Dorothy Redd and Marc Amouri Bakambia
Marc Bakambia
Marc Bakambia
Marc Bakambia
Dorothy Redd
Dorothy Redd
A Congolese immigrant accused of strangling his ex-girlfriend and taking a selfie with her dead body has pleaded guilty to murder in southeastern Minnesota.
Minnesotan newspaper The Star Tribune reported that Marc Amouri Bakambia admitted to killing Dorothy Redd in August 2014 after she ended their relationship.
Bakambia pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on Tuesday following a nine-day trial.
Dakota County prosecutors say that the 29-year-old Bakambia will serve a 30-year prison sentence before being deported to Congo.
Redd's mother found her 24-year-old daughter's lifeless body on a bed in her West St. Paul home. Investigators say they later found the selfie on Bakambia's mobile phone, showing him lying next to Redd's body.
Days before her death, Bakambia was arrested on suspicion of assaulting her. He was released from jail on the 8th August 2014 on conditions that included not having any contact with Redd, according to the Tribune.
The woman's mother told police that her daughter said she feared for her life and that she was so frightened that she "pretended like she was dead, but she was getting weak," during the assault, the Tribune reported.
The day before her tragic death, Redd attempted to end her relationship with Bakambia following a supermarket argument.
He was arrested on 13 August 2014 for violating the court-issued no-contact order.
During his first police interviews, he gave an investigator conflicting accounts of what happened but later acknowledged that Redd was dead.
Bakambia also left several voicemails for the investigator involved in the case while he was locked up.
Some of the messages found him speaking as if her were talking to his dead ex-girlfriend.
“My life don’t have no sense right now,” Bakambia said in one voicemail, according to recordings obtained by the Tribune.
“But I’m still fighting. I need to know exactly what I did to my fiancée.”
In another incident, the killer made a strangulation motion to his throat while uttering “fiancée, my fiancée” as he was speaking with a West St. Paul petrol station employee who informed police of the encounter, the Tribune reported.