MECHANICSBURG — A man accused of murdering and dismembering his ex-girlfriend confessed to the crime during an exclusive interview with the Dayton Daily News on Wednesday.

The Daily News requested interviews with all five suspects arrested in connection with the murder of 21-year-old Jessica Rae Sacco inside her apartment at 625 W. Light St. in Urbana.

The only one to agree was the main suspect, 25-year-old Matthew Puccio. He’s been charged with murder, felonious assault, abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence.

Puccio said he plans to plead guilty and deserves the death penalty.

Puccio said he’d been in a relationship with Sacco for about a year-and-a-half.

About two months ago, he said they began arguing more. Things came to a head just before midnight March 21, Puccio said, when he went to Sacco’s apartment to confront her about text messages he received claiming she wanted him dead.

He claimed it ended with her asking him to kill her.

“She was pleading with me to slash her throat, slash her wrists, do something, and I told her, ‘No. I can’t do that to you,’ ” Puccio said.

“And she told me to stab her then, so I just held my hand above her stomach. She grabbed my wrist and pulled it into her stomach,” he said.

About 12 hours elapsed from when the argument began to Sacco’s death, Puccio said. At about noon March 22, he said, he called his four friends — Christopher Wright, 37, and Sharon Cook, 25, both of Urbana; and Kandis Forney, 25, and Andrew Forney, 26, both of Michigan — and told them what he’d done

He decided to cut up Sacco’s body because he “was scared.” He removed two legs and an arm, then stopped because “I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

In arrest affidavits, police indicated Wright and Cook helped him remove the limbs. But Puccio said he dismembered the body alone. He said the four friends helped clean up while he “just sat there and broke apart.”

To hide the evidence, Puccio claims his friends told him to dump the body parts. He said they drove to a wooded area in Covington, Ky., and pushed them out of the car.

Puccio then went to a friend’s house in Hamilton. He did not call the police, he said, because he knew they would discover the body eventually and he “needed to come to terms with what I did.”

Puccio said Cook, Wright and the Forneys shouldn’t be punished, because “they had nothing to do with this.”

“We have no right to take someone else’s life, no matter what the scenario is,” he said. “I know (that), and I have to live with that.”

Puccio remains in the Tri-County Jail on a $100,000 bond. A preliminary hearing has been set for 10 a.m. April 17.