A man has been arrested in Arizona after a headless body was found hidden in a closet in an apartment in Phoenix.
“This is brutal. This is awful. This is, you know, a word almost doesn’t, it’s not good enough to really describe this,” Phoenix Police Sergeant Robert Scherer said.
Christopher Ebanks, 32, was arrested in connection with the alleged crime, which occurred last week. According to court documents obtained by AZFamily, officers responded to reports of a possible homicide at around 9 p.m. on May 7.
At the apartment officers found a strong smell of bleach and other chemicals coming from inside, and found various cleaning supplies littered around including bleach bottles, wet blankets, as well as “red substances,” the outlet reported.
Authorities said the body discovered appeared to “be dismembered” and was missing its head and hands. The corpse was wrapped in carpet and an air mattress and was tied up with an extension cord, according to the documents.
“It’s one thing to murder someone. It’s another thing to go through dismemberment afterwards,” Scherer said.
According to AZFamily, detectives were called by the father of a woman who claimed that her boyfriend had been killed by his “associate” – referred to as “Draco” but later identified as Ebanks.
The three were reportedly drinking at the apartment before the two men got into an argument, Fox10 reported. Ebanks then allegedly pulled out a hatchet, court documents stated.
The woman claimed she witnessed Ebanks stab her boyfriend multiple times, and said he then told her, “we need to clean this up,” the court documents stated, per AZFamily.
He then put the head and hands of the victim into a suitcase and ordered the woman to drive him to his own apartment, where she had been forced to shower “at knife or gunpoint” in order to destroy evidence of the alleged killing, according to authorities.
“Our detectives are extremely confident that this individual is a victim and extremely confident that anything that they may have done throughout this whole scenario was in duress,” Scherer said.
Following his arrest Ebanks was charged with crimes including murder and kidnapping and is being held on a $1 million bond. He is due back in court on Thursday May 14.
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