Matthew Sullivan: Ex-sailor dumps wife's body in San Diego Bay 2 years after he killed and hid her in freezer
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA: A former Navy sailor was convicted this week and sentenced to 16 years life imprisonment after he was found guilty of killing his wife, hiding her body in a freezer for two years and then dumping the body in San Diego Bay shortly before he moved out of town.
Matthew Sullivan denied killing his 32-year-old wife, Elizabeth Sullivan, whom prosecutors said he stabbed at their Liberty Station home in October 2014. However, last year, a San Diego Superior Court jury found him guilty of second-degree murder.
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On Friday, March 12, Superior Court Judge Albert Harutunian III, who presided over the trial, handed down the sentence. “The jury verdict and the evidence at trial made it clear that Matthew Sullivan brutally murdered his wife, methodically cleaned up the messy murder site, and then hid the body for years,” Harutunian said. “He almost got away with it, but his final attempt to hide the body at the bottom of the bay failed.”
On October 4, 2016, Elizabeth's body was found after she was reported missing for two years. On that day, movers were at the home she had shared with her husband and their two children. Sullivan was getting out of the military and was moving to the East Coast.
At trial, San Diego County Deputy District Attorney Jill Lindberg said that Sullivan killed his wife because she was involved with another man and was planning to leave him. She also warned Sullivan that she will take their children along with more than $1,000 out of their bank account, the prosecutor said.
On March 12, Lindberg said 36-year-old Sullivan had “murdered his wife in their home as their children were in the other room. He made her look like the person who had abandoned her family when that was not the case and he knew it,” Lindberg said, adding that Sullivan made his children “twist in the wind and wonder what had happened to [their mother].”
Sullivan's attorney, Marcus DeBose, has said that Elizabeth was addicted to drugs, didn’t always come home at night and sometimes slept in a nearby park. He also stated that his client had no records of crime and had been a Boy Scout as a child in Minnesota. Sullivan later spent eight years in the Navy, with deployments overseas including the Middle East, the attorney said. The former petty officer was honorably discharged in 2016.
Sullivan made a statement during the hearing, saying some defense witnesses were not able to testify for various reasons and that he believed they would have turned the case in his favor. “I firmly believe their testimony would have changed the verdict in this trial,” he said. Lindberg responded: “There is clearly no remorse on the defendant’s part. He thinks he could have gotten a different verdict.”
Forensic tests suggest that Elizabeth's blood was soaked into the carpeting and wooden floor in her bedroom. Investigators also discovered a knife bearing traces of her blood tucked under the attic insulation.
Detectives also found out that the day she disappeared, her husband bought carpet cleaner. Sullivan did not report his wife missing. One of her friends did. Sullivan’s attorney defended him saying that the bloody carpet was the result of Elizabeth cutting herself, as she was used do to this when she was under stress. He also added that Elizabeth hid that knife in the attic for herself.
Sullivan was arrested in Delaware in 2018 and extradited to San Diego to stand trial.