I couldn’t ignore the smell from the tenant’s apartment any longer. When my wife and I forced our way in, I spied a pot boiling on the stove… I knew what he had done – now we had to make it out alive

When chef Marcus Volke stabbed his wife Mayang Prasetyo to death in their Brisbane home and then tried to ‘melt’ her corpse in a pot filled with caustic soda, it made headlines around the world.

Now former soldier, firefighter and daredevil pilot Kevin Hughes, 67, has broken his silence about the shocking and terrifying day in 2014 he walked in on his new neighbour cooking his beautiful wife.

‘I glanced to my right towards the stove and then a very cold shiver passed through my body. It was like we had entered the middle of an Alfred Hitchcock movie set,’ he says in his just-released memoir, Courage and Resilience, One Man’s Story.

Speaking exclusively to Daily Mail Australia, Mr Hughes, a former firefighter who has rescued people from burning buildings and horror road crashes, says it was one of the most terrifying experiences of his life.

He started to realise something was very wrong when he and his wife Debrena, 67, noticed a horrible smell coming from the apartment of the ‘softly spoken young couple’ who had only just moved into their building.

‘We were leaving, going down in the lift, and I said, “What the hell is that smell?” Straight away with my experience I thought it’s either a drug lab or the smell of death,’ Mr Hughes says.

Just as Debrena, who was the property manager at the apartment complex, called Double One 3, in the upmarket riverside enclave of Teneriffe, decided to enter and see what had happened, Marcus Volke arrived home.

‘He’s walked up with his arm wrapped in a bandage which he’d said he’d cut at work. He was carrying two drums of acid. He’d cut her up, but we didn’t know that at this stage. Even, so the alarm bells started going off,’ Mr Hughes says.

Chef Marcus Volke stabbed his wife Mayang Prasetyo to death in their Brisbane home and then tried to ‘melt’ her corpse in a pot

Indonesian-born Mayang, who was transgender, met Volke in Melbourne after he became a male escort

Unbeknownst to Mr Hughes, there were two feet in the pot on the stove. Volke used the colander to strain the body parts after boiling them

Volke, 27, told them he was cooking pig’s head broth on the stove to explain the ‘pungent and putrid’ smell, and edged around them to enter the apartment, locking the door behind them.

It was a couple of hours later that Debrena received a call to say an electrician Volke had called was downstairs and needed access to the main electrical board because his apartment had lost power.

When they followed the electrician into Volke’s apartment, he told them his wife had left suddenly after an argument. Mr Hughes immediately knew something was very wrong.

‘The carpets were wet, and I could tell it was where a body had bled out. There were bits of skull and skin on the cornice,’ he says.

‘I said to him, “If your partner has left, how come her bag is still here?” I thought that was a bit strange. Turns out there were two feet in the pot on the stove, but I couldn’t see what was in the pot at that stage. There were bones in the dishwasher and her head and parts of her torso were in a black plastic garbage bag in the washing machine.

‘I firmly believe we came close to never getting out of there at a couple of stages.’

Still unaware of what horror had unfolded in the apartment, a furious Debrena argued with an increasingly agitated Volke about the damage, until Mr Hughes finally got her attention and made her leave with him.

‘I barely knew them, but I knew he had a black belt in karate and owned knives. I didn’t know if he had a gun. And she was giving him a right royal dressing-down. When we were out of there and in the lift, she asked why I had stopped her,’ he says.

‘I said, “Because she’s cooking in the f***ing pot.” I remember that as clear as day.’