Behind the picture-perfect yellow walls of their family home in a village near Basel,Kristina Joksimovic,38,was strangled to death by her husband Marc Rieben,41,who went on to dismember and 'puree' her in a blender.
Now,eight months after the disturbing crime,the stairs leading up to the large semi-detached house are overgrown with weeds.
The property lies abandoned in an affluent area of Binningen,which locals call the 'gold hill' due to the 'who's who of rich people' that live on the streets overlooking the Rhine and Basel.
The couple's neighbour,who shares a wall with Kristina,told MailOnline she 'never even heard the couple fighting' and only realised what had transpired next door when police cars lined the road and officers went around to question residents.
'I only knew her as a neighbour and saw her sometimes in our [shared] garage. It's horrible,' she said,adding that she never thought something like this could happen in Switzerland,let alone next door.
Kristina,the mother of their two children,was allegedly killed because she had previously come at him with a knife. He admitted dismembering her body 'in a panic'
She added: 'Women come forward but are told 'you provoked him'. They aren't protecting women here. The police and the system failed to protect her.
'I have experienced domestic abuse at the hands of my former partner and it took extremely long for the police to come,like 30 minutes or more,and when they were finally here,they told me it was his home and he could punch in the door.
'They also asked me: 'What did you? How come that he hit you? What did you do before?'.'
The mother of a little boy,who is around the same age as Kristina's daughters,said people would still come and place new flowers and candles on a wall in front of the house.
Even now,dozens of pots with blooming orchids and other flowers are lining the top of the 3ft wall as well as two framed pictures of the mother-of-two.
Joksimovic's body was found in her home with an autopsy revealing the mother-of-two was strangled to death before being chopped up with the garden implement,a knife and a saw.
Her husband,who was only named by pseudonym Thomas in local media due to Swiss privacy laws,had an appeal for release from custody rejected earlier this week by the Federal Court in Lausanne after admitting to having killed his wife.
Kristina's husband is reported to have claimed he killed her in self-defence after she came at him with a knife. He then reportedly said he dismembered the ex-model - with whom he has two children - 'in a panic'.
Investigators said Thomas showed a 'lack of empathy and cold-bloodedness after killing his wife' and displayed 'sadistic-sociopathic traits' in their psychological assessment,while prosecutors said the businessman had grabbed a former partner by the neck and hit her.
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