Mónica Spear Mootz was born to Rafael Spear Tudares and Ingeborg Mootz Gotera. Her maternal family emigrated from Germany, and her paternal family has English ancestry. The Spear–Mootz family moved to Orlando, Florida in 2000 after her mother, Ingeborg, retired from her job with an oil company in Venezuela. Her father, Rafael, is a project engineer at Siemens Westinghouse. Prior to being named the "fifth most beautiful woman in the universe," Spear completed a bachelor's degree in theater from the University of Central Florida before returning to Venezuela to compete in the national pageant. Her participation in Miss Venezuelagarnered notoriety when she was asked during the traditional "breakfast with press" the day after the pageant, because of her degree, which Venezuelan playwright she liked the most, to which she answered, "Gabriel García Márquez", a Colombian writer. She crowned her Miss Venezuela successor, Jictzad Viña, on 15 September 2005. Spear married a British businessman, Thomas Henry Berry (whose nationality was later misidentified as Irish) in June 2008. She gave birth to a daughter later that year. The couple divorced in 2012, but remained friendly, and at the time of their death they were attempting to reconcile She was a naturalized United States citizen, resident inMiami, Florida. She is a cousin of Jossie Nikita Marques Spear, a Venezuelan model. Spear was fluent in Spanish, English and French. On January 6, 2014, Spear was in her native Venezuela on vacation with her ex-husband and their five-year-old daughter. On a highway in central Carabobo, when the three were inside their car waiting for assistance after the vehicle had broken down, Spear and her ex-husband were killed during an attempted robbery and their daughter shot and wounded in the leg. The police reported that the incident occurred around 9 or 10 p.m. It has been theorized that the thieves tried to rob them and the couple resisted.