thought of her as a big sister in a way, but also as a role model, because she’s a very strong single mother and a smart businesswoman and I looked up to that. It’s just a shame because I wanted to learn more from her.”
Last week, Belize police charged a Canadian man with theft in an unrelated robbery. The man had previously been questioned by police regarding the deaths of Matus and DeVoursney, and local reports identified him as a tenant living on Matus’s seaside property.
Kurnath said the grief felt by Matus’s friends and family is compounded by the mystery surrounding her death and lack of answers from authorities.
“The feelings that we have right now . . . of sadness and anger, confusion, frustration, I mean we’re feeling all of this,” she said. “All we want to know is why. The sad part is I don’t know, at this moment, if we will (or) when we will. But we just want that closure though, we want that peace.”