A woman who mysteriously went missing in Mexico may have been murdered by a cartel who abandoned her toddler daughter at a church.
Tahnee Shanks, from Australia, had been staying in a holiday resort in the tourist hotspot of Cancun when she went missing.
The 32-year-old had travelled there with her estranged husband Jorge Astudillo and their daughter Adelynn from their home in Merida on May 1.
It was revealed she had sent an eerie text message to her friend months before, telling her pal to remember a man's name before saying: "Just in case anything happens to me they can go after him."
Footage showed Ms Shanks, Mr Astudillo and Adelynn, two, leaving the hotel together the next day before passing a road toll out of town in their white 4WD just before 12pm.
Their car then made a U-turn 20km from their hotel before taking a detour down a different road.
Ms Shanks' phone then pinged as it travelled near to a supermarket, which is the last known contact she had, at around midday.
Daughter Adelynn was later found wandering barefoot outside Parroquia San Miguel Arcangel Church in Cancun about 9pm that day.
Carlos Santos, a fellow tourist who was there with his family, found her and said a man pointed her out and promised to look for her parents, but never returned.
Hours later, Ms Shanks' car was then found burnt out 40km south of Cancun. Police have since launched a missing person investigation.
Mr Santos, however, had contacted police and shared photos of Adelynn to social media.
These went viral and lead to Ms Shanks' mother Leanne and brother Ben back in Australia recognising her days later.
Adelynn was returned to Australia by her grandmother and uncle earlier this month.
Adelynn is safely settling into life in Queensland after being granted an emergency Australian passport, it's understood.
Ms Shanks' family are holding out hope that she is still alive, but there is still an eight-hour window on the evening of May 2 that remains unexplained.
Police are now urgently working on two theories as to why she disappeared, the Mail reports.
The first theory is that there was a domestic violence incident and Mr Estudillo is on the run or in hiding.
The second is that Mr Astudillo was involved in criminal activity that's linked to Mexico's notorious drug cartels and the disappearance is payback.
"He (Mr Astudillo) was threatened before and he even had hired a bodyguard because...he was afraid for his life," Quintana Roo state attorney-general Oscar Montes de Oca Rosales told 60 Minutes.
"It could be retaliation for the criminal groups that he was involved with.
"According to the law, we consider them as alive and that's the way that we look for them until something is shown to be different."
From what investigators have found so far, Astudillo "could be" a cartel member himself.
He had previously been accused of fraud and selling fake holiday packages, but Ms Shanks has been cleared of any criminal links, it's reported.
The eerie message from Ms Shanks to her friend came months before the disappearance.
In the text message, she eerily said: "I know this is gunna sound weird but keep (his) name.
"Jorge Luis Aguirre Astudillo! Just in case anything happens to me they can go after him.
"Not that anything will! But I just want to keep that as a backup."
Adelynn's godmother Nikita Weller claimed her friend Ms Shanks confided in her about her fears about her husband.
The couple had recently separated after Ms Shanks found out he had an affair and booked a flight to return to Queensland with Adelynn.
Ms Weller said: "She found out he was into some shady stuff. She didn't say what.
"But it scared her enough to want to come home. She just said he was into shady stuff and she was scared and that was it.
"I told her: 'I think you need to come home. I think this is it, it's time you've got to come home somehow'."
Her desperate brother has offered a one million peso reward (A$70,000) for information on his sister's disappearance, despite police advising him against such a move as it could generate swathes of false information.
He said he'd received just a single message about his sister's disappearance.
Ben said: "There's an eight-hour period from them going through that toll and Adelynn being dropped off in Cancun at that church.
"Then her phone stopped pinging pretty soon after that. It might have been a couple of hours I understand.
"We need closure...I just can't leave it like this because all I can think of is that something worse than being murdered has happened, like she is being trafficked."
He believes the couple must have used a different route to return to Cancun because they were not filmed on the same toll road camera on the way back.
Meanwhile, Ms Shanks' mother and brother rushed to Mexico within days after a family friend alerted them about the photos of Adelynn online.
Leanne only met her granddaughter once before but Dan had never met his niece due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
"(Tahnee's) never been away from that child," Ms Shanks' mum said.
"But look, it's just about...we've got to do everything we can to try and find her, we are distraught, her brothers and sister love her...we've just got to bring her home to Ade.
Ms Shanks was planning to fly back to Queensland on June 16, her family said.
And according to her Facebook profile page, Ms Shanks' plans were delayed by border closures.
In May 2021, she wrote: "I can't come back to Australia till mid 2022!!! My baby girl will be 2 1/2 years old and hasn't even met her grandad, uncles, great gran, cousins."
