In the classic Hollywood comedy “How to Murder Your Wife,” Jack Lemmon is falsely accused after creating the perfect crime for a newspaper cartoon strip.
Now law enforcement officials in New York want to question Russian-Israeli author Yevgeny Perchikov after two of his girlfriends wound up dead – in circumstances strikingly similar to the fictional accounts he wrote in a collection of murder stories.
And in a twist that evaded the Hollywood screenwriters, Perchikov collected $1 million life insurance on one of the dead women, while two other insurance companies refused to pay.
He was denied a similar payout after his second girlfriend died.
The Manhattan District Attorney has launched a fraud investigation and wants to question Perchikov, but last night the elusive author could not be found in New York or at his last known address in Israel.
And the families of the dead women have filed papers in an American court accusing Perchikov of murder.
Larysa Vasserman, 48, a divorcee who had recently immigrated to the US from Ukraine, met Perchikov when he answered a lonely hearts ad.
She died in her Brooklyn apartment in mysterious circumstances in 2002.
Tatiana Korkhova, 54, a widow who knew Perchikov from their native Russia, was discovered dead in her Manhattan home in 2004.
Doctors were unable to discover the cause of death in either case, and it transpired that both women had taken out large life insurance policies worth millions of dollars – with Perchikov as the beneficiary.
The plot thickened when the families of the dead women realized that Perchikov had written stories which explained how a killer could carry out the perfect murder and get away with it.
One was about a hit man hired to kill someone so the death would not appear to be a homicide, suicide or accident.
In the second, the main character is a doctor who relates how someone injects a victim with a drug to induce nausea and then gives a second shot to “treat” the condition – actually a fatal dose of adrenaline.
Vasserman had complained of nausea shortly before her death.
According to a wrongful death suit filed against Perchikov by her family, he falsely claimed she was pregnant.
The family also found a string of inaccuracies in the insurance applications – claims that Perchikov was a medical doctor, and that Vasserman was an art restorer earning $100,000 a year when in fact she cleaned houses.
The family sued the insurance companies, accusing them of negligence by issuing the policies based on fraudulent information.
Korkhova’s family filed a similar action which claimed she was given “an overdose of norepinephrine, a method of murder which Perchikov described in detail in the short story.”
Cyril Wecht, a prominent American pathologist hired by the families’ lawyer, said Perchikov had written a plausible short story in which a murder victim was killed with an undetectable injection of norepinephrine.
A court in New York dismissed the suits last week, but the Manhattan district attorney is investigating whether fraud was committed.
The American police have not opened a murder inquiry.
But the mystery surrounding Perchikov’s current whereabouts continues to grow.
Neighbours at his modest apartment block in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, said last night he spent most of his time in Russia, apparently looking after his elderly father.
“We have been separated for two years. He hasn’t lived here since then,” Perchikov’s wife, Natalia, told reporters through her firmly locked front door.
“We don’t live together anymore.” She refused to answer questions about her estranged husband. “I can’t tell you anything about him and I don’t want to talk about him,” she said.
Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-482338/Author-missing-girlfiends-die-similar-circumstances-victims-stories.html