WIFE

up and Matthew Sullivan was stationed in the Navy. They married in 2010, moved when the husband was transferred to San Diego and had two children.

They were living in Navy housing at Liberty Station when Sullivan started getting long deployments overseas. As the marriage chilled, they slept on separate floors of their threestory townhome and the wife signed herself up on a dating website.

She began dating a man but neglected to tell him she was married with children. A friend of his who noticed two child seats in Elizabeth Sullivan’s car called Child Protective Services, thinking her children must be home alone. The fallout from the CPS investigation was that her husband learned she was unfaithful and the boyfriend ended their dating relationship, Deputy District Attorney Jill Lindberg said.

She said Matthew Sullivan was “understandably upset” and abused his wife on at least one occasion.

Defense lawyer Marcus Dubose told jurors the wife abused drugs — moving from wine, marijuana and amphetamines to whiskey, cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl. She didn’t always return home at night.

In October 2014, Sullivan asked his mother, her partner and his sister to move in to help with child care. The prosecutor said Sullivan’s wife didn’t get along with the in-laws and planned to get a restraining order to keep them out of the house.

She met with an attorney on Oct. 13, 2014, arranging to visit the lawyer’s office the next day. Lindberg said Sullivan and his wife got into an argument the night of the 13th. The wife called a friend in Virginia that night, then never used her cellphone again.

The next day, Lindberg said, Sullivan bought carpet cleaner at Home Depot.

Dubose laid out a different account of the couple’s dwindling time together, saying that after the CPS incident, Elizabeth Sullivan

broke her bedroom mirror and used a shard to slice her arm. Finding her with blood everywhere, Matthew Sullivan bound her wound. She asked him not to call 911 for medical help.

The wife began sleeping in a park along San Diego Bay near their home, Debose said. He added that two off-duty sheriff ’s deputies saw her sleeping there one day, recognizing her later from photos after her body was found.

When Elizabeth Sullivan failed to contact friends, one of them reported her missing to San Diego police. As weeks dragged on without finding her, the homicide squad took over the case but found no evidence of foul play.

On Oct. 4, 2016, the day Matthew Sullivan was moving out of the Liberty Station town house to join a girlfriend in Virginia, his wife’s decomposed body surfaced in the bay about half a mile from her home. It took the county Medical Examiner’s Office a week to identify the remains.

An autopsy revealed she had been stabbed five times with an object that broke her ribs, and her upper jaw and nose were fractured.

Lindberg said homicide investigators searched the town home more thoroughly, eventually finding Elizabeth Sullivan’s blood soaked into her bedroom carpet and on a knife tucked under insulation in the attic. That, the prosecutor said, is enough evidence to convict the defendant of murdering his wife.

The prosecutor said the body may have been stored in a freezer in the couple’s garage prior to investigators searching the home. Matthew Sullivan was arrested in 2018 after he had left the Navy and moved to Virginia.

Dubose noted that Elizabeth Sullivan’s body was found near the same park where she occasionally slept. He also said that one of her friends got an email, apparently from her, several weeks after she left her home.

The trial is expected to resume Monday.