COPS have arrested the ex-boyfriend of a famous influencer whose body was found stuffed in a suitcase and buried in the woods.
Patrick M. got caught up in the investigation after the police found him in Stefanie Pieper’s apartment following her death.
Stefanie Pieper was making her way home from a Christmas bash before she vanished.
She went radio silent and was not seen after she got out of a taxi with her friend.
When a patrolling team went to Stefanie’s apartment for an investigation, they found Patrick and her dog Marlow, a Golden Retriever.
But he claimed: “I don’t know where Stefanie is. I only have the key to look after her dog,” before driving off from the scene in his red Golf car.
The nightclub security guard initially fled to his native Slovenia but was arrested and extradited back to Austria.
Cops feared he could be at the centre of her chilling disappearance.
He initially remained silent on the matter, but eventually cracked after hours of interrogation.
The 31-year-old is alleged to have ambushed Pieper after a Christmas party last Saturday and killed her following a loud argument.
Witnesses say that they saw her ex-partner at the apartment and he was carrying a suspicious roll of fabric.
It is thought that he then used his red Volkswagen Golf to transport her lifeless body across the border into neighbouring Slovenia.
Investigators later found his car burned out in a parking lot near the border.
He apparently sought to destroy any evidence of his wrongdoing.
On the night of her disappearance, Pieper texted her friends to say that a mysterious figure was hanging around her apartment.
She wrote: “There’s a creep in the stairwell.”
The popular influencer added the person she saw cut a “dark figure”.
Investigators had spent days searching for Pieper, using drones and sniffer dogs to aid their efforts.
Officers had searched several properties belonging to the suspect’s family.
According to reports in Slovenia, her body was eventually found in a forest near the town of Majsperk.
The alarm was first raised when she failed to show up for a scheduled photoshoot.
When she didn’t arrive for work, the concerned photographer went to her apartment to check on her.
Feeling increasingly uneasy about her absence, he contacted the police.
Officers later found her phone discarded in a nearby bush.