Fugitive baked up cheesecake poison plot to kill lookalike
Prime suspect in Russian murder hunt fled to US and plotted to steal friend’s identity, prosecutors allege
A RUSSIAN woman on the run from police in her homeland has been accused by New York prosecutors of lacing a friend’s cheesecake with poison in an attempt to murder her and steal her identity.
Viktoria Nasyrova, 42, is being held in New York’s notorious Riker’s Island prison, accused of what Richard Brown, the Queens district attorney, called “a bizarre and twisted crime”.
Nasyrova’s strange story began in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, where she befriended her older neighbour, Alla Aleksenko.
Mrs Aleksenko, 54, mysteriously disappeared in 2014, and her badly burned remains were found in a shallow grave months later.
Nasyrova was the prime suspect, and was allegedly after the victim’s cash inheritance.
But she began an affair with one of the detectives on the case, and, before prosecutors could press charges, she fled to the US.
But Nadezda Ford, Mrs Aleksenko’s daughter, who had moved to the US to study in 2007, was determined to seek justice and hired a private detective. Herman Weisberg, a 20-year veteran of the NYPD, discovered that Nasyrova had moved to within five blocks of Ms Ford’s home in the Russian enclave of Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, New York.
He found that Nasyrova had an active Facebook profile, and he began to gather clues about her whereabouts through studying selfies she had taken. He tracked down people who knew Nasyrova, and learned that she was allegedly funding a lavish lifestyle of fur coats and diamond jewellery, mainly by drugging and robbing men.
On Aug 28, 2016, Nasyrova visited the Queens home of 35-year-old Olga Tsvyk, bearing cheesecake as a gift, according to authorities.
Ms Tsvyk also spoke Russian and, crucially, bore a striking resemblance to Nasyrova.
After eating some of the cake, the woman started to feel sick and lay down. She allegedly remembered seeing Nasyrova sitting by her as she passed out.
The next day, she was found unconscious in bed by a friend. She was wearing lingerie and there were pills scattered all around her, giving the impression she had tried to kill herself, authorities said.
She was taken to hospital for treatment and made a full recovery.
When she returned home, Ms Tsvyk noticed her passport and employment card were missing, along with a gold ring and cash.
Homeland Security agents tested leftover pieces of the cheesecake and found it was laced with phenazepam, authorities said. The pills tested posi-
‘This is a bizarre and twisted crime that could have resulted in death’
tive for phenazepam, too. Nasyrova was arrested in Brooklyn on March 20 last year and on Wednesday police in Queens detailed the charges against her.
“This is a bizarre and twisted crime that could have resulted in the death of a Queens woman, whose only fault was that she shared similar features with the defendant,” said Mr Brown.
“Offering a gift of a cheesecake, the defendant is alleged to have laced the dessert with a Russian drug and presented it to the unsuspecting victim. Luckily, the Queens woman survived the poisoning. The defendant has been apprehended and now faces a long term of incarceration.”
Nasyrova faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted, and is next due in court on May 25.
Mr Weisberg told The Daily Telegraph that he was hired by Ms Ford in February 2017 to try to track down Nasyrova. He said: “I got lucky with tracking her down. She kept on slipping through people’s fingers, but I put it all together and called my old friends at the NYPD to tell them I had found a woman wanted in Russia for murder.
“They were pretty happy about it – I didn’t know about the cheesecake incident at that time.”
He added that Nasyrova looked “remarkably” like her alleged victim. “She’s quite a character,” he said.