3 cases tagged “New York true crime”
Convicted: Carolyn Warmus
On the night of January 15, 1989, Paul Solomon unlocked the door to his Greenburgh, New York condominium and found his wife, Betty Jeanne, sprawled on the living room floor. She had been shot nine times and pistol-whipped about the head. He had spent the evening bowling with friends, then drinking and having sex with his mistress in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. The two stories would collide in a courtroom spectacle that transfixed a nation. Carolyn Warmus was 25 years old, the daughter of a Michigan insurance mogul worth an estimated $150 million, a Columbia University-educated teacher working at the same Scarsdale-area school as her married lover. She was beautiful, ambitious, and, prosecutors argued, capable of cold-blooded murder. The press called it the 'Fatal Attraction' case, a nod to the 1987 thriller about a married man whose affair spirals into obsession and violence. But the deeper you look at this story, the more the tidy tabloid narrative frays at the edges. Who was the real obsessive? Who, exactly, had the most to gain? And was the woman convicted of Betty Jeanne Solomon's murder actually the one who pulled the trigger? Nearly four decades later, those questions remain stubbornly, disturbingly alive.
Convicted: Rita Gluzman (born Rita Shapiro)
On Easter Sunday morning, April 7, 1996, an East Rutherford police officer spotted a man dropping garbage bags into the Passaic River behind a small New Jersey electronics company. When Officer Richard Freeman approached, he found blood on the man's hands and clothing. Inside those bags were sixty-five pieces of what had once been Yakov Gluzman, a prominent cancer researcher, dismembered through the night with hacksaws and a scalpel after his wife and her cousin attacked him with axes in his own apartment. The woman who orchestrated it had once moved George H.W. Bush, UN Secretary-General U Thant, and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to action on her behalf. She had survived rape at age ten, near-starvation at eleven, and the entire machinery of Soviet bureaucracy. She had gone on an 18-day hunger strike to free her husband from the USSR. And then, more than two decades later, she waited in his darkened apartment holding an axe. Rita Gluzman became the first woman ever charged and convicted under the Violence Against Women Act, a law built to protect women from men like the one prosecutors said she had become. Tabloids called her the Jewish Lizzie Borden. She still calls herself innocent.
Convicted: Elena Kiejliches
Three days after her husband was shot to death inside their Staten Island home, Elena Kiejliches packed her two young children into the car and drove to Disney World. When she returned, she told authorities that Borys Kiejliches might have simply walked out on the marriage. What investigators eventually uncovered was something far darker: a calculated killing rooted in an eighteen-month affair with an aspiring rapper she had met at a Manhattan traffic light, a man she had showered with more than $85,000 in cash, jewelry, and gifts. The body of Borys Kiejliches, a jet-fuel magnate worth an estimated $3 million, turned up a month later in a marsh near the Belt Parkway, wrapped in carpet and stuffed in a cardboard barrel. Elena has maintained her innocence ever since, and her defense attorney still believes her. But a Staten Island jury did not. In 2002, she was sentenced to 22 years to life. This is the story of a marriage, a murder, and a cover-up that stretched from a quiet hilltop neighborhood all the way to a Florida theme park.
