A university lecturer has been sentenced to 31 years in prison for strangling his wife to death and throwing her body from their fourth-floor balcony in one of Brazil’s most high-profile murder trials of recent years.

Following a seven-day trial, Luis Felipe Manvailer was sentenced to 31 years, nine months and 18 days in prison for homicide and obstruction of justice on 10th May.

A jury of seven men found him guilty of killing his wife of five years, Tatiane Spitzner, whose dead body was found inside the couple’s apartment in the Brazilian municipality of Guarapuava in July 2018.

Witnesses attest to seeing Spitzer lying in a pool of blood on the pavement beneath the couple’s fourth-floor balcony and Manvailer subsequently taking her bloodied body back inside their apartment building.

The biology professor, then aged 32, was arrested following a traffic accident over 200 miles from the crime scene hours later.

He told the police, who believe he was trying to flee to Paraguay, that his wife had jumped to her death.

However, the autopsy carried out on the 29-year-old lawyer’s body gave the cause of death as mechanical asphyxia.

Security camera footage recorded inside the couple’s apartment building also showed Spitzer trying to run away from her husband in the garage and the professor roughing up his wife in the lift shortly before the crime took place.

Manvailer’s preventive detention was ordered, and he has since spent two years and nine months in a prison in Guarapuava.

The judge, Adriano Scussiato Eyng, also ordered the defendant to pay BRL 100,000 (GBP 13,559) in compensation to the victim’s parents.

The victim’s family’s lawyer, Gustavo Scandelari, has said he considers the verdict a milestone in the fight against femicide.

It had taken years for the trial to go ahead, as it had been postponed numerous times due to appeals from the suspect’s lawyer and complications due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Manvailer’s lawyer, Claudio Dalledone, has said he will appeal the sentence.