A 32-year-old man has been jailed for life for the murder of his ex-girlfriend in Cork three years ago after he failed to accept that their five-year relationship was over.
Miller Pacheco, a Brazilian engineer whose full name is Miller Mizerani da Cunha Belo Pacheco, had denied the murder of Bruna Fonseca (28), a librarian, at his apartment at Liberty Street in Cork on January 1st, 2023.
The jury of five men and seven women at the Central Criminal Court took just one hour and two minutes on Thursday to find him guilty of Ms Fonseca’s murder after hearing evidence from more than 30 witnesses in the trial.
On Friday, Ms Justice Siobhán Lankford sentenced Pacheco to the mandatory life sentence and backdated it to January 2nd, 2023, when he first went into custody. She paid tribute to Ms Fonseca, whom she described as “a kind and caring person, a complete human being”.
Defence counsel Ray Boland SC said his client accepted the jury’s verdict and would not be appealing it. He said his client had also asked him to express his remorse for his actions to Ms Fonseca’s family and for the great distress he had caused them.
The court heard victim-impact statements from Ms Fonseca’s older sister, Izabel, who told how their family life had been paralysed by her murder. Her cousin Marcela said they all still bear the scars of what happened to her at the hands of her former boyfriend.
Among Ms Fonseca’s family in court for the sentence were her sisters Izabel and Fernanda, her niece Maria and her cousin, Marcela, as well as 30 members of the Brazilian community in Cork. Many of them wore T-shirts with Ms Fonseca’s photo and a caption saying she would never be forgotten.
Pacheco sat with his head bowed in the dock as the court heard details from Izabel about how her family received her body for burial in their hometown of Formiga some two weeks after she was murdered in Cork, thousands of kilometres from where she had grown up.