New York woman charged in kayak death denies killing her fiancé

In barely a whisper, Angelika Graswald, the woman accused of killing her fiancé while they were kayaking on the Hudson River, told ABC’s “20/20” that she “loved him” and “didn’t do anything to kill him.”

Graswald, 35, was charged with second-degree murder in late April after Vincent Viafore, 46, with whom she lived in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., drowned when his kayak capsized.

She has been in the Orange County jail awaiting trial since, and prosecutors have said that Graswald, who was the beneficiary of two life insurance policies totaling $250,000 that Viafore bought, tampered with his kayak by removing a drain plug. They cited incriminating statements she made to police, including it “felt good knowing he was going to die.”

But in an interview with Elizabeth Vargas broadcast Friday night, she repeatedly denied doing anything to Viafore’s kayak. (Her lawyer, Richard Portale, has said that her comments during the police interrogation were coerced.) “No, I loved him,” she said, wearing a beige sweater over her orange jailhouse jumpsuit. “I didn’t do it.”

However, the program also played excerpts from nearly 12 hours of police interrogation tapes, and while Graswald did not confess outright to killing Viafore, she did express frustration with the relationship and a desire to end it. She complained about his pressuring her to participate in “threesomes, porn — everything.”

Battled emotions

She also talked about feeling emotionally torn on the river, after the police asked her what was going through her mind. “I’m like ripping in two halves,” she said. “You know, angels and demons. The demon side, it’s not a good side, and that side was telling me this is gonna happen, let it happen. Just let it. But the good was, ‘Save him, save him, save him. You’re strong.’”

The detectives asked why the demon side won out, and she replied: “Well, ’cause of the way he was treating me, you know.”

But during the hours of police interviews, she waffled and contradicted herself as well. An interrogator asked, “Did you want him gone?” Her reply: “Sometimes.” At another point, she said, “I didn’t want to kill him or anything like that.”

A detective asked, “Why didn’t he have that plug in there?” She responded, “He didn’t have it because I guess I had it.” The interrogator pressed, “Did you intentionally take that plug out because you wanted to set yourself free?” “Could be,” Graswald replied. A Latvian native who arrived in the United States years earlier as an au pair, Graswald talked about the couple’s passion for the water. The two kept kayaks in their apartment, and they planned to be married on a beach in Latvia, she said.

On April 19, a mild Sunday, they ventured out on the Hudson in two kayaks. The water was 46 degrees, cold enough to immediately cause hypothermia. Graswald wore a life jacket, but Viafore did not. “He didn’t have one,” she told Vargas.

While Portale, her lawyer, has said that Graswald struggled with English despite being in the country for 20 years, she appeared to have an impressive grasp of the language during the police interrogation.

During the questioning, the detective asked, “When you watched him in the water, was a part of you saying, ‘My worries are going away now?’ Were you almost ... .” He paused, but she filled in the word, offering “Euphoric.” The detective said, “Euphoric that he was gone — you felt that way?” She answered, “I still do.”

The “20/20” program also played the tape in which she is read her Miranda rights, as well as the 911 call she placed from the river in which she is heard shouting, “Hold on baby!” Hours into the interrogation, she did yoga poses when she was alone, and even hopscotched across the room. At the end of the interrogation, visibly frustrated and exhausted, she said, “I wanted him dead and now he’s gone, and I’m OK with it.”