Marcus Volke, a young Austrian cook, killed his girlfriend in Australia in 2014. He was then discovered by the police just as he was boiling his remains to get rid of them.
Marcus Volke
The young man was born in Vienna, but had long lived in Australia where he had also attended high school.
He worked as a chef on cruise ships and it was in one of these ships that he met Mayang Prasetyo, an Indonesian transgender woman who later became his girlfriend. She used to do drag shows at a Melbourne club called Le Femme Garcone, then she moved to Brisbane to stay with Marcus.
In 2013 the two of them get engaged officially and then get married in Europe. Everything seems to be going well. They live together in a good neighborhood and both have a good job and, apparently, no problem.
Murder
The murder was discovered after Marcus and Mayang’s neighbors complained of a strong smell from their apartment, where the couple had moved only 3 weeks earlier. A few days earlier the neighbours had heard screams coming from the apartment and had warned the police, but they could not tell whether it was a party or a fight.
The police decided to investigate after the complaints about the bad smell. When they arrived at Marcus’ apartment on October 4, 2014, he escaped through the window. In his kitchen, the remains of poor Mayang boiled while other parts of the body were in some containers in the house.
Shortly before the police arrived, Marcus had called an electrician for a problem with his electric stove. When the electrician arrived to fix the fault, Marcus told him to ignore the smell because he was cooking pork broth. But in reality, he was disposing of his girlfriend’s remains.
The police chased Marcus Volke, but he took his own life by cutting his throat with a knife before being taken into custody. A couple living in the same residence as Marcus said that one night, a few days before the murder, they had met Marcus. The young man would ask them to use their telephone because he had forgotten his keys. He was very tense, stammered and had just returned from the hospital.
The records confirm that the man allegedly went to the hospital for a hand cut and that he would have justified it as a domestic accident. That was also the last day that the neighbors saw Mayang and, probably, the date of the murder.
A double life
What emerges after the investigation is disconcerting. Both allegedly worked in the prostitution field, in some of Melbourne’s legal brothels. Marcus had also worked as a gigolo in Europe under the name of Heath XL. Mayang, on the other hand, proposed herself as a Top Escort and was able to earn up to $500 an hour.
Then she regularly sent money to Indonesia to support his family and give his two younger sisters, aged 15 and 18, a good education. And perhaps Mayang’s profession may have been the cause of the quarrel. Marcus had gone with her to Indonesia and met his family, who today describe the young man as taciturn. However, the couple seemed to love each other, although someone suggested that the two had married to get Mayang permission to stay by marriage.
Unfortunately, given the death of the protagonists of the affair, we will never know the truth.
