FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A woman thought she was being helpful when the Serbian man she had met on a dating app asked her to translate a message into Colombian Spanish, saying he needed it for a novel his friend was writing.

“I met someone wonderful,” the message began. “He has a summer house about 2h from Madrid. We are going there now and I will spend a few days there. There is barely any signal though. I’ll call you when I get back.”

The woman sent him back the Spanish version of the message. Later, her mother Googled his name, David Knezevich.

That was when she saw, according to a criminal complaint, that he was the husband of Ana Knezevich, a Fort Lauderdale woman of Colombian descent who disappeared in Madrid in February and hasn’t been seen since. The exact message the woman had sent him for his friend’s novel appeared again and again in news reports, sent from Ana Knezevich’s phone the day she disappeared.

David Knezevich was arrested Saturday at Miami International Airport on federal kidnapping charges pertaining to his involvement in his wife’s disappearance, according to federal officials. It remains unclear if Ana Knezevich is alive or dead, but a federal complaint brings to light new details about the events surrounding her husband and her disappearance. Investigators allege that David Knezevich spray-painted the security cameras at his wife’s building in Madrid, stole license plates from a car on the street where she had disappeared, and later, while she was widely reported missing, had his employees impersonate her in order to close out insurance policies and open a bank account.

On Feb. 2, Ana Knezevich went to look at apartments. She wanted to stay in Madrid more permanently, she told her friends. She was preparing for a divorce from David Knezevich, in which he did not want to divide up the assets evenly, according to the complaint. She was afraid of him and thought he was secretly monitoring her. According to a petition for conservatorship filed by her family in Broward, she had told friends that he was narcissistic and manipulative during group therapy sessions.

Security cameras captured Ana Knezevich entering her Madrid apartment a little after 2 p.m. It would be the last time anyone ever saw her.

That night, a man in a helmet entered the building a little before 9:30 p.m. Inside, he spray-painted the security camera lens, though he did not completely obscure its view. It captured him duct-taping the building’s lock so that he could enter it again. At one point, he looked right at the camera. He appeared to have “physical characteristics that resemble of those of Knezevich,” the complaint states.

About an hour later, camera footage captured him leaving the elevator with what appeared to be a suitcase.

The next day, David Knezevich reached out to the Colombian woman he had met on the dating app, who is not named in the complaint.

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