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. He said it was her personality that drew them together. “The way that she helped me with my kids, being there for me when I was going through psychotic breaks. She held me and told me it would be all right,” he said.
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.
Puccio said Sacco bled on his lap for seven hours. Then, he grabbed a plastic bag.
"She asked me if I could just let her die already. I told her, 'There is only one way I can do that, and it's not going to be pleasant,' " Puccio said.
Puccio claimed Sacco "smiled" as he put a bag over her head. Weak from the stab wound, it only took "about 20 seconds" for her to succumb, he said.
"I just laid next to her and cried. Kept telling her I'm sorry," Puccio said.
About 12 hours elapsed from when the argument began to Sacco’s death, Puccio said. At about noon on March 22, he said, he called his four friends - Christopher Wright, 37, and Sharon Cook, 25, all 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 affidavits filed with the arrests, police indicated Wright and Cook helped him remove the limbs. But Puccio said he alone dismembered the body. He said the 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.
Watch the video of the confession at whiotv.com/videonews on our website.
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