A woman who shot her husband in cold blood before chopping up his body and placing the pieces into three suitcases has said he still haunts her. Elize Matsunaga murdered 42-year-old Marcos Matsunaga before cutting him into seven parts at their penthouse apartment in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The motive for the crime was allegedly the discovery that her husband had been cheating on her, but the aftermath has left her hearing voices coming from his decapitated head.
- Elize shared her story in a Netflix documentary. In Elize Matsunaga: Once Upon A Crime, she revealed that she’d allegedly been abused by her stepdad and eventually ran away to Sao Paulo to become an escore in order to pay for college so she could be a lawyer. At one point, she met Marcos, a Japanese millionaire, who was married at the time. Eventually, he divorced and he and Elize married and had a daughter.
- The couple’s daughter, Helena, was only one when the murder happened. Their relationship was troubled from the beginning due to allegations of cheating and a fight over custody of Helena. This eventually led Elize, now 47, to hire a private investigator to prove that Marcos was being unfaithful.
- Elize has always claimed the murder was self-defense. After getting into a fight over the private investigator’s findings, Elize said she was “scared” at how Marcos reacted when confronted with the proof. She grabbed a gun from the cabinet and shot him multiple times, saying: “I still can’t tell you what kind of emotion made me pull that trigger. I can’t describe it to you. I can’t even tell you what I felt because I saw him collapsing, and at that moment it seemed the world stopped.”
- She didn’t bother to call for help. Instead, she dragged Marcos’s body from the room and cut off his head, arms, torso, groin, and legs before putting the parts in plastic bags and stuffing them into suitcases. While Elize has always insisted that Marcos was dead when she began cutting, an autopsy claimed he was alive. She was arrested nine days after the crime and eventually sentenced to 19 years in prison during a trial in 2016.
- She claims people only care because her husband was rich. According to Elize, people have done much worse but she’s gotten attention only because her husband was wealthy. “The types of crimes I learned about in prison, there are crimes that are way more barbaric than mine, way more shocking than mine, but nobody mentions them,” she claimed. “Nobody talks about them because the victim wasn’t wealthy. The victim was an ordinary person. Someone poor.”
Elize, who hasn’t seen her daughter since her arrest, said she took part in the Netflix documentary to offer Helena her side of the story.
