Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
At 6:41 p.m. on December 9, 2017, Summit County Sheriff Steve Barry found Marcia Eubank in a Walmart parking lot in Akron, Ohio. Half an hour later she was sitting in an interview room at the sheriff’s office Detective Bureau, still wearing a patterned scrub top.
There was not much left to hide. That afternoon her son Howie had climbed through a window into her office, found a storage tote covered in flies and sent her photos of it. At 1:34 p.m. she texted him back. The tote held part of his father’s body, she wrote, and the rest was in the basement. “Call the police and tell them I killed dad and stored his body.” She had killed him, she wrote, on June 13. That was six months earlier, and for all that time the family had believed Howard Eubank had left for Texas.
By the time the interview began, crime scene deputies and the medical examiner’s team had already been through the house on Linda Street and found the two hidden totes in the basement. At 7:14 p.m. Detectives Larry Brown and Brian Breeden sat down with her.
The full story of the case, from the window Howie climbed through to the texts his mother sent from his dead father’s phone, is in our main article: Mom Pretended to Be Their “Missing” Dad for Six Months. Then Her Son Climbed Through a Window.
Wicked Crime obtained the full, uncut recording of this interview directly from law enforcement. You can watch all of it below.
The recording runs 56 minutes, from 7:14 p.m. until just after 8:10 p.m. Marcia sits on the left. One detective, in a black Sheriff’s shirt, sits at the end of the table. The other sits at the bottom edge of the frame, mostly out of view.
What happens in the video
Timestamps refer to the player above.
00:49 – A detective pats her down. All she has is a tissue.
01:25 – “Everything in here is audio and video recorded.”
01:49 – She says she kept switching her phone back on, and that she had planned to turn herself in that night.
02:37 – A detective tells her they are at her house with a search warrant: “We found some remains of your husband.”
03:02 – Miranda warnings. She answers “yes” to each one.
04:03 – She gives the time of the shooting to the minute.
08:18 – Asked what happened with her husband’s job: “I killed him.”
10:53 – “I stood behind him. I shot him in the head.”
16:41 – “It was basically that morning. I just snapped.”
20:10 – She says she fired again when he lifted his head.
22:26 – A detective sums up her account and checks it with her, step by step.
27:34 – “Wait a minute.” She corrects what she told his boss.
34:49 – “I’m glad he’s gone.”
37:19 – She says she hates guns and had never fired one before that morning.
39:30 – Asked whether she ever thought she might kill her husband.
42:09 – She agrees she “had all day” to come up with a story before Howie got home.
46:45 – Told she will be charged, she answers: “That’s fine.”
52:08 – A detective asks whether she plans to harm herself.
53:18 – She asks for water. One detective leaves the room for about a minute.
56:12 – “Come on out here.” The interview ends.
“6:28 in the morning”
The interview starts gently. A detective tells her that her son is safe and that someone will go back and explain everything to him. Her first worry, she says, is Howie: “I don’t want my son going to jail for…” She never finishes the sentence.
At 04:03 the detective asks when it happened. Before he can finish, she gives him the date and then the time: “6:28 in the morning.”
She tells them her husband was a drunk who had been abusive for most of their 24 years together, and that she stayed because of her children. Asked what happened with his job, she answers with three words: “I killed him.” Then, at 08:22: “I basically texted his boss,” telling him that Howard had quit.
She says she bought the gun “probably a week or two before.” At 10:32 she describes the morning itself: “He’s yelling at me nonstop and stuff, and I just couldn’t take anymore.”
“I stood behind him,” she says at 10:53. “I shot him in the head.”
Eight days, then the totes
She explains that she moved his body into the office closet and left it there for eight days. Then, she says, she had to cut him up, “which I really didn’t plan on doing. I was gonna turn myself in.” At 11:32: “I panicked.”
At 12:25 she asks the detectives a question of her own: “Didn’t my son tell you?” She describes where the basement totes are, behind a table full of junk and under two cardboard boxes, just as she had told Howie in her text. She is less sure of the colors. The second one is “maybe it’s green,” she says. It was blue.
She tells them, in detail, which parts of the body are in which tote and what tools she used. She insists that nothing ever left the house and that her son “knew nothing.”
“I just snapped”
Asked when she made the decision, she answers at 16:41: “It was basically that morning. I just snapped.”
At 20:10 she explains that there was more than one shot. “I believe I shot him five times,” she says. “I had to go back in because he lifted his head at one point and was moaning.” Asked to confirm that she fired the rest of the shots to make sure he was dead, she answers at 21:10: “It’s hard to say it, but yes.”
Asked whether Howie never wondered where his father was, she says she had sent him messages saying his dad had left, “and stuff like that, you know, trying to cover.”
At 27:34 she stops a detective mid-question. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I may have told him he was in the hospital at that point,” she says, meaning Howard’s boss. And the rest of his family? “All I said is that he left town and they believed it.”
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