Honduran Singer Arrested in Stabbing Death of American Cereal Heiress

In a story that sounds a lot like the plot of a failed Dashiell Hammett novel, the American heiress to the Post cereal (and now General Foods) fortune has been found dead at her spa resort on the Caribbean island of Roatán, the largest of Honduras’ Bay Islands.

Honduran police say they’ve arrested a local singer in connection with Nedenia Post Dye’s death. Dye was found stabbed to death on Dec. 22 in a room at the Baan Suerte luxury spa she’d been running and living at for the last 15 years. According to Roatán police chief Alex Madrid, the 46-year-old Dye had been helping the singer get sober because helping people quit drugs and alcohol that was sort of her thing. “She was a good woman,” Madrid told CBS News, “who worked with young people at risk, drug addicts and alcoholics.”

The suspect, Lenin Roberto Arana (whose occasional stage name is “The Canary,” as if this story couldn’t get any more film noirish), was found, according to CBS, wearing “blood-soaked clothing” as he tried to flee in Dye’s car, though he’s so far maintained his innocence, insisting — in a creepy juxtaposition — that he and Dye were a) romantically involved and b) that he could never have hurt Dye because “Nedenia was like a mother to me.”

Dye, originally from Santa Monica, Calif., was the great-granddaughter of cereal heiress and socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post, who inherited the cereal company that would go on to become General Foods Inc.