The ex-boyfriend of Florida mother Cassie Carli was ordered to pay her nearly $6,000 in child support days before she vanished and was later found buried in a shallow grave.
Ms Carli, 37, went missing on 27 March after meeting her former boyfriend Marcus Spanevelo for a visitation with their four-year-old daughter Saylor near Navarre Beach in Florida.
A major search operation lasting almost a week ended on Sunday with the police finding her body in a barn in Alabama, with identification confirmed through a distinctive tattoo, the Santa Rosa County sheriff’s office announced at a news conference.
Mr Spanevelo, who has ties to the property where the body was found, was arrested in the case on Saturday.
Court documents show that Mr Spanevelo was ordered to pay Ms Carli’s attorney fees in their extended custody battle - totalling $5,920 - just nine days before she went missing, Fox News reported.
According to a GoFundMe page set up by her sister Raeann, Ms Carli was involved in a legal dispute with Mr Spanevelo over access to their daughter in 2021.
The page has raised $1,705 of a $8,000 goal for legal fees spent on an attorney that helped regain custody of Saylor, Ms Carli wrote in the campaign description.
Mr Spanevelo had filed several motions for contempt, a motion for temporary custody, a motion to request daycare attendance, and numerous other petitions in family court, according to the documents.
In her note on the GoFundMe campaign, Ms Carli said Mr Spanevelo had bi-monthly visitation rights but owed her "over 10K in support" since she filed for sole custody in 2019.
“This man was a master at the game of manipulation and though I could see all the warning signs of an abuser, I believed his excuses and became stuck in his web of narcissistic lies,” she wrote.
“During my pregnancy, this man’s abusive control and manipulation escalated. But having battled infertility in my first marriage, I desperately wanted a family. So, I justified his erratic behavior as long as I could.”
She alleged the state was set to issue a delinquency notice but allowed him to continue his scheduled custody visit after making a “false” child protective services claim.
"For over two weeks, I had no contact with my daughter or knowledge of her whereabouts," Ms Carli wrote.
Mr Spanevelo was arrested in Tennessee on Saturday on charges of giving false evidence and tampering with and destroying evidence in relation to getting "rid of" Ms Carli’s phone.
Text messages cited by The Sun showed Mr Spanevelo had contacted Ms Carli’s father the day after she vanished and said she had asked him to drop her off “in the middle of nowhere” in the Florida city of Destin to stay with a friend named Stacey.
Ms Carli’s father was immediately suspicious, writing back: “Stacey moved to Alabama a while ago. Cassie would never have you drop her off anywhere. Is her car at your house?”
Mr Spanevelo replied to say that Ms Carli’s car was still in Navarre Beach and he had left with Saylor, The Sun reported.
Her car was found at Juana’s Boat Ramp two days later.
Friend Sam Porter, who coordinated the search in Florida, said in a Facebook post that Ms Carli’s dad received a message from her phone saying she was "having car trouble and that her cell phone was dying".
"This morning her father received a text message from Marcus Spanevelo stating that Cassie had started going crazy and that he was bringing her to my house," Ms Porter alleged in the video.
"Cassie was never brought to my house."
She was discovered more than 1,500 miles away in Alabama, with Santa Rosa County Sheriff Bob Johnson telling a press conference more charges are likely following an autopsy to determine Ms Carli’s cause of death.
