It is when darkness struck that the quest for justice ironically found its light in a gruesome murder case perpetrated by the husband against his wife in Brisbane, Australia.
Australian Marcus Volke was busy cooking something strange in their kitchen when one thing went awry triggering power outage in his apartment. He readily called the services of a 24-hour electrician to ask for someone who can fix his problem immediately. Someone was available to attend to Volke’s problem and it was thanks to the power outage and the observant eye and strong intuition of the electrician that led to the discovery of a gruesome domestic violence.
The electrician oddly noted the bottles of bleach, garbage bags, and a strong, foul smell in Volke’s apartment when he arrived. He started to sense trouble and danger then. Volke tried to give the alibi that the foul smell was coming from the pig’s broth where the stock pot boiled over, dripped down and got into the oven, created a ‘big bang’ and power just went off after that.
The electrician did not fall for Volke’s alibi. Instead, the electrician alerted the building manager, who shortly after called the police to carry out a “welfare check.”
Turned out, Volke was not preparing pig broth at the time he made a call for the electrician, horrifically instead, Volke was cooking the feet of his wife already. When the authorities managed to enter Volke’ s apartment, they thought they had discovered a sick joke meant for a Halloween special: they saw human feet in a pot on the kitchen floor. They also found the wife’s remains inside a garbage bag.
Volke had tortured, abused and eventually killed his wife, Mayang Prasetyo. In a horrific case of domestic violence, Volke also dismembered his wife’s body. He tried to cook his wife’s feet or the soup.
Volke was accommodating with the officers who went to his place, but he excused himself afterward, with the alibi that he needs to secure his dogs first. He locked himself in the house, slashed his throat and jumped to the garden fence, with the intention of hiding and running away from the police. He hid inside a garbage bin, where he bled to death.
Volke misled his family into believing that he was a cook on cruise ships. The truth is he and his wife worked as highly-paid escorts who traveled the world. They also lived for a year in Denmark. His wife is an Indonesian pre-operative transgender sex worker. She started identifying as a woman back in Indonesia before moving to Australia. She opted to work as an escort for the higher income as she is sending money at home to help two younger sisters go to school.
Two weeks before the gruesome murder of his own wife, authorities reveal that Volke went to see a doctor for his anxiety, depression and a sleep disorder.
Prasetyo’s relatives in Indonesia are coordinating with Australian officials to send Prasetyo’s remains to Indonesia so they could arrange for her funeral.
