Good and Evil in Paradise

On Mai 7, 2024

Daniel Langlois, 66, and his partner, Dominique Marchand, 58, in an undated photograph.

Daniel Langlois Foundation

Deep in the lush mountains of the Caribbean island of Dominica, amid stands of lemongrass, giant ferns and palms, three roads converge where two lives ended, violently. A few weeks before Christmas, the bodies of Daniel Langlois, a French-Canadian philanthropist and Hollywood animation centi-millionaire, and his partner, Dominique Marchand, were found at that spot, in a car, halfway into a ravine, burned beyond recognition. Even though the bodies were charred, investigators could tell they had been shot first.

The official and still-evolving story of their murders is a classic tale of good versus evil set in a steamy jungle. Like other expats who live on Dominica, Langlois and Marchand, who bought their property in the late 1990s, were attracted to the island’s wild, Edenic quality; its waterfalls, volcanic hot pools and deep green forests where spectacular blossoms northerners would see only in florist shops grow like weeds. But the dead couple had become heroes to many on the tiny, impoverished island of 72,000. They were widely admired philanthropists and environmentalists. A few weeks before Langlois was murdered, the government had awarded him its highest civilian honor for his philanthropic work.

For decades, the couple lavished their wealth on the community, spending $1 million just to rebuild the local school destroyed in a Category 5 hurricane, designing resiliency projects and building infrastructure like a jetty, pouring money into a marine reserve and the island’s stray dog and cat rescue program, as well as countless private disbursements to individuals in the nearby village who needed health care or other assistance.

Langlois, 66, was a computer animation pioneer and Academy Award winner (Sci-Tech 1997) who worked with Steven Spielberg on Jurassic Park and other major filmmakers before selling his company, Softimage, to Microsoft in 1994 for $200 million. His 3D tool has been used in numerous big-budget hits including the Harry Potter series, Star Wars prequels and Titanic. He was influential in early innovations of CGI, particularly as the tech related to human characters and expressions. After selling Softimage, he founded the Daniel Langlois Foundation in 1997 to promote collaboration and exchanges between the arts and science, and was a major investor and promoter in the Montreal film community.

In Dominica, Langlois spent years designing and building a dream project: an off-the-grid model structure deep in the mountains that eventually became a luxury resort he called Coulibri Ridge. It opened in late 2022, and made Condé Nast’s Traveler’s “2023 Hot List.” Travel + Leisure called it “the world’s greenest resort.”

A few days after Langlois’ and Marchand’s remains were found in the ravine several miles from their home, police arrested the couple’s next-door neighbor, Jonathan Lehrer, an American with survivalist tendencies; and a Florida man, Robert Snyder, whom police claim he hired as a hit man. Police say the Americans shot the Canadian couple, then set their car on fire, with an accelerant that burned so fiercely, Snyder reportedly had burns on his hands and legs when he was arrested.

Langlois and Lehrer were both North American expats with money who migrated down to the tropics. But they were improbable neighbors: a progressive Canadian who built a green resort where rich, eco-minded guests paid at least $700 a night, and a reported prepper who turned his plantation into a safe haven for himself and advertised it to other disaster-fearing survivalists.

Lehrer and his wife arrived in 2011, with enough wealth to buy the island’s oldest still-intact former coffee and cocoa plantation, the Bois Cotlette estate, which bordered Langlois’ land. Lehrer upgraded the 53-acre 18th century grounds into a tourist destination, financed by busloads of cruise ship passengers paying to visit his small exhibition on cocoa processing. The beans were turned into bricks of chocolate that would be sent to Trinidad and made edible, according to a former employee.

Lehrer has been called a “chocolatier” in news articles, but he and his wife were not making or selling chocolate. They were running bus tours for cruise ship passengers through their old plantation. They soon became notorious on the island as all-American private-property cranks. The dirt road from the coast into the mountains where the eco resort is located passed through their property. Dominicans had been using it since the days of slavery, but the American couple tried to unofficially privatize it. As early as 2016, the road was in dispute and soon the conflict went to court. As Langlois built his eco-lodge, Lehrer would reportedly block the road with stones and tree trunks. Coulibri Ridge employees routinely videotaped their contentious interactions with the Lehrers and have since posted some online.

A judge granted an injunction in 2019 keeping the road public and allowing Langlois’ guests and workers to access it, explicitly calling it “Morne Rouge Public Road.” But non-paying tourists were shooed off. Trip Advisor comments about the chocolate plantation are filled with warnings about the Lehrers, claiming they set large dogs on passing hikers and threatened drivers who found themselves on the road.

On a recent visit to Dominica, I drove the disputed route. It is narrow, unimproved, with deep, tire-sucking ruts, and too rough for anything but a four-wheel drive or truck. It does pass through the old plantation’s ruins, close enough to reach from a car window at one tight turn and touch the stone walls of the old plantation’s warehouses and mills.

On the edge of a steep green ravine less than a mile away, mourners have left a shrine of purple flowers in vases and the melted nubs of two candles at the crime scene. The fire was so hot that melted remains of the victims’ black SUV are embedded in the dirt.

“This issue of the public road just kept getting worse,” one longtime Langlois employee told me. “Mostly it was Jonathan. Every time we had a shipment go through that property, we videotaped because he was just … He was Jonathan.”

Golden Passports and a Bunker

Major crime is rare on the island. The police force is ill equipped to do basic forensics and has reportedly had to send the remains to labs in the U.S. or Canada, and asked the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to assist in the investigation into Langlois’ death. Meanwhile, inhabitants of the nearby hamlet of Soufriere have been open about their intent to do vigilante justice if Lehrer is released.

Lehrer and Snyder, a Florida mechanic Lehrer employed to work on his tour buses, are both in the national prison, called Stock Farm, outside the capital city of Roseau. They have not yet been required to enter a plea, but their lawyers say they plan to plead not guilty. Lehrer’s wife — who has not been charged — has left the island and hired a Texas PR firm.

Lehrer recently applied for bail after five months incarcerated in the severely overcrowded prison. His request was rejected. The bail denial included mention of an eyewitness to the crime, a Dominican native who Lehrer’s legal team says worked as his property manager. If Lehrer is convicted, he will be subject to the Dominican penalty for murder: execution by hanging.

Islanders I spoke with generally accept the road rage motive. But there are other aspects of the story that deepen the mystery, going beyond a simple road dispute. The two wealthy white North Americans — Langlois and Lehrer — were avatars of two opposing sides of an island conflict that pits environmentalists and activists against a cabal of outside interests pressing for more access to natural resources, and a government accused of corruption in caving to those interests.

Dominica is mountainous, volcanic and — directly in the hurricane path — not a magnet for high-end resort investment. The island has been ravaged by countless tempests. Its relatively tiny and poor population depends on tourism (cruise ships dock daily), fishing, small family farms or work on sporadic developments, many financed by Chinese and Russian investors.

The island has for years subsisted largely on income from so-called golden passports, proceeds of which constitute about half of the government’s revenues. Because Dominica is in the Commonwealth, its passport holders can get into the Schengen zone (EU) without visas, even post-Brexit. Dominica sells passports starting at $100,000. The program, called citizen by investment, requires investors to put that money into real estate, a project (of which Lehrer’s property was one) or a government bond. The program has no residency or language requirement. Investigative journalists have separately accused some island officials of selling diplomatic passports, which the officials deny.

The business is reportedly corrupt, with investigative journalists finding that passports have gone to international criminals, money launderers, crypto scammers. One 2019 Al Jazeera investigation revealed longtime President Roosevelt Skerrit allegedly took hundreds of thousands of dollars for his 2014 election campaign from an Iranian businessman named Alireza Monfared in exchange for making him the Dominican ambassador to Malaysia. Monfared was eventually arrested by his own government and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment. Skerrit — who has called the allegations totally false — has been reelected four times, in sometimes-tense election cycles involving riots and accusations of graft. His administration maintains close ties with China, which has invested heavily in infrastructure on the island, including a controversial new airport that is under construction, plus post-hurricane housing for displaced islanders.

After a consortium of investigative journalists collaborated on a 2023 exposé into the passport scheme, Skerrit blasted them as “terrorists” and accused them of being financed by the political opposition. The golden visa program has brought $1 billion into government coffers since its inception, and reportedly constitutes 55 percent of the national income. The Dominican government calls the program “Citizenship by Investment” (CBI) and deputizes various investors and other individuals around the island as “agents.”

Lehrer was one of eight CBI “agents” on the island, a position that allowed him to vet passport applicants and gave him access to top government officials, as well as sell off bits of his own vast property through the program. Lehrer’s attorney in the murder case is Lennox Lawrence, a close associate of Skerrit, and a former acting attorney general on the island. Lehrer’s closeness to the government — and the challenge the case presents an under-equipped police force — have prompted observers in Dominica to worry that the authorities will not be able to make charges stick. The government has brought in a special prosecutor from Trinidad to handle the case, and reportedly asked for Canadian assistance with the investigation, although Canadian officials have not confirmed their involvement.