William Dathan Holbert, a former landscaper and gym manager from western North Carolina, killed five Americans in the Bocas del Toro archipelago of Panama between December 2007 and March 2010. His victims were a family of three, Michael Brown, his wife Manchittha, known as Nan, and their teenage son Watson; Bo Icelar, a former gallery owner from Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Cher Hughes, a St. Louis woman who had lived in Bocas del Toro for about ten years. Each time, Holbert took over what the victims owned, telling neighbors he had bought it. He lived in Panama as "Bill Cortez," a supposed Dutch citizen, with his partner, Laura Michelle Reese, who went by Jane Cortez.
The case came apart when friends and family of Cher Hughes refused to accept her disappearance. Police found her body and Icelar's on Holbert's land in July 2010, by which time he and Reese had fled. Nicaraguan soldiers caught them on July 26, 2010. Holbert confessed on July 30, drew a map of the graves, and the remains of the Brown family were dug up four days later. He spent seven years in pretrial detention. In July 2017 he told a bench of three judges in David, Chiriquí, "I killed them," and on August 14, 2017, the court sentenced him to 47 years and one month in prison. Reese, who always denied knowing about the killings, received 26 years and 4 months.
Holbert was born on September 12, 1979, according to the record of his 2010 interrogation that the journalist Nick Foster quotes, and Foster gives his birthplace as Hendersonville, North Carolina. TVN Noticias, in a 2021 profile, described his family as owners of a small apple orchard and a cattle ranch in a mountain village in North Carolina. He played football at North Henderson High School, the Associated Press reported in 2017.
By 2004, CBS News reported in 2010, he had a successful landscaping business, a wife, three children and a home in the mountains. AP reporting from the same week said he separated from his wife in May 2004, spent a short time in Charleston, South Carolina, and returned to the North Carolina mountains. He sold the landscaping business and went to work at a fitness club in Asheville. One of his co-workers there was Laura Michelle Reese.
His time at the gym ended badly. The club's owner, Kevin Hoover, told the AP that Holbert spent $25,000 in company checks on televisions, mattresses, washers and dryers; Hoover did not press charges. A National Post report in 2010 attributed a similar account to Marie Hoover, who said she had hired him to manage the club, that he had forged her signature on the checks, and, as she told the Asheville Citizen-Times, that he "wanted to be Tony Soprano for a while." Kevin Hoover told the AP that Holbert "had a brilliant mind" and that he had "never thought he could be a killer, much less a serial killer."
The same years brought white supremacist activity. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Holbert joined the National Alliance in 2002 and in 2005 opened a shop in Forest City, North Carolina, called Southern National Patriots, which sold books, music and pamphlets promoting white supremacy and held meetings on what members described as the decline of Southern white culture. TVN Noticias described the group as a militia and political party, the "Patriotas Nacionales del Sur," which it said reached about 500 active members before disbanding in 2005. The SPLC and later interviewers recorded tattoos including a swastika and the words "Aryan Pride"; Foster's interrogation record lists a Confederate flag on his chest.
A year after the separation Holbert filed for bankruptcy, listing hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts, the AP reported. In June 2005 a judge ordered his arrest for failing to pay child support and failing to appear in court; he had been given 20 days in jail and never reported. CBS News reported that this order came from Polk County.
What followed, according to police and court officials who spoke to the AP in 2010, was a run through at least six states under false names. In mid-2005, in Missoula, Montana, he stole a car, altered its vehicle identification number and sold it in Conrad, Montana; the undersheriff there, Jeff Pruttis, said Holbert had also forged the title. In late 2005, at Oak Island on the North Carolina coast, he sold a house that did not belong to him for about $200,000 in cash. The Tico Times, citing America's Most Wanted, dated the Oak Island scheme to October 2005 and said the house was a vacation home worth about half a million dollars, sold for less than half its value. The Wilmington, North Carolina, police held a warrant for his arrest over the sale; their spokeswoman, Lucy Crockett, said in 2010 that it would likely stay on file.
In early 2006 he and Reese, using other names, paid cash for a cabin in Lawrence County, Kentucky, and talked of opening a 24-hour fitness center; they left soon after the sheriff found their van was uninsured. In February 2006 a trooper stopped him on Interstate 90 in Wyoming near the Montana border. Holbert broke away and led the trooper on an off-road chase in a Jeep Cherokee that had been reported stolen in West Virginia, then crashed and ran with a woman passenger. Later that year a moving van he had rented under an alias in Bismarck, North Dakota, was found in North Palm Beach, Florida. The Tico Times reported that he and Reese had used the names Luke Kuhn and Michelle Brukart in the United States, and that he was wanted there for car theft, deceptive practices and fraud.
Holbert told Panamanian prosecutors in 2010 that he married in Costa Rica in 2006, that he entered Panama illegally in 2007, and that he arrived with $50,000 in cash from a fraud committed in the United States. He traveled on a Dutch passport in the name of William Adolfo Cortez, which he said he had bought for $600. Reese used the name Jane, or Jena, Seana Cortez. The travel writer Richard Arghiris, reporting from Bocas del Toro in 2011, wrote that the couple entered Panama in July 2007 and first settled in Volcán, in the highlands of Chiriquí.
Bocas del Toro is a province on Panama's Caribbean coast, an archipelago of mangrove islands popular with tourists and with foreigners who buy land there. Many of the Americans living there did not ask much about one another's pasts. "We think we know one another, but no, not really," a longtime resident, Sandi Hodge, told Arghiris.
The man the expatriates knew as Bill Cortez said he was a wealthy real estate entrepreneur, ABC News reported. He was large, loud and known for his guns and his parties. "He was loud and big and wild, but mostly we just kind of ignored him," Hodge told ABC. He later ran a bar and a hostel, and the Jolly Roger Social Club, a gathering place for a loyal circle of drinkers whose slogan, Arghiris and the British writer Ian Birrell both recorded, joked about how many members survived. Holbert described himself to prosecutors as a farmer earning about $1,500 a month.
Michael Brown, his wife Nan and their son Watson lived on a farm at Aguacate, in the Tierra Oscura area of Bocas del Toro, about an hour by boat from Bocas town. Michael Brown's daughter from an earlier relationship, Leanne Brown, told Panamanian investigators in 2010 that her father had retired very young and had always wanted a small farm with horses. Nan, born Manchittha Nankratoke, was described by Leanne as her father's Thai wife; investigators found a Thai passport for her in the house. Watson, their son, was a teenager. Reports of his age differ: the Tico Times said he was 14 when the family went missing in 2007, La Prensa said 16, prosecutors at the 2017 trial said 18, and the AP described the third set of remains as those of a child. His half-brother, Marco, had also lived in Bocas.
The family was not what it seemed, and investigators spent months working out who they were. Assistant prosecutor Ángel Calderón said in 2010 that Michael Brown was a fugitive wanted on drug trafficking charges in the United States and living under an assumed name; La Prensa reported that prosecutors believed his real name was Marcos Francis Allen. ABC News reported instead that he had been in a witness protection program after testifying against drug dealers. Foster found records of an earlier criminal history in the United States and Australia. Prosecutors sought judicial help from Switzerland, where Brown appeared to hold bank accounts, and from Thailand.
Brown was selling the farm. An acquaintance of the family later told police that he had seen "Bill Cortez" arriving at the house in mid to late December 2007, and that Brown had told him Cortez offered $750,000 for the property. According to Holbert's own account to prosecutors, he had answered a Craigslist advertisement, visited, and decided to rob and kill the family. He described shooting Michael Brown behind the house, then the son, then Nan Brown, who was working in the garden. He buried them in two places on the land. The same acquaintance later asked Holbert, at a supermarket in Changuinola, where the Browns had gone, and was told he had no idea.
Holbert and Reese moved into the house and renamed it Hacienda Cortez. Holbert told neighbors he had bought it. He found the passwords to Brown's bank account in Hong Kong in a filing cabinet, he told investigators, and drained it through cash machines in Bocas; bank records showed transfers of $162,710 between February and April 2008, and only $508.78 was left when he was arrested. One check for $15,900 was first returned by the bank because the signature was wrong. When a friend of Marco Brown's called about a cheap listing for the property, Reese told him the family had sold up and left in a hurry.
Bo Barry Lawrence Icelar had owned a gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, before moving to Bocas del Toro. Arghiris described him as an art collector and a martial artist. He had a house at Big Creek, near Bocas town, and wanted to sell it and move back to the United States. Holbert told prosecutors Icelar was asking more than $400,000.
Icelar was last seen on November 30, 2009, after breakfast at a café in Bocas town. On the same date his longtime friend Sharon L. McConnell, in the United States, found that he had stopped answering his phone. She learned that Cortez had bought his property, and when Cortez did not return her calls she asked a friend of Icelar's in Panama to report him missing, the AP reported. Holbert told Hodge that Icelar had sold him the property at a reduced price, which surprised people who knew him. By Holbert's account, he shot Icelar in a boat on the lagoon with a .38 revolver and buried him on his land. TVN Noticias, in its 2021 profile, dated the killing to March 2009; every other source puts Icelar's disappearance in late November 2009.
Cheryl Lynn Hughes, known as Cher, was 53 and a native of St. Louis, Missouri. About ten years before her death she moved to Bocas del Toro with her boyfriend, Keith Werle, whom she later married; St. Louis's Riverfront Times recorded friends' memories of her as a loving free spirit. She rented out short-term accommodation on the islands, including a property Foster names as the Casa del Sapo, and owned a small hotel. She and Werle had separated by early 2010.
She was reported missing on March 20, 2010, according to CBS News. Arghiris wrote that she was killed on March 23, after being lured outside to see sloths. Holbert told prosecutors he killed her in about March 2010. Afterward, Werle and her friends received text messages from her phone saying she was fine, that she had left with another man, and, in one, that she had gone sailing. Werle knew she disliked sailing. Then the messages stopped. Meanwhile Cortez moved into her home, said she had sold him the property before leaving, and took over her hotel.
Hughes's friends and family said police did almost nothing at first. They contacted Don Winner, a reporter for the website Panama-Guide.com, who took the case to Panama's attorney general and the Department of Judicial Investigation and found that the Cortezes had been buying properties and businesses for cash from people who later vanished, CBS News reported. Werle, suspicious of Cortez's shifting accounts of the sale, pressed police to search. Arghiris dated the search of Hacienda Cortez to June 20, 2010.
Holbert told prosecutors that on June 11, 2010, a friend warned him police were looking for him. He and Reese left Bocas del Toro in early June and crossed into Costa Rica. Searching the property, police found Hughes's dogs, her passport and other belongings. One of her dogs, a Doberman named Jack in Arghiris's account, led investigators to her grave in wooded ground behind the house. Soon afterward they found a second body nearby, which was identified as Bo Icelar's. Both had been buried in shallow graves. A cooler holding Hughes's belongings, which Holbert had shipped to Panama City, was sent back to Bocas after Air Panama staff grew suspicious. Panamanian authorities issued a wanted notice for William and Jena Seana Cortez as armed and dangerous.
In Costa Rica, a cabin owner recognized the couple in July 2010 and they moved on. On July 26, by Foster's account, they took a powerboat after putting its owner into the water and headed for Nicaragua. Nicaraguan soldiers stopped them at the San Juan River, which forms the border. They said they were Dutch. Holbert refused to give a statement in Nicaragua and asked for a lawyer.
On July 29, 2010, Interpol and Judicial Investigation officers brought them back to Panama in shackles aboard a Civil Aeronautics aircraft, landing at Albrook airport in Panama City at 6:09 p.m., Telemetro reported. In front of the cameras Holbert smiled, said the people of Panama were "very friendly" and that he liked living there, and, asked about the deaths, laughed and thanked them for the trip. President Ricardo Martinelli called the case one of the first cases of serial murder in the country. Calderón said the number of victims could reach ten.
On July 30, 2010, Calderón questioned Holbert from 3 p.m. until 8:25 p.m. A public defender was present. Holbert admitted killing all five Americans, described how and why, and drew a sketch of the property showing where the bodies lay. "He has explained what he did, how he did it and why he did it," Calderón told the AP. Holbert said he had posed as an investor, gained his victims' trust, shot them and taken their money and property. He insisted that Reese knew nothing: "My wife is innocent of all these crimes," he said, and that he had always acted alone.
Calderón said Holbert chose people he believed no one would come looking for. Holbert denied harming any Panamanians. In 2010 residents had told investigators that several Ngäbe Buglé men who had owned land on nearby islands or worked at the hostel had disappeared, and some early reports quoted Calderón as saying Holbert had admitted seven killings. He was never charged with any Panamanian's death, and at a hearing in 2017 he said the missing workers had turned up later.
Reese was questioned on July 31. She invoked Article 25 of Panama's Constitution, asked for help from the US Embassy and complained that she was being held unjustly. To most questions she said she did not know. Calderón told reporters on August 3 that charges of homicide had been brought against her.
On August 3, 2010, a team of Ministerio Público experts led by the chief prosecutor for Chiriquí, Luis Martínez, went by boat to Hacienda Cortez at Aguacate. By that afternoon they had found three sets of remains in pits behind the house, in the places Holbert had marked. The Institute of Legal Medicine examined them. Holbert refused a psychological evaluation and asked for a lawyer, the institute's director, Humberto Mas, said. On August 16 Panamanian prosecutors were due to meet the FBI, which had offered documents to help identify the victims and on Holbert himself.
Identifying the Browns took weeks. On September 2, 2010, Leanne Brown came forward and gave a blood sample. DNA tests matched her to her father and to Watson, and death certificates for the family were issued later that month.
Holbert and Reese were held in separate prisons in Chiriquí while the five cases were prepared. In 2011 the Tico Times reported, citing Costa Rica's Telenoticias, that the chief prosecutor of Chiriquí had written to Costa Rican prosecutors linking Holbert to the 2007 killing of Jeffrey A. Klein, a US business owner, in Puerto Viejo on Costa Rica's southern Caribbean coast. No Costa Rican trial on that accusation has been reported.
Foster, who visited him, wrote that in the Chiriquí prison bribes bought favors and that Holbert had his own computer, internet access and a phone, and at times a cell to himself, and that he paid for a prison football team's jerseys. Birrell, reviewing Foster's book in 2016, noted that Holbert, still untried after more than five years, had lost weight, said he had found God and campaigned for prisoners' rights. Asked twice how he had killed the teenage boy, Foster wrote, Holbert talked about other things. Reese married a man from Chiriquí on November 14, 2015, at the women's prison at Los Algarrobos, Dolega, where she was held; her lawyer, Claudia Alvarado, confirmed it.
Foster's book, The Jolly Roger Social Club: A True Story of a Killer in Paradise, was published by Henry Holt in 2016. NBC's Dateline had covered the case in October 2010.
The Supreme Court of Justice ordered the five case files joined. The trial was first set for February 20, 2017, before the Superior Court in Chiriquí, but was suspended that morning when Alvarado, who then represented both defendants, presented a medical excuse. That day Holbert asked Panamanians to forgive him. "I ask the people of Panama to remember I have never in my life harmed a Panamanian citizen," he said, according to the Tico Times. "I am completely sorry and I accept my guilt for my selfish actions." He said he had confessed and supported prosecutors "100 percent." He also said Reese was another victim of what had happened. Alvarado said the defendants hoped for a single sentence of no more than 20 years. A lawyer, Roniel Ortiz, represented relatives of Cher Hughes.
The hearing was postponed three times in all. It finally took place on Monday, July 10, 2017, at the Superior Court of the Third Judicial District in David, before Judges Carlos Cuesta, Asunción Castillo and Carmen Luz De Gracia. Both defendants waived a jury and chose a bench trial. Before it began, the defense asked for an agreed sentence of 21 years for Holbert. The prosecutor, Emeldo Márquez, refused, saying the crimes were very grave and had been proved by the investigation.
Holbert pleaded guilty to the five homicides and the robberies. "Yo los maté," he told the judges, "I killed them," and added that he accepted responsibility for his actions and accepted his punishment, EFE reported. His lawyer asked the court to weigh his cooperation and his admission. Reese pleaded not guilty. Her lawyer, Carlos Rodríguez, argued that she too had been Holbert's victim, that he was abusive and manipulative, that she had known nothing of the killings, and that no identification procedure had ever confirmed that she was the woman seen with him. Márquez, in a single closing argument covering all five killings, argued that Holbert had killed with a firearm and that Reese had taken part, and asked for the maximum penalty on every count. He also asked that copies of the file be sent for a separate prosecution over the weapons found on Holbert's land in 2010, which included an AK-47 rifle.
On August 14, 2017, the Ministerio Público announced the verdict. The court convicted Holbert as the principal of aggravated homicide and aggravated robbery of the five Americans and sentenced him to 47 years and one month in prison. Reese was convicted as an accomplice and sentenced to 26 years and 4 months, for her part in helping him take the victims' property. Márquez said the files held enough evidence to tie both defendants to the crimes. Alvarado said an appeal was likely.
Holbert's appeal to the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice rested on one argument: that the killings took place under the 1982 Penal Code but he had been sentenced under the later code, which allowed longer terms. In September 2017 he also asked to serve his sentence in Bocas del Toro, where he said relatives lived. Judge Cuesta was to decide that request.
In May 2018 he was moved under heavy guard to Changuinola to face a separate charge of possessing weapons and explosives. On December 19, 2018, the prosecutor in Bocas del Toro, Irvin Castillo, dropped that case under the principle of discretionary prosecution, and the defense said too much time had passed in any event.
According to TVN Noticias, which reported the ruling, the Supreme Court notified Holbert on October 7, 2020, that his sentence would be 46 years and 5 months. Reese's later appeals and present status have not been reported.
Holbert married a Panamanian woman, Elizabeth Núñez, on January 17, 2019, at the public prison in David, TVN reported. That year he told an international news outlet that prison staff were corrupt, and a disciplinary board ordered him moved. On October 21, 2019, he was transferred from the men's prison in Chiriquí to La Mega Joya, also called La Nueva Joya, east of Panama City. His lawyer said in November 2019 that he was held in its extreme-security wing and could see his family only through glass and in shackles, and she asked for a move to the maximum-security wing.
By 2021, TVN reported, he was the pastor of Sector C at La Nueva Joya, with a ministry called "Ejército de Cristo" (Army of Christ), and had written prison memoirs about his flight, arrest and early years in custody.
As of February 13, 2026, Holbert was held in Sector C of La Mega Joya. That day Newsroom Panama published a handwritten letter, dated January 8, 2026, that his wife had given to the press after a visit. Addressed to the Minister of Government, Dinoska Montalvo, it said he had been recommended for a transfer that nobody had acted on, that he had obeyed prison rules, and that his sector had no technical board to review his case. Nothing further about him had been reported by October 2026, and no US prosecution of Holbert for the North Carolina, Montana or other charges, nor any request for his transfer to the United States, has been reported.
Proven by conviction: the aggravated homicide and robbery of Michael Brown, Nan Brown, Watson Brown, Bo Icelar and Cher Hughes, which Holbert also admitted in court. Reese was convicted as an accomplice to the robberies and killings; she denied knowing about the killings, and Holbert has always said she was innocent.
Accused, never tried: the 2007 death of Jeffrey A. Klein in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica. Reported in 2010 and never charged: the disappearance of several Ngäbe Buglé workers, whom Holbert said in 2017 had turned up alive. Early reports that he admitted seven killings were not repeated by prosecutors. Birrell's 2016 review and the SPLC also mention an American lawyer killed in Costa Rica; this appears to refer to the Klein accusation, and nothing more was found.
Details that differ between sources: Watson Brown's age (14, 16, 18, or "a child"); Michael Brown's background (a fugitive on drug charges, as prosecutors said, or a protected witness, as ABC reported); the date of Icelar's killing (November 2009 in most sources, March 2009 in TVN); the court's name (the Superior Court of the Third Judicial District, sometimes called the Superior Court of Chiriquí); and Holbert's state of origin, which some 2010 reports gave as Texas. The spelling of Cher Hughes's husband's surname is Werle in AP and Foster and Worle in the Riverfront Times.
September 12, 1979: William Dathan Holbert is born in North Carolina.
2002: joins the National Alliance, according to the SPLC.
May 2004: separates from his wife; sells his landscaping business and works at an Asheville gym, where he meets Laura Michelle Reese.
June 2005: a judge orders his arrest over unpaid child support.
Mid-2005: steals and sells a car in Montana.
Late 2005: sells a house he does not own at Oak Island, North Carolina.
February 2006: escapes a Wyoming trooper after a chase.
2006: says he married in Costa Rica.
2007: enters Panama illegally as "William Adolfo Cortez."
December 2007: kills Michael, Nan and Watson Brown at Aguacate and takes their farm.
February to April 2008: $162,710 is moved out of Michael Brown's bank account.
November 30, 2009: Bo Icelar is last seen; Holbert kills him and takes his house.
March 2010: Cher Hughes is killed; she is reported missing on March 20.
June 2010: Holbert and Reese flee to Costa Rica.
July 2010: police find the graves of Hughes and Icelar on Holbert's property.
July 26, 2010: Nicaraguan soldiers arrest the couple at the San Juan River.
July 29, 2010: deported to Panama City.
July 30, 2010: Holbert confesses and maps the graves.
August 3, 2010: the Brown family's remains are found at Hacienda Cortez.
September 2010: DNA confirms the Browns' identities.
December 2011: Panamanian prosecutors link him to a 2007 killing in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica.
November 14, 2015: Reese marries in prison.
February 20, 2017: trial suspended; Holbert asks Panamanians' forgiveness.
July 10, 2017: bench trial in David; Holbert pleads guilty.
August 14, 2017: sentenced to 47 years and one month; Reese to 26 years and 4 months.
December 19, 2018: a weapons case against him is dropped.
January 17, 2019: marries Elizabeth Núñez in prison.
October 21, 2019: transferred to La Mega Joya.
October 7, 2020: the Supreme Court sets his sentence at 46 years and 5 months (TVN).
February 13, 2026: his letter to the Minister of Government is published; he is held in Sector C, La Mega Joya.