A harrowing footage has been released by police in Brazil to show the last moments of a woman’s desperate fight for life in an elevator.
Tatiane Spitzner was allegedly brutally attacked by her husband before being strangled then thrown from a fourth-floor apartment.
The full sequence of the chilling events shows Luis Felipe Manvailer forcefully manhandling the woman in the early hours of the morning.
Last Thursday forensic investigators at Parana’s Medical Legal Institute (IML) released their report which concluded the lawyer did not die because of a fall but was strangled while in the couple’s apartment.
The 29-year-old lawyer's bloody and broken corpse was found inside the couple’s apartment in Guarapuava, south Brazil, on July 22.
Police suspected the 32-year-old university biology lecturer had killed his wife of five years after viciously assaulting her, but he denied it.
He claimed they argued, and she died after throwing herself off the balcony in their flat.
But their findings suggest Tatiane met a violent end and was choked to death while desperately trying to defend herself. The imprints of a pair of hands were on her throat, and the hyoid bone, located at the front of the neck, was fractured; an injury commonly associated with strangulation. The lawyer also suffered multiple fractures to the rest of her body consistent with a 40ft fall onto concrete paving.
A distressing record of the scenes leading up to the lawyer’s death gives a graphic insight into the domestic abuse she suffered.
According to reports, the couple were on a night out when they started arguing over images of a woman found on Manvailer’s phone. Security cameras in the city centre condominium where they lived, documented a blow by blow account of the incident that starts with a car pulling up outside the building. Strong images show the Jiu-jitsu martial arts specialist apparently slapping his wife several times across the face in the vehicle as she tries to fight him off.
The sickening violence continues in the underground car park with the victim being physically assaulted, kicked, throttled, chased across an underground car park and into the elevator where she is brutally battered, overpowered and restrained as she desperately tries to get away.
What is not seen is the 15 minutes of alleged brutality inside the couple’s apartment. But shortly after the pair arrived at their apartment, a body plunges to the floor outside the building.
Cameras show the accused allegedly bringing the victim’s body into the lift. The suspect holds his head in apparent despair. He is then seen allegedly cleaning traces of blood from the walls of the elevator.
Close friends of the victim claim she revealed in a series of texts, sent many months prior to her death, that she was "afraid" of her husband who she accused of "mistreating" her, and she wanted a divorce.
However, the defence lawyer for the husband argued the couple had a "happy" relationship.
Manvailer has been charged with murder (including the qualifiers under Brazilian law of femicide, cruelty, clumsy motive and hindering the victim’s defence to further explain what happened), along with incarceration of the victim and procedural fraud.
He is in prison awaiting trial.
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