Murder of Marcos Matsunaga

Marcos Kitano Matsunaga was born in São Paulo on 1 October 1970. He graduated from Colégio Santa Cruz, studied business administration at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) and took over the running of Yoki, the food company founded by his grandfather, Yoshizo Kitano, in the 1960s. He met Elize Araújo in 2004 and, after separating from his first wife, married her in October 2009. By May 2012 the couple had a one-year-old daughter.

According to accounts gathered by investigators, the marriage became strained from 2010 as Elize suspected him of infidelity. In May 2012 she hired a private investigator, who photographed Marcos meeting another woman in São Paulo on 17 May while Elize was visiting her home state of Paraná. She returned to São Paulo on 19 May.

That evening, security cameras at the couple's apartment building in Vila Leopoldina, in the west zone of São Paulo, recorded Marcos going downstairs to collect a pizza at about 7:30 p.m.; it was the last footage of him alive. Elize Matsunaga later confessed to shooting him in the head with a .380-calibre pistol inside the apartment and to dismembering his body. The next day she left the building carrying three suitcases, and his remains were later found beside a road in Cotia, in Greater São Paulo. She said his affair was the motive, that the shooting followed an argument in which he struck her, and that she had acted alone.

After the remains were identified, she confessed and was arrested by São Paulo police on 4 June 2012. A judge in Cotia refused her lawyer's request for release, and prosecutors asked for her to be held in preventive detention until trial.

Her jury trial began at the Barra Funda criminal courthouse in São Paulo on 22 November 2016 and, at seven days, was one of the longest in the history of the state's judiciary. The day before the verdict, she told the court she "was not herself" on the day of the killing and expressed remorse. In the early hours of 5 December 2016, the jury of São Paulo's 5th Jury Court convicted her of qualified homicide and of destruction and concealment of a corpse. Jurors accepted the qualifier that she had used a means that prevented the victim's defence and rejected the prosecution's allegations of base motive and cruel means. Judge Adilson Paukoski Simoni sentenced her to 19 years, 11 months and one day in prison under a closed regime.

On 22 March 2019 the Fifth Panel of Brazil's Superior Court of Justice (STJ) reduced the sentence to 16 years and 3 months, recognising her confession as a mitigating factor. After serving about ten years, she was granted parole on 30 May 2022 and left the Tremembé penitentiary to serve the rest of her sentence under conditional release, with a duty to report her address and occupation to the courts.