On Mother’s Day 2025, according to El Universo, an Ecuadorian newspaper, two men entered the office of Danielle Charles, Mirador San Jose’s malignant narcissist-in-chief, and beat her to death with a baseball bat.

An acquaintance of ours discovered her brutalized body later that evening. Despite the many cameras an increasingly-paranoid Danielle installed throughout Mirador San Jose, there are apparently no recordings that identify her killers, and no witnesses. The Policia Nacional interviewed several MSJ workers, I am told by friends who still live there. No arrests. Various residents also inform me that one of Danielle’s thuggish sons, in town to visit his mother and push around her more vocal critics, immediately left the country.

Inmirsan, the grossly mismanaged organization that “develops” Mirador San Jose, emailed homeowners to ignore the entreaties of their fantasy HOA and continue to pay tribute to Inmirsan, upon pain of whatever the latest threat may be. This email referred to Danielle’s killers as cowardly thieves and beatified her the all-favouring Saint of Montecristi. I read the text. It made me want to vomit in my mouth.

Almost anyone who knows Danielle also knows she had it coming. Yeah yeah, that’s a terrible thing to say. I feel no shame. This was not a good person.

Chantal and I subpoenaed Danielle’s bank statements for our 2021 criminal complaint against her. She funnelled Inmirsan revenues into her personal accounts, wired that money in the hundreds of thousands to her sons in West Africa and Canada, then claimed she was too broke to finish the development of our retirement community.

She stole donations from a Canadian nonprofit for the children of families who had lost everything in the great earthquake of 2016.

Back in Canada, CRA (Canada Revenue Agency, for my American readers) shuttered three corporations registered in her name at her most recently deceased husband’s home address, for non-payment of federal taxes. I find it telling that these legal entities were created as assisted living facilities and daycare centres. Small children and elderly: people who are easily controlled and manipulated.

In Ecuador, Danielle neglected to forward to the state energy provider, CNEL, more than $100,000 in fees collected from the residents of Mirador San Jose. She disappeared when CNEL terminated MSJ’s electrical service – two weeks before the Pandemic arrived. From her imperial perch in Manta, Danielle demanded $10,000 in cash to turn the lights back on. Or we could, in her words to my wife, “die in the dark”. Chantal and I, and many of our neighbours, were forced to flee our homes when the lockdowns started. News travelled quickly. Without power or security (our unpaid guards walked off the job that same day), we were sitting ducks. The local cops were shaking down anyone who left MSJ to find gas for their generators.

More recently, Danielle had been working to impose her own water cartel on the lives of our friends and former neighbours. They were forced to sign a “contract” guaranteeing her exclusive water rights to their homes. I say forced because she forbade any other water truck from entering “her” urbanization. It was Danielle’s water or no water.

I should note here that Ecuadorian water cartels are very powerful – and violent. As the young mayor of San Vicente, a town connected by causeway to Bahia de Caraquez, near our home in San Clemente, unfortunately discovered. She lost her life shortly after her election when she tried to make good on a promise to hook every home to the municipal water supply.

When Danielle banned her competitors from MSJ, I can only surmise that this didn’t sit well with a few better-connected local sociopaths. Of course, that’s just my hypothesis. She could have been done in by any of the other saps she screwed.

What matters is that Danielle is no more. She has ceased to be. She has expired and gone to meet her maker. Bereft of life, she rests in pieces. She is an ex parrot.

I can’t say I’m surprised. Nobody is. I doubt she’ll be missed.

This seems a better place than any to stop. I have decided to end my blog. I started it to describe the experience of retirement in an unfamiliar culture. Six years on and Ecuador is no longer unfamiliar. Chantal and I are acclimated. I have nothing new to say.

I could write the obligatory how-to or where-to-stay, but I won’t. Travel tips bore me. There are plenty of other blogs that parse this tedium. For those who prefer not to read, I can name at least a half dozen idiots with smartphones who record their cretinous travel adventures for YouTube. I once watched an entire series by some Canadian nitwit who traveled the length of Ecuador’s coast, including San Clemente. Each episode was about her eating encebollado. Her only takeaway was breakfast food.

Danielle’s grotesque departure cuts to the very heart of this life Chantal and I built here. Ecuador is magical and murderous. We have hiked the Inca Trail, snorkeled Galapagos lava flows, scaled active volcanoes. We also know someone who was killed in a contract hit. A few of our neighbours in San Clemente are Choneros and Los Lobos narcoterrorist gang members. Los Bajos, on the road from Mirador San Jose to Montecristi, is where they leave the bodies of their victims.

This isn’t some abstraction on CNN. This is our daily circumstance. The trick is to live with it.

Ecuadorian courts cannot and will not hold people like Danielle to account. The police are corrupt. Politicians are feckless. So natural law takes over. If you’re on the right side of it, Ecuador gives everything you dream and more.

If you aren’t, well… There are less dramatic ways to go.

See you on the beach.