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Joseph S. A. Porter, 25, pleaded guilty to second-degree unintentional murder in the strangulation death of Cristina Prodan, 27, at her Edina, Minnesota, apartment on January 4, 2018, and was sentenced to 250 months in prison.

The Hennepin County Attorney's Office charged Porter with one count of second-degree murder in June 2018 while he was in federal custody. He entered the plea on January 15, 2019, and Hennepin County District Judge Martha Holton Dimick imposed the 250-month sentence, equal to 20 years and 10 months, that same day.

Minnesota sentencing guidelines called for 180 to 216 months. Prosecutors said Porter agreed to the longer term because he did not call authorities, hid Prodan's body and caused prolonged distress to her mother. Under Minnesota law, he serves about two thirds of the term in prison and the remainder on supervised release, with credit for time spent in custody after his arrest. No appeal has been publicly identified.

During his police interview, Porter admitted meeting Prodan online and moving to Minnesota to live with her. He said they argued on January 4, that he punched her and put her in a chokehold until she was unconscious, and that he placed her body in a suitcase and drove away. Prodan died of strangulation. Porter also admitted putting her remains in a shipping container in New Orleans and setting them on fire with gasoline, burning himself in the process.

Porter loaded the suitcase into his 1995 Honda Accord and drove south. That evening, an officer in Greene County, Missouri, stopped him for expired registration and saw large suitcases, a new pickaxe and a shovel in the back seat. Porter said he was moving back to Arkansas from Minnesota and needed the tools for his job. On January 5, Prodan's mother, Livia Prodan, asked Edina police to check on her. Officers found the apartment disheveled and empty.

On the evening of January 6, the New Orleans Fire Department extinguished a fire in a shipping container at a junkyard and found a badly burned body. Porter had doused the remains with gasoline and burned them with old tires. The remains were identified as Prodan. Her cellphone pinged near Cabot, Arkansas, on January 9, and surveillance video showed Porter and another person pawning it at a Walmart. Another cellphone ping led police to Porter's estranged husband's home in Jacksonville, Arkansas, where Porter was arrested that day with burns on his face, hands and body. He was booked into the Pulaski County jail, initially on theft charges, and charged in federal court with kidnapping.

Prodan lived in Edina, while her mother lived in nearby Richfield. Porter was from Arkansas and moved to Minnesota in the fall of 2017. Prosecutors described their relationship of roughly three months as marked by frequent conflict. Porter was married to a man in Arkansas, from whom he was estranged. Prodan obtained a no-contact order against Porter in late December 2017, and he was convicted on December 28, 2017, of a gross misdemeanor for violating it.

The video runs about 78 minutes and shows the police interview-room recording itself. It begins with a short narrated introduction naming the people involved.

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Part 2 of 2 of the recording described above.