A man who was said to have committed the ‘perfect murder’ when he threw his ex-wife over the side of a cruise ship was caught after a key detail was discovered.
This murder, committed by Lonnie Loren Kocontes, was the focus of a Channel 5 documentary The Push: Murder on a Cruise Ship, airing last night, March 13.
Kocontes, a lawyer, killed his ex-wife Micki Kansaki in May of 2006.
Whil
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he was an initial focus of investigations, the lawyer would not be caught for seven years.
Kocontes had thrown Micki Kansaki overboard on a cruise ship for financial gain, hoping to gain access to her almost £800,000 fortune.
In addition to this he hoped to sell her home for profit.
The pair had divorced prior to her death, but had recently reconciled and were making plans to get remarried.
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Kocontes and Kansaki had made one another the executors of each other’s estates.
Julie Sanarita, the niece of Kansaki, told Dateline: "He said he was going to change, he was going to work less, and things were going to be better. She was just so happy.”
The man claimed that he had taken a sleeping pill on May 25, waking the next morning to find his ex-wife missing.
This, however, was found to be a lie as he was eventually discovered to have murdered her.
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A statement from the Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer called the lawyer’s murder the ‘perfect crime’, but revealed one key detail led to his arrest.
He said: “Despite all of his painstaking planning to pick the perfect ship, the perfect room and the perfect time to commit a murder, the fact that he strangled her before throwing her overboard gave us the very evidence to convict him of murder.
“She couldn’t breathe in water because she was dead long before her body ever hit the ocean and when authorities found her, her cause of death was determined to be asphyxiation – not drowning.”
Kocontes told police: “I can’t rule suicide out. When she would be sad and she would drink, she talked in general terms wishing that she were dead.
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“She’s talked about wanting to kill herself in the past.”
An FBI investigation into the death began when, in 2008, Kocontes tried to to move nearly the full sum of money in Kansaki’s bank account into his own.
He was arrested in 2013 and sentenced to life in prison in 2020, 14 years after her murder.
The Push: Murder on a Cruise Ship can be watched online on Channel 5.
Topics: Crime, TV and Film, TV, Channel 5, Documentaries, True Crime
Michael Slavin