“I don’t love you and I can’t be with someone out of pity,” Bruna Fonseca (28), a Brazilian woman living in Cork, texted her ex-boyfriend Miller Pacheco (32) on December 18th, 2022.

Two weeks later, on New Year’s Day, 2023, gardaí would discover her body in Pacheco’s apartment. She had been strangled.

At Pacheco’s trial for her murder at the Central Criminal Court in Cork, this and many other texts, voice messages and recorded conversations were read out in court.

As Irish Times Southern correspondent Barry Roche who attended the trial explains, they paint a picture of an angry man, full of self-pity, who could not accept that his former girlfriend who he had followed to Ireland from their native Brazil no longer wanted to be in a relationship with him.

He put forward a plea of self-defence but the evidence proved otherwise and he was found guilty of her murder. On January 23rd last he was sentenced to life in prison.

Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Suzanne Brennan. 

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