Days before Christmas in 2022, librarian Bruna Fonseca tried to explain why she no longer wanted a relationship with her engineer boyfriend Miller Pacheco.
“I don’t love you and I can’t be with someone out of pity,” Fonseca (28), a Brazilian woman living in Cork, texted Pacheco (32) on December 18th.
“That’s why I need to distance myself, because for you, any sign of help is a light at the end of the tunnel and I can’t give you hope because I don’t want us to get back together.”
Less than two weeks later, on January 1st, 2023, the relationship ended violently. Following weeks of being plagued by the Brazilian man by text and voice messages, Bruna lay dead at his apartment at Liberty Street in Cork.
Pacheco strangled Fonseca to death. The two had been in a relationship for five years and he had proclaimed in the run-up to her killing that he loved her and could not live without her following the end of the relationship. On January 23rd last, Pacheco was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of his former girlfriend.
At the outset of Pacheco’s murder trial at the Central Criminal Court in Cork, prosecuting lawyer Bernard Conlon SC painted in broad strokes how their relationship fell apart, re-enacting their conversations for the jury.
Bruna had recorded some of their conversations on her phone.
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