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STUCK behind bars in a New York jail cell, it is still possible to catch glimpses of Viktoriya Nasyrova’s wicked charms. There’s the coy smile she gives male visitors and the wideeyed look of faked innocence that comes over her face whenever her hideous crimes are mentioned.
For while she no longer has access to expensive make-up and designer outfits, the 47-year-old Russian is a seasoned seductress, a cheat and a liar.
Above all, as a US court heard last week, she is a prolific poisoner, one of the worst in American legal history.
That trial centred on her attempt to kill a beautician with slices of tranquilliser-laced cheesecake, said to be from the Big Apple’s finest bakery, so she could steal the woman’s identity. But while Nasyrova was found guilty of attempted murder, assault and unlawful imprisonment and now faces up to 25 years in prison, detectives believe her latest crimes are just the tip of a monstrous iceberg.
She is also wanted for at least one brutal murder in her native Russia, where she is alleged to have burnt a victim’s body and dumped it in woodland before fleeing to New York nine years ago.
There, using various aliases and advertising online as a dominatrix, she drugged men and robbed them of cash, credit cards, jewellery and watches.
This week, the Mail spoke to those involved in bringing Nasyrova down and uncovered an evil saga so twisted, so shocking, it is not surprising it is already being touted as a future Netflix series.
Such talk is hardly surprising given the success of Inventing Anna — the platform’s hugely successful drama about Anna Sorokin, another notorious Russian-born criminal who conned and thieved her way through New York high society.
But Nasyrova’s ruthless crimes against both men and women are on a whole other level.
As the victim of the cheesecake poisoning, Olga Tsvyk, told the Mail this week: ‘Viktoriya is a very bad and dangerous person. This didn’t just happen to me. It happened to other victims. Some of them didn’t want to come forward but I’m a strong woman. I will be relieved when she is sentenced in March.’
Also staggering is how she was finally brought to justice by the combined efforts of a singleminded private detective and the hell-bent daughter of the woman Nasyrova is alleged to have killed in Russia.
‘I haven’t seen anyone this ruthless in a long time,’ says Herman Weisberg, an ex-NYPD cop who now runs his own detective agency, Sage Intelligence Group.
He tracked down Nasyrova after analysing selfies she posted on Facebook while on the run and identifying the make of her car and further clues he spotted in the reflection in her mirrored sunglasses.
And while Nasyrova is yet to be tried for the alleged Russian murder, it was Weisberg’s investigation which ultimately saw her put behind bars earlier this month for the infamous cheesecake poisoning.
‘She’s dangerous; definitely had to be taken off the streets,’ he tells the Mail. ‘She’s a very manipulative person. She’d slipped through the net multiple times.
‘I think if she wasn’t put in jail, she would have left a trail of bodies behind her.’
The devastation Nasyrova left in her wake stretches back to the former Soviet Union, where she was born in December 1975 in the bleak industrial town of Armavir in southwestern Russia. After school, she trained as a hairdresser and moved to the nearby city of Krasnodar.
There, in an apartment block, she became the next-door neighbour of retired 54-year-old Alla Alekseenko and befriended her over a period of months. Alla spoke of her new friendship with her glamorous, apparently kindly, neighbour during regular phone conversations with her daughter, Nadia, who had been living and working in New York since 2007.
But after entrusting Nasyrova with thousands of euro worth of her savings, after the younger woman said she would take it to New York and give it to Nadia, Alla became concerned she wouldn’t get the money back.
On October 4, 2014, she told her daughter that Nasyrova had finally agreed to return the money.
But the next morning, when Nadia called to check on her mother, there was no reply. Alla was never heard from again.
Nadia flew back to Russia and found her mother’s flat empty, but ransacked of jewellery and documents, as well as around $52,000 (€48,000) in cash from the sale of her grandmother’s house. Like many Russians, Alla — who had lived through the economic chaos of post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s — mistrusted banks and kept her savings hidden at home.
When she challenged Nasyrova, still living next door to her mother’s empty apartment, Nadia says she told her: ‘Your mother is alive!’ Words which convinced her something terrible had happened.
When Russian police didn’t take the case seriously, Nadia began investigating, bribing officials to hand over traffic camera footage which showed her mother’s limp body in the front of a hire car being driven by Nasyrova.
The dark-eyed brunette was arrested and interrogated, not only about Alla’s disappearance, but also the 2014 disappearance of two owners of another apartment — an apartment Nasyrova was then somehow able to sell herself. Russian authorities have since admitted that the investigation against her was fatally stalled after she seduced one of the lead investigating officers.
And after stealing someone’s identity, Nasyrova flew to Mexico and finally to New York. Interpol issued an international ‘red notice’ requesting her arrest on murder charges.
In April 2015, Nadia received the news she had been dreading; her mother’s charred and incomplete remains had been found in a remote area, three hours drive away and close to Nasyrova’s home town.
‘Viktoriya took everything from me, my family, my life, my mum, my everything,’ Nadia told US TV channel CBS in 2017.
Back living in New York, she didn’t give up on her bid to find the woman whom she believes almost certainly killed her mother. She was stunned to find her on Facebook, living in plain sight just down the road in New York, shamelessly flaunting herself in fur coats and posing in front of the Manhattan skyline. Nadia reported Nasyrova to police and immigration officials but when they failed to find her, she turned to Weisberg for help.
He says of Alla’s deeply determined 36-year-old daughter: ‘She had a very very close relationship with her mother and she would have chewed
The case stalled after she seduced one of the officers
She drugged men and stole from them
through steel to find out who killed her. She would have made a great cop.’
By the time Weisberg began investigating, Nasyrova was up to her old tricks again.
In May 2016, she was arrested for shoplifting two furs worth around €550 but NYPD officers didn’t connect her to the Interpol red notice and soon she was free again — and dangerously emboldened.
Posing as a dominatrix called ‘Anna’ or ‘Rachel’ or ‘Mara’ on dating apps, she began drugging male victims and stealing from them. Several were married and too embarrassed to call the police, but among those she targeted, and nearly killed, was 54-year-old Reuben Borukhov, who owns a New York dry-cleaning store.
He was single when he met Nasyrova via a dating app in June 2016; she invited him to dinner at her apartment in New York’s Sheepshead Bay.
‘She was smart and attractive,’ he told the Mail this week.
‘I went to her house and she cooked fish and said we needed to eat it immediately. There were no bad smells, nothing suspicious.
‘We sat down and toasted. I took a few bites of fish and that is the last I remember. I didn’t know where I was for two days.’
During that time, Nasyrova took a watch worth €750 and $500 cash and ordered an €1,800 diamond ring using Borukhov’s Amex card. Once it had been delivered, she drove him back to his dry-cleaning shop in Queens and told his shocked employees that the reason he could barely stand was that he was drunk on vodka.
‘My workers know I don’t drink,’ explains Borukhov. ‘So they took me to hospital. I don’t remember anything about it. I was dizzy and nauseous for two weeks. I could have died. I think if she’d put extra drugs in the fish then that would be it.’
The hospital confirmed he’d been poisoned and he gave evidence at her trial.
A couple of months later and having moved in with a new unsuspecting lover, Nasyrova hatched her most devious crime to date.
This time she set her sights on 35-year-old Ukrainian beautician, Olga Tsvyk, plotting to kill her so she could assume her identity — they look uncannily alike.
Nasyrova had been a regular client