When chef Marcus Volke stabbed his wife Mayang Prasetyo to death in their Brisbane home and then tried to ‘melt’ her corpse in a pot filled with caustic soda, it made headlines around the world.
Now former soldier, firefighter and daredevil pilot Kevin Hughes, 67, has broken his silence about the shocking and terrifying day in 2014 he walked in on his new neighbour cooking his beautiful wife.
‘I glanced to my right towards the stove and then a very cold shiver passed through my body. It was like we had entered the middle of an Alfred Hitchcock movie set,’ he says in his just-released memoir, Courage and Resilience, One Man’s Story.
Speaking exclusively to Daily Mail Australia, Mr Hughes, a former firefighter who has rescued people from burning buildings and horror road crashes, says it was one of the most terrifying experiences of his life.
He started to realise something was very wrong when he and his wife Debrena, 67, noticed a horrible smell coming from the apartment of the ‘softly spoken young couple’ who had only just moved into their building.
‘We were leaving, going down in the lift, and I said, “What the hell is that smell?” Straight away with my experience I thought it’s either a drug lab or the smell of death,’ Mr Hughes says.
Just as Debrena, who was the property manager at the apartment complex, called Double One 3, in the upmarket riverside enclave of Teneriffe, decided to enter and see what had happened, Marcus Volke arrived home.
‘He’s walked up with his arm wrapped in a bandage which he’d said he’d cut at work. He was carrying two drums of acid. He’d cut her up, but we didn’t know that at this stage. Even, so the alarm bells started going off,’ Mr Hughes says.
Chef Marcus Volke stabbed his wife Mayang Prasetyo to death in their Brisbane home and then tried to ‘melt’ her corpse in a pot
Indonesian-born Mayang, who was transgender, met Volke in Melbourne after he became a male escort
Unbeknownst to Mr Hughes, there were two feet in the pot on the stove. Volke used the colander to strain the body parts after boiling them
Volke, 27, told them he was cooking pig’s head broth on the stove to explain the ‘pungent and putrid’ smell, and edged around them to enter the apartment, locking the door behind them.
It was a couple of hours later that Debrena received a call to say an electrician Volke had called was downstairs and needed access to the main electrical board because his apartment had lost power.
When they followed the electrician into Volke’s apartment, he told them his wife had left suddenly after an argument. Mr Hughes immediately knew something was very wrong.
‘The carpets were wet, and I could tell it was where a body had bled out. There were bits of skull and skin on the cornice,’ he says.
‘I said to him, “If your partner has left, how come her bag is still here?” I thought that was a bit strange. Turns out there were two feet in the pot on the stove, but I couldn’t see what was in the pot at that stage. There were bones in the dishwasher and her head and parts of her torso were in a black plastic garbage bag in the washing machine.
‘I firmly believe we came close to never getting out of there at a couple of stages.’
Still unaware of what horror had unfolded in the apartment, a furious Debrena argued with an increasingly agitated Volke about the damage, until Mr Hughes finally got her attention and made her leave with him.
‘I barely knew them, but I knew he had a black belt in karate and owned knives. I didn’t know if he had a gun. And she was giving him a right royal dressing-down. When we were out of there and in the lift, she asked why I had stopped her,’ he says.
‘I said, “Because she’s cooking in the f***ing pot.” I remember that as clear as day.’
The spot on the carpet where Mayang bled to death – Mr Hughes says he immediately knew what had happened
Volke left a trail of blood after leaping out of his apartment and climbing a fence while fleeing police
The alleyway which Volke ran down before taking his own life in an industrial bin
They immediately called the police and when they arrived Mr Hughes showed them the photos he’d taken on his mobile phone of the ‘damage’ and the cooking pot, but the police thought it might all have been part of a sick prank.
When the two police officers knocked on Volke’s door to do a welfare check, he answered, but said he needed to secure the two French Bulldogs that Mayang was often seen walking in the neighbourhood and promptly shut the door in their faces.
Moments later Debrena saw him jump over a balcony and run down an alleyway at the side of the apartment complex. The police officers and Mr Hughes gave chase, but it wasn’t until hours later that the dog squad helped locate him.
Volke was found dead in an industrial bin with a carving knife and self-inflicted wounds to his wrists and a slashed neck. The murder-suicide made headlines around the globe and forced Mr Hughes and Debrena into hiding to avoid hordes of media wanting interviews.
A coronial inquest held into the murder-suicide in 2017 found that Volke had bought a large cooking pot, rubber gloves, a scrubbing brush, garbage bags, wipes and laundry soaker from a supermarket in Newstead about 6pm on October 3, 2014.
With his shopping list of things needed to ‘melt’ Mayang’s bones complete, he went to hospital by taxi to treat the wound on his hand, telling the taxi driver ‘he had been cutting onions and the knife slipped’.
The following day he went out and bought a meat cleaver, with a doctor later determining that Mayang’s ‘body was dismembered after death with attempts to dispose of the body made by cooking and dissolving the body parts’.
The coronial inquest also heard evidence that Indonesian-born Mayang, who was transgender, met Volke in Melbourne after he became a male escort to try and pay off $9,000 worth of credit card debts.
Mr Hughes says he had no idea Mayang was transgender and thought she was extremely ‘pretty’ when he ran into her in a hallway in the unit complex
Kevin Hughes and his wife Debrena, 67, noticed a horrible smell coming from the apartment of the ‘softly spoken young couple’ who had only just moved into their building
Mr Hughes detailed the grotesque discovery of Volke cooking Mayang in his new memoir, Courage and Resilience, One Man’s Story
He promised to help get her a permanent partner visa in return for her help in plying his business in transgender clubs. The couple married in Denmark in August 2013, and were sex workers in Asia and Europe before moving to Brisbane in August 2014.
Volke, who grew up in the small country Victorian farming community of Haddon, near Ballarat, kept his secret life as a prostitute and his marriage to a transgender woman secret from his parents and siblings.
Before the brutal murder, he worked part time as a chef at Bulimba in Brisbane and had suffered mental health issues for nine years. He told an ex-girlfriend that he was again struggling with mental health before he killed Mayang.
Mr Hughes, who says he had no idea Mayang was transgender and thought she was extremely ‘pretty’ when he ran into her in a hallway in the unit complex, admits the crime still haunts him today.
He has detailed the grotesque discovery of Volke cooking Mayang in his new memoir, Courage and Resilience, One Man’s Story.
Mr Hughes is a former daredevil pilot who won a major bravery award after famously clambering out of the cockpit to rescue a female parachutist trapped beneath his plane in midair, and dodged missiles in Afghanistan on top of flying top secret ‘ghost planes’ transporting terrorists to black sites.
He also worked for many years as a firefighter in Brisbane, and says the horrors and tragedies that first responders routinely witness will always haunt him more than Volke’s shocking crime.
You can read more about his extraordinary life in Courage and Resilience, One Man’s Story, which is published by Bilby Books and available in soft cover, hard cover and audio book.
