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A gigolo who brutally murdered his Indonesian transsexual prostitute girlfriend was foiled in his attempt dispose of her body by cooking it when the power went out.
Marcus Volke is believed to have killed Mayang Prasetyo, 27, in their upmarket Brisbane flat in October 2014 in a domestic violence incident.
Standing over her lifeless body, the 27-year-old put his chef skills to work and chopped her into pieces before boiling them on his electric stove.
It seemed like a perfect plan and he may have gotten away with it if the huge pot hadn't boiled over and short-circuited his apartment's power.
'G’day, is this a 24 hour electrician?' he casually asked Brad Coyne, forced to call for help getting the power back on to complete his sick plot.
'Yeah I got a bit of a problem. Um, I was cooking on my stove, it's an electric stove and the stock pot boiled over, dripped down and got into the oven and basically made this big bang and then all the power turned off.
'Does it sound like something you'd be able to fix today?'
A few hours later Mr Coyne arrived at the Teneriffe flat and was confronted by a putrid smell, which the killer tried to explain away.
'You'll have to mind the smell, I'm cooking pig's broth,' Volke said.
The electrician was led around the house, where he saw garbage bags, bottles of chemicals and rubber gloves.
'We went into the bathroom which had laundry in it and there was a cupboard that had the washing machine in it - which I didn't know at the time had bits of his wife's body in it, like her head and arms,' he told the Scottish Daily Record at the time.
Mr Coyne got the power back on and tested the stove - not knowing Ms Prasetyo's feet were sitting half-cooked in the massive pot.
Still feeling something was off, he talked to the building manager on the way out - who immediately called police for a welfare check.
A coronial inquest is investigating what happened next, when two police officers arrived for a routine check that led to Volke slitting his own throat in a nearby skip.
Constable Liam McWhinney and his partner Senior Constable Bryan Reid arrived at the flat and initially found Volke cooperative and were not suspicious.
But when they asked if they could search the apartment, Volke told them he needed to secure his dogs, locked the door and fled.
Constable McWhinney said the pair gave chase but their quarry eluded them and they returned to the unit to search it.
That was when they found the pot with Ms Prasetyo's feet simmering, and in disbelief thought it was a joke.
'Originally I thought it was some sort of sick prank… Halloween or something — when I put two and two together, I realised it wasn't a prank,' Constable McWhinney told the inquest on Monday.
'There was a pool of blood at the base of the fridge.'
Meanwhile, Volke jumped over his balcony fence into a laneway behind his building, then over another fence.
Having self-harmed before fleeing the apartment, he left a trail of blood behind him, smearing both fences and officers could easily follow.
Volke sought refuge inside the industrial bin but was soon surrounded by 15 officers with no escape.
When police opened the bin they found he had slit his own throat with the knife he grabbed on his way out of his flat.
The crime scene took four days to clean up, and included disturbing items like rubber gloves, bleach, and 'squelching' carpet, along with a vomit-inducing smell.
The three-day inquest will, in part, determine what role police had in Volke's death, and whether they complied with Queensland Police policy and procedure.
On Monday it also heard from Detective Sergeant Joshua Walsh that Volke saw a doctor for anxiety, depression and a sleep disorder two weeks before the murder-suicide.
Police also obtained medical records showing that he had sought treatment at Victoria's Ballarat Hospital when he was 16 years old.
Detective Sergeant Tom Jakes, the dog squad’s Senior Constable Robert Richardson and district duty officer, Senior Sergeant Sean McKay, are also expected to testify.