Ann-Marie Delsol squints against the humid Caribbean sun as she points down at the rutted dirt track where the bodies were found in December of 2023. Her employers had been shot and left in their car, which someone set ablaze and pushed into the underbrush. The vehicle could have been shoved down the steep hill instead of this a shoddy attempt at concealment. “When I saw Daniel and Dominique’s bodies — Daniel’s body was in holes,” Delsol says, her musical voice stoic despite her grief.
A former cook for hoteliers Daniel Langlois and Dominique Marchand, Delsol heard news of a charred vehicle not far from her old workplace, eco-resort Coulibri Ridge. Worried about her family, who had land near the incident, she raced across the treacherous, rutted road to see what was amiss. What she saw haunts her to this day. “It is very painful for us because we’ve lost two great people,” she says. “That’s the first time we are ever having a crime like this in Dominica.”
Nearly two years later, there’s still evidence at the crime scene that shook this small island country — ash on jutting rocks, melted scraps of plastic and fabric scattered in the verdant shrubbery where wild dogs stalk giant lizards. A modest roadside memorial vase. A crime scene that’s no longer just a crime scene — but something in limbo, much like the tragic case of Langlois and Marchand, who have yet to get justice.
Ann-Marie Delsol protests every time Jonathan Lehrer goes to court.
Matthew Escudero/Law & Crime
Law and Crime Online
Langlois and Marchand were the de facto patron saints of Dominica, a small island country that settlers played tug-of-war over for centuries until it went independent in the ‘70s. The Canadian ex-pat couple found the beauty in what is now dubbed the “Nature Island,” even though signs of colonial turmoil remain: a village called, simply, Massacre (in honor of a 1600s battle between the British and the indigenous people), a courthouse still boasting cells and chains from before slavery was abolished in the 1800s. Churches, libraries, and houses stand splintered and rotting next to posh tourist resorts, the aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Maria. The death of the popular couple, then, became another stain on the island — a grisly, shocking double murder that stood as an anomaly in the close-knit, friendly community.
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Langlois and Marchand were long-time philanthropists, even before they moved across oceans. But when they washed ashore, their charity flowed as freely as the bubbling hotsprings studded on the island’s beaches. Langlois — a Canadian VFX visionary responsible for the tech that made movies like Jurassic Park possible — and his partner Marchand collaborated not only on Coulibri Ridge, but also rebuilding jetties, a primary school, and coral reefs after the devastating 2017 storm.
“When I heard of his demise I was very much taken aback and sad,” says Ericson Degallaire, principal of the Soufrière Primary School, which Langlois and Marchand meticulously rebuilt with the same materials they used for their eco-resort. Now, children laugh and study in the open-air structure, boasting candy-bright paint. “Since his demise, things have not been the same in terms of that economic activity. Because I’m sure he would have done more had he been around. So his loss has impacted the community a great, great deal,” the principal adds.
The question soon became: Why would anyone want this couple, who had given so much to their community, dead? Police soon zeroed in on another family of transplants, the Lehrers, who had bought the neighboring chocolate plantation Bois Cotlette in 2011. To hear the islanders tell it, the patriarch, a former Wall Street wunderkind named Jonathan Lehrer, didn’t have the best reputation. Degallaire says that the man never waved to him when he drove by the school toward his 1720s estate; islanders claim he filmed them when they got too close to his land; and TripAdvisor reviews paint a picture of a man who shouted at anyone who stepped foot on his property sans invitation or reservation. “The White American manager… informed us in a very rude and unfriendly way to get off his estate straight away,” wrote one reviewer. “Almost felt we were about to manhandled off the premises.” And that was a problem, since what islanders considered a public road passed through Lehrer’s property — as did Langlois.
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According to local press, this dispute over a simple spit of land could have culminated in bloodshed. “My own investigations and personal knowledge [show] that there is a strong… case against [Lehrer] including and not limited to direct eye witness evidence, circumstantial evidence, and scientific evidence,” police would later say in court. Still, the veracity of that statement remains in question and a judge and jury have yet to decide.
Jonathan Lehrer leaves court after being denied bail on charges related to the killings of Canadian businessman Daniel Langlois and his partner, Dominique Marchand, in Roseau, Dominica last year. Lehrer and another man face charges of murdering the couple.
AP Photo/Clyde Jno Baptiste
MORNE ROUGE ROAD first appeared on a map in the late 1770s, tread by slaves, foreigners, and citizens for hundreds of years before and after Dominica became an independent nation in 1978. Lehrer and Langlois began battling over the road in 2014; Lehrer said it was his property and that Langlois’ heavy trucks were clipping the sides of his ancient estate. Langlois — and many other residents — maintained that it was a public thoroughfare.
Ayeola George, who works in public relations on the island, recalls an alleged run-in with Lehrer right before the murders when she was on her way to meet up with Marchand at Coulibri Ridge to discuss a charity concert. She got turned around on the dirt road, and drove too close to Bois Cotlette. “Here comes Jonathan and he said — he’s in jeans, no shirt, no shoes — ‘Hey you’re going to see Daniel?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ He’s like, ‘Tell Daniel I said he is an asshole,’” she recalls. “So I was reversing, I’m looking in the mirror and Jonathan Lehrer is filming me. He has his phone and he’s filming me. I’m a Dominican — we know how to talk, we know how to stand up for ourselves. But at the same time, I knew of his aggressions toward locals. So I just left it alone.”
A PR rep for the Lehrer family could not comment on this particular incident, but pointed out that islanders had staged a protest on the road in 2018 after alleging that Lehrer blocked the byway. Lehrer’s rep denies that his employer ever blocked the road, and, when asked about the reported filming of locals, told Rolling Stone: “My thought is that this was in direct response to the family getting things stolen and the property vandalized [during the protest]. So if Jonathan was filming locals tearing across his property, it was likely due to ensuring his safety and the safety of his property.”
The men had previously taken the matter to court after Lehrer built another road as a compromise, and, after Langlois’ death in 2023, a judge ruled in the Canadian’s favor. It hardly mattered at that point, though, since the police had arrested Jonathan Lehrer and his bus driver Robert Snyder Jr. for murder. The conflict over the road was trumpeted as the motive in the press.
Lehrer — who has maintained his innocence to Rolling Stone claimed he wasn’t bothered by the road ordeal — has been locked away in Dominica State Prison for over two years now. In stasis, much like that crime scene. “To truly understand the inhumane conditions, you must be able to imagine the cell block,” says his 25-year-old daughter, Emma, who grew up largely on the island and has always dreamed of returning there as a doctor. She also claims that islanders’ views of her father are wildly incorrect, describing him as a sweet, adventurous man who wasn’t afraid to play pretend with his kids at theme parks. “[He lives in] a concrete room, with a hallway in the middle lined with six single-occupancy cells along each wall,” she says of his current predicament. “There are no windows in the block, and no ventilation built in. In fact, the ventilation is so bad that the prison puts a giant fan in the entrance to the cell block in the evening so the inmates don’t suffocate.”
There’s been a series of starts and stops with Lehrer’s case, which Emma claims is riddled with corruption. “There is a lot of planted evidence, concealed documents, tampered witness statements, and more generally abuse of process that we hope to successfully showcase along with the perjury of police officers about the evidence they claimed early on before their suspicions were proved false,” she says. “Now we need to expose it.”
Daniel Langlois and Dominique Marchand
Courtesy of Céline Caisse
The news coming out of Dominica is much more opaque, filtering largely through local reports since both the defense and prosecution have yet to respond to Rolling Stone for comment. After previous denials, Lehrer was initially granted bail in November of 2024 due to what the defense claimed was the State’s “misrepresentation of the quality of evidence” against him. In short: the defense claims, the prosecution have none and they’re stalling. Lehrer remained imprisoned while the bail conditions were determined; those included about a quarter of a million in U.S. dollars and the revoking of his U.S. citizenship.
According to Lehrer’s family publicist, the Acting Deputy Commissioner of Police then submitted an application to reverse bail — which was denied by the judge. In December of 2024, the ADCP searched the prison where Lehrer is being held and found a set of jail keys in an “undisclosed location,” according to PR. The ADCP then provided the keys as evidence that Lehrer intended to escape, but was dismissed by the judge due to lack of witnesses, per PR. Then, in January of this year, Lehrer was slapped with a weapons trafficking charge, which made bail ultimately impossible. Still, the charges allege that he was transporting an arsenal of guns on December 4th, when, as Emma points out, he was already in custody. Lehrer was again denied bail for these charges in March.
In the midst of all this, the judge who initially granted Lehrer bail recused himself from the case, after he was told by the prosecution that he should remove “himself from the matter since they had information that was not helpful to him,” according to local press.
It’s a thorny matter all around, to put it lightly, with both sides bristling at how slowly the process is going. “On the side of the court, there’s an inscription that says ‘the High Court of Justice,’” says local activist Lofty Durand. “Sometimes what goes on in there, I think that the inscription should change to the high court of injustice,” adding that locals are afraid Lehrer will just be released and disappear in lieu of a trial. “The court should have been moving with a little more alacrity in that regard, so that all parties concerned, even Jonathan’s family, if he’s innocent [get answers].”
Both sides, too, point to government corruption by way of explanation, Lehrer’s defenders claiming he’s being used as a foreign scapegoat for a crime he didn’t commit, and islanders whispering that Lehrer is receiving preferential treatment due to his wealth. Lehrer’s family is part of the country’s controversial Citizenship By Investment program, whereby folks can obtain passports if they funnel money into local projects. Dubbed the Golden Passport program, it has had its share of issues, with the Government Accountability Project (GAP) alleging that the island has sold citizenship to such people as an Afghan spy, a Turkish millionaire-fraudster, and a former Libyan colonel under Muammar Gaddafi.
Although Lehrer has not been accused of any malfeasance regarding the program, his original lawyer, Lennox Lawrence, was previously attorney general of Dominica. Still, in the past, Lawrence denied that this gave his client any advantage. “We have a system of separation of powers just like you have in the United States and in Canada,” he said. “The executive is totally different from the legislature.”
Finally, in August, a judge ruled that Lehrer and Snyder would stand trial for murder, with an indictment pending for September, but the indictment and trial have yet to transpire. When Rolling Stone reached out to the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court about timing, they declined to comment.
“At nearly every stage of the case, the government has manipulated the course of justice and interfered with the proceedings,” says the Lehrer family publicist. “Jonathan has been denied the right to speak with media or see his doctor. To date, there is no trial date set as the government and prosecution scrambles to find a way forward for this case.”
MEANWHILE, LEHRER’s FAMILY also waits — back in Texas, where they worry every day that Jonathan will die from prostate cancer, for which they claim he is receiving paltry care. When his daughter, Emma, visited him recently — after bail was denied — she says she was met with a grim scene. “I was finally, after weeks of begging through letters and phone calls from the lawyers, allowed to see him for 15 minutes through a Plexiglass screen talking to him through a phone,” she says. “As the end of the time approached, the guards began to harass us and told me I had to leave. I remember turning to the guard with tears in my eyes, asking him if I could just give my dad a hug. He laughed at me. ‘Who do you think you are?’ he asked me as he escorted me out the door. I didn’t even get a proper goodbye.” If Lehrer is found guilty, he could face public hanging.
The Lehrer family aren’t the only ones suffering. There’s Delsol, a grandmother, who leads a group of protesters down to each of Lehrers’ hearings, yelling up at the windows of the old courthouse so he can hear her pain. “Every time the court case is on the agenda, I am always there,” she says, looking down at a photo of her brand-new grandchild on her phone. “We will be protesting until…” she pauses. “It will never stop.”
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And then there’s Langlois’ old friend, Simon Walsh, a dive shop owner, who is still shaken by the murders. His blue eyes fill with tears as he recalls how Langlois saved him from bankruptcy after a hurricane, how they teamed up to rebuild the coral reefs after they were beset by a rare disease. They never did get to finish that project, but Walsh carried on, coaxing dying coral back to life in the breezy, beachside Daniel Langlois Coral Rescue Center. And Degallaire, principal of the Soufrière Primary School? He’s eagerly anticipating the opening of a secondary school, named for Marchand.
Langlois’ and Marchand’s impact, then, is not just a lonely crime scene — scraps of a car and soot scarred rocks. It’s there in the fabric of the island they called home, in the hearts of the people who welcomed them — and that will endure, much like Dominica has all these centuries.
