Marcia Eubank is behind bars for murdering her husband, Howard Eubank, at their home in Akron, Ohio, where she hid his dismembered body.
On Dec. 9, 2017, Marcia received a text message from her son, who asked about a foul-smelling crate he had found beneath a pile of blankets at their home in the 3000 block of Linda Drive in Coventry Township.
“It is part of your father’s body,” Marcia replied in a text message. “The other parts are in the basement under two boxes in crates.
“Call the police and tell them I killed dad and stored his body. Don’t dig crates out; let police do that.”
Her son obliged.
Later that day, officers with the Summit County Sheriff’s Office arrested Marcia at a local Walmart.
She was booked into the Summit County Jail on charges of aggravated murder, corpse abuse, and evidence tampering.
According to the Akron Beacon Journal, her bond was set at $1 million.
In an interview with investigators at the Summit County Sheriff’s Office, Marcia stated that on June 13, 2017, she got into an argument with her 54-year-old husband in his home office.
She went to their bedroom and retrieved a .22 caliber handgun, which she had purchased four days earlier.
Marcia said she planned to kill herself, but instead, she returned to the office and shot her husband once in the back of the head as he was sitting at his desk.
She then left the room, but when she heard him moaning, she went back and shot him three more times in the head. That’s when he slumped over his computer and died.
Marcia told investigators that she had suffered years of mental and physical abuse by her husband.
According to a written statement, Marcia claimed she “was tired of being belittled and yelled at and something in my head snapped.”
“I should have died that morning, but he started yelling at me like he always did. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
Family members agreed that their relationship was tumultuous and there was verbal abuse, but they said she was the aggressor, and they never witnessed Howard physically assault her, Cleveland reported.
Instead of turning herself in as she had originally planned, Marcia decided to get rid of the evidence.
First, she dragged her husband’s body to a closet and left it there for eight days. Then she removed the body and cut off the limbs.
Using power tools and a grinder, Marcia dismembered Howard’s body and poured bleach on it before dumping his remains inside three plastic storage containers.
One was kept in a locked room, while the other two were hidden away in the basement.
Hours after dismembering her husband, Marcia went to a job interview. And when she returned home, Marcia contacted Howard’s job.
Before his death, he was working as a truck driver for a pipe company. She used his cell phone to send a message to his employer that stated that he had to quit his job, as he had become ill and was moving to Houston, Texas.
For the next six months, Marcia continued to use Howard’s cell phone. She would send text messages to his family and friends to make them believe that he was alive and well.
According to ABC News, their son stated that “we all thought it was odd and strange that he would just up and leave, but it never crossed our mind that she would actually murder him.”
He said the last time he spoke to his father on the phone was in May 2017. “We were talking about him coming to my wedding and how excited he was to come and how proud of me he was.”
“And then in the middle of June, we get a message saying that he left my stepmom and went to Texas.”
Police learned through an investigation that Howard’s murder may have been planned.
Two months before his death, Marcia used the computer in their home office to search the following: “how to murder, what to murder people with, what poisons kill, and the effects of lye,” Cleveland reported.
On June 18, 2017, six days after the killing, email records indicated that Marcia purchased lye on Amazon and attempted to “cash in on her husband’s 401K retirement account,” prosecutors said.
In a press release, Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh said, “This was a very difficult situation. My heart goes out to the family. However, Mrs. Eubank needs to be accountable for her actions.”
“She killed her husband, hid the body, and lied for six months about what happened. If not for her son finding his father’s body, what she did may still be secret today.”
Marcia took a plea deal, and the aggravated murder charge was dropped. She then pleaded guilty to murder with a firearm specification, tampering with evidence, and abuse of a corpse.
In February 2019, Marcia was sentenced to life in prison, and she will be eligible for parole after serving 20 years.