SANTA MONICA — Nedenia Post Dye, great-granddaughter of heiress and socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post, was found stabbed in a spa resort located in Honduras last week.
Dye, who was 46, was a Santa Monica native and had been living for 15 years on Roatan, the largest of Honduras’s bay islands and located in the Caribbean. She ran the Baan Suerte luxury spa where she had been slain. The suspect who was arrested by Roatan police is Lenin Roberto Arana, a local singer who took on the stage name “The Canary.” He claimed to have been romantically involved with Dye and alleges that he is innocent.
Her famous great-grandmother, Marjorie Merriweather Post, was a leading American socialite during the early 1900s as well as the founder of General Foods, Inc. She was a prodigy who went to college at the age of 14, and at the age of 27, she was the wealthiest woman in America who turned her father’s cereal company into a food empire. Post was also known for her controversial Russian art collection which she purchased from Stalin’s government.
Nedenia Dye was an alumnus of Mount Vernon College, where her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother also studied. She started her own business in Roatan, a location popular among tourists for its vacation homes, luxury resorts, stunning views and scuba diving. When her body was found on December 22, she had been stabbed multiple times in the back. Roatan police caught Arana attempting to run away from the scene of the crime in the victim’s car, with his clothes covered in blood.
Before her death, she followed in her great-grandmother’s footsteps as an entrepreneur and a philanthropist by developing a soccer program for underprivileged children in Roatan. She was a benefactor to her alma mater and also played a large role in her community, helping young people quit drugs and alcohol, and Arana was one of the people who received help from her.
