Peru’s National Police force have located a motorcycle they believe belonged to the Comox Valley man who was killed by villagers who accused him of shooting a spiritual leader.
Officers found the vehicle Tuesday morning about 50 metres from where Woodroffe’s body was found Saturday in a shallow grave, according to El Comercio, one of Peru’s major daily newspapers. The newspaper published photos this morning of about a dozen police officers searching the long grass in the Indigenous community of Victoria Gracia in Peru’s Ucayali region.
Investigators are looking for a firearm, the newspaper reported, which could be key to determining whether Woodroffe committed the crime villagers accused him of: The shooting death of Olivia Arévalo, an 81-year-old plant healer and Indigenous people’s rights activist from the Shipibo-Konibo tribe of northeastern Peru.
Peru’s attorney general has ordered the arrests of two men wanted in connection with Woodroffe’s killing. José Ramírez Rodríguez and Nicolás Mori Guimaraes, both from the Victoria Gracia village of the Ucayali region, were identified through a cellphone video showing the lynching of Woodroffe, 41, who cried out for mercy as he was strangled to death while others watched.
Peru’s Public Ministry confirmed on Monday that the deaths of Woodroffe and Arévalo are linked and said prosecutors are investigating both cases.
Officials have backed away from claims that Woodroffe was a prime suspect in Arévalo’s killing, stating that forensic tests have yet to confirm this.
Arévalo, who carries out ayahuasca ceremonies for westerners, was found dead in her home Thursday. Woodroffe was killed later the same day, officials said.
Yarrow Willard and Sean Sullivan, who have both known Woodroffe for more than a decade, told the Times Colonist they cannot believe Woodroffe is capable of killing anyone.
“I don’t believe for a second he murdered anybody. I think it’s a [case of] wrong place, wrong time,” Sullivan said.
Friends said Woodroffe travelled to Peru to experiment with ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic coffee-coloured brew made of native plants. He wrote on a fundraising site that after watching a family member struggle with alcohol addiction, he decided to become an addictions counsellor using plant-based medicine.
Dr. Gabor Maté, a retired B.C. physician who has himself tried ayahuasca and used it to treat the root causes of addiction, said it’s a powerful substance that can trigger people’s deepest wounds.
“It has tremendous capacity to help people understand themselves,” he said. “It’s not specific for addictions. What it really is is a way for people to get to know themselves both emotionally and spiritually.”
Maté has worked with ayahuasca for 10 years and has seen it help people struggling with addictions, suicidal thoughts or depression.
“What has to be emphasized is it has to be done in the right context, under the right guidance. It’s not something that you should take lightly, and there are traditional ways of working with it and that has to be respected.”
Unlike alcohol, the substance is not associated with violence, Maté said. In Brazil, it’s given to prisoners to make them less violent, he said.
There have been cases of violence associated with ayahuasca, however.
In 2015, Winnipeg man Joshua Stevens stabbed a London man to death at the Phenoix Ayahuasca retreat near Iquitos, a few hours from where Woodroffe was killed. Stevens, then 29, told CTV Winnipeg that he stabbed Unais Gomes in self-defence after the 26-year-old attacked him and two other people with a butcher’s knife.
Stevens was released and allowed to return to Canada after witnessed backed up his version of events.
Woodroffe lived in Courtenay and Cumberland and has a nine-year-old son. He planned to study with a plant healer with the Shipibo tribe in Iquitos, Peru, according to a message he wrote on an Indigogo fundraising site, which he created in 2013 to raise money for his travels.
kderosa@timescolonist
