In 1998, a man in the Pacific Northwest sat at a computer and browsed a catalog.
Not a catalog of furniture.
Not a catalog of women.
Each listing had a photograph.
Each listing had an age.
Each listing had a nationality, a height, >> [music] >> a weight, and sometimes a sentence or two about the woman’s interests.
Some of them mentioned cooking.
Some mentioned music.
Some mentioned a desire to travel.
All of them, without exception, mentioned a willingness to relocate to the United States.
The man scrolling through these listings was Indle Gifford King Jr.
He was 36 years old.
He stood 5 ft 7 in tall and weighed somewhere between 270 and 290 lb, depending on the month.
He was balding.
He wore a hairpiece.
He had been divorced once already, and the circumstances of that divorce included a protection order filed by his first wife alleging that he had beaten her, thrown her against a wall, and slammed her head into it repeatedly.
[music] None of this was in his profile.
The listing that caught his eye belonged to an 18-year-old ethnic Russian woman from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
Her name was Anastasia Solovyeva.
She was tall.
She was blonde.
She had long hair and a striking face.
She had listed her interests as music, English, and a desire for a better life.
>> [music] >> Her parents were music instructors.
She played classical piano.
She had studied English with such focus that she was already fluent enough to babysit for an American diplomat stationed in Bishkek.
If you had read that listing in 1998, you would have seen what the industry wanted you to see.
>> [music] >> A young woman available for purchase, essentially.
Not in those words.
The industry preferred terms like international matchmaking, >> [music] >> foreign correspondence, cross-cultural romance.
But the mechanics were straightforward.
[music] A man paid a fee to access the catalog.
He selected a woman.
He paid a larger fee to receive her contact information.
He paid an even larger fee to arrange a trip to meet her.
If everything went according to plan, he sponsored her entry into the United States on a fiance visa, married her within 90 days, and she became his wife.
She arrived in a country where she knew no one.
She spoke little English in most cases, though Anastasia was an exception.
She had no legal standing independent of her husband for the first 2 years.
She had no support network.
She had no recourse.
The listing did not mention any of this.
It did not mention that Anastasia Solovyeva was at 18 a young woman of extraordinary intelligence and ambition who was going to outgrow whatever man selected her from this catalog within months of arriving.
It did not mention that she would enroll in college and gain admission to the University of Washington to study law.
It did not mention that she would begin keeping a diary documenting the abuse she suffered, and that she would store that diary in a safety deposit box at a local bank because she did not feel safe keeping it at home.
It did not mention the bruises.
>> [music] >> It did not mention the threats.
It did not mention the night she came to work at a downtown Seattle seafood [music] restaurant with tears streaming down her face because her husband had hit her during a driving lesson.
And it certainly [music] did not mention that 2 years and 5 months after her name appeared in that catalog, Anastasia Solovyeva would be strangled to death with a necktie in the home she shared with the man who had selected her.
While that man, all 270 lb of him, pinned her body to the floor.
This is the story of a transaction, and like all transactions, >> [music] >> it began with a buyer.
Indle Gifford King Jr.
was born into comfort.
He grew up on Mercer Island, Washington, an affluent community set in the middle of Lake Washington between Seattle and Bellevue.
His parents were well-off.
They provided for him generously.
As a teenager at Mercer Island High School, he drove a mouse gray Fiat coupe with a red leather interior and a stereo system so expensive he had a custom [music] cover built to conceal it from view.
He kept the car immaculate.
He blasted music through the speakers when he drove.
He wanted people to notice him.
He wanted people to be impressed, but people were not impressed by Inderjit King not in the way he craved.
He was short.
He was heavy.
He was losing his hair before he finished college.
He was by the accounts of people who knew him growing up desperate for status and deeply insecure about his appearance.
One childhood friend described his defining obsession as the desire to have a blonde obedient woman on his arm.
A beautiful woman, a woman who would signal to the world that Inderjit King was a man of substance.
He pursued a doctorate in finance at the University of Cincinnati.
He did not finish.
He held a series of temporary teaching positions at various colleges and none of them renewed his contract.
He moved back to the Pacific Northwest.
He worked at a bookstore.
>> [music] >> He worked as a grocery clerk.
He was caught shoplifting fruit and soft drinks from a supermarket.
>> [music] >> He was not the upper middle class professional he presented himself as.
He was a man whose life had fallen well short of his ambitions and whose response to that failure was not humility or recalibration but rage directed consistently at the [music] women closest to him.
He discovered the mail-order bride industry sometime in the early 1990s.
The precise moment is not clear, but the circumstances that led to it are.
King had traveled to the former Soviet Union and during that trip he had been captivated by the young women he encountered in cafes and nightclubs.
Upon returning to the United States, he began placing advertisements in Russian-language newspapers.
He was not looking for a pen pal.
>> [music] >> He was not looking for a companion.
He was looking for a product, and the international matchmaking industry, which by the late 1990s had grown into a sprawling, largely unregulated operation connecting American men with women from the former Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, and Latin America was ready to supply one.
The industry worked on simple principles.
The agencies recruited women from economically depressed regions.
These women filled out profiles, provided photographs, and were listed in catalogs that were marketed primarily to American men.
The men paid subscription fees, typically around $155 per year, to access email addresses.
They paid additional fees, sometimes $3,000 or more, for arranged trips during which they could meet and interview prospective brides in person.
Some men applied for multiple fiance visas simultaneously.
Five at a time was not uncommon.
Whichever woman’s paperwork cleared first became the bride.
The system was built on an imbalance of power so stark that calling it romantic was an act of either delusion or deceit.
The women were overwhelmingly young, poor, [music] and desperate to leave their home countries.
The men were overwhelmingly older, wealthier, >> [music] >> and attracted to the idea of a wife who would be economically dependent, and they hoped compliant.
In 1993, Indur Gokind placed an advertisement in the Moscow News inviting a female Russian student to study in the United States.
An 18-year-old named Ekaterina Kazakova from the Siberian city of Omsk responded.
She was interested in studying biology.
She saw the ad as an opportunity.
King invited her to study at Wright State University in Ohio, and she arrived in September 1993.
Within weeks, King proposed marriage.
He told her it was the only way she could remain in the country legally.
After consulting her parents, who approved, she accepted.
The marriage began with a deception and ended with violence.
King dropped out of his doctoral program.
His teaching contracts were not renewed.
His credit was ruined.
[music] He ran up debts in Ekaterina’s name without her knowledge, forcing her to take cash advances of $2,000 at a time.
She worked as a pharmacy technician while studying.
She was the sole earner in the household.
King supported her studies only because, as she later told investigators, he was focused on her future earning potential.
When she began refusing to hand over money, the arguments escalated.
At first, the fights were verbal.
Then they turned physical.
Ekaterina later described a pattern.
The violence would build.
King would lose control.
He would hit her.
Then he would calm down and act as if nothing had happened.
She endured this for approximately 2 years.
On the evening of July 5th, 1996, while King was working an evening shift at a B.
Dalton bookstore, Ekaterina packed a bag, found the car in the parking lot, and drove to Columbus, Ohio.
She did not look back.
She filed for a protection order, alleging that King had hit her in the head with his fist, thrown her against a wall, and continuously pounded her head against the wall.
She also alleged that King had threatened to find her >> [music] >> and kill her if she tried to leave.
King responded by filing for an annulment.
He claimed the entire marriage had been a fraud, that Ekaterina had married him solely to gain entry to the United States.
>> [music] >> The court denied the annulment.
The divorce was finalized in July 1997.
Ekaterina remarried, became a dentist, [music] and built a life in Ohio under a different name that she has never made public.
King returned to the Pacific Northwest a bitter man.
He told anyone who would listen that his wife had used him, that she had taken half his assets, that she had exploited his generosity to [music] gain citizenship.
He cast himself as the victim, a trusting man who had opened his home and his heart to a foreign woman only to be fleeced [music] and discarded.
His friends were struck by how much he had changed physically.
The man they remembered from high school was now approaching 40.
His weight well past 270 lb.
His hairline long gone behind a toupee.
But his obsession had not changed.
Within months of the divorce, he was back in the catalogs, shopping again.
This is important.
This is the part that most people overlook, and it is the part that explains everything that followed.
King did not approach his second search for a wife the way a man approaches a relationship.
He approached it the way a dissatisfied consumer approaches a replacement product.
The first one had been defective.
The first one had failed to comply.
The first one >> [music] >> had developed opinions and independence, and eventually the courage to leave.
He was not going to make the same mistake twice.
He was going to find a woman who was younger, more isolated, [music] and less likely to resist him.
He was going to find a woman whose gratitude for the opportunity to come to America would keep her in line.
And if it didn’t, [music] he was going to make sure she understood the consequences.
In 1998, the catalog delivered Anastasia Solovyova.
To understand what happened next, you have to understand who Anastasia actually was, because the gap between the person described in that listing and the person who arrived in Snohomish County, Washington is the gap between a product description and a [music] human being.
Anastasia Solovyova was born in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, the only child of Anatoly Solovyov and Aleftina Solovyova.
Her father was 63 at the time of her death.
Her mother was 55.
They were both [music] music instructors.
They had spent their lives teaching.
In Russia, they had run two small state [music] music schools, and for a period early in their marriage, before Anastasia was born, they had slept on chairs pushed together in the same building where they taught because they had no separate home.
Their daughter was their world.
Anastasia grew up surrounded by classical music and jazz.
She played piano.
She sang in a chorus.
Her teachers at the music conservatory in Bishkek later described her as amazingly hard working and a universal favorite, constantly surrounded by friends.
She was, by every account, vivacious, warm, socially magnetic.
As a small child, she memorized poems and fairy tales and performed them for adults.
She had the poise and looks of a model, and she was fiercely, almost recklessly ambitious.
She wanted to see the world.
Specifically, she wanted to see America.
In an impoverished post-Soviet republic where opportunity was scarce and the future was uncertain, America represented everything Anastasia believed she could become.
She studied English with an intensity that bordered on obsessive.
She baby sat for the children of an American diplomat in Bishkek, practicing her language skills in the process.
She enrolled in matchmaking catalogs, not because she was desperate for a husband, but because the catalog was, in Kyrgyzstan in the late 1990s, one of the few available pathways to the life she wanted.
Her parents invested their savings to prepare her.
They understood the risk.
They also understood their daughter.
Anastasia was resourceful, intelligent, [music] and determined.
If she could get to America, they believed, she would thrive.
>> [music] >> They were right about that.
They were catastrophically wrong about the man who would take her there.
When Indle King arrived in Bishkek, he presented himself well.
He was intelligent.
He was attentive.
He was well-dressed.
He spoke enthusiastically about his upper-middle-class life in America, his family’s wealth, his professional accomplishments.
In the Solovyov’s modest apartment, there was no way to verify any of it.
There was no [music] internet to check his background.
There was no registry to search for protection orders or divorce records.
The matchmaking agency that had connected them had no obligation to disclose his history and had not done so.
Anastasia and her parents saw what King wanted them to see.
A respectable American man offering their daughter the future she had always wanted.
After a brief courtship, >> [music] >> Anastasia left Bishkek for the United States.
She and King were married in April 1998.
He was nearly 37.
She was 18.
They moved into a townhouse in Mountlake Terrace, a quiet subdivision in Snohomish County, about 20 miles north of Seattle.
To the neighbors, they were an odd couple.
He was short, heavy, >> [music] >> and middle-aged.
She was tall, blond, and barely out of her teens.
But the neighborhood was not the sort [music] of place where people asked questions.
And for a while, the marriage appeared to function.
Anastasia wrote home to her parents describing her new life in glowing terms.
She told them how much she enjoyed America.
She was adapting quickly.
Within months, she found work as a hostess at a seafood restaurant in downtown Seattle.
Her co-workers liked her.
She was sociable, energetic, and her English was already strong enough to handle the job without difficulty.
She made friends.
She began studying.
Within 2 years, she had gained admission to the University of Washington, where she intended to study law.
Think about that for a moment.
An 18-year-old woman arrives in a foreign country knowing almost no one, married to a man twice her age, and within 2 years, she has taught herself enough, worked hard enough, and adapted thoroughly enough to earn a place at one of the most competitive public universities in the United States.
That is not the profile of a passive woman waiting to be rescued.
That is the profile of someone building a life with whatever tools were available.
But, the tools she needed most were the ones she could not access: legal protection, financial independence, a support network, a way out.
Because by the time Anastasia was settling into her new country, the marriage had already begun to deteriorate, and the deterioration followed the exact pattern that Indle King’s first wife had described.
The violence began gradually.
Arguments, raised voices, then physical confrontation.
King hit Anastasia during a driving lesson, and she arrived at work that day in tears.
The hitting became routine.
The sexual abuse began.
The threats followed.
King told Anastasia that if she ever tried to leave him, he would find her and kill her.
Those were the same words he had used with Ekaterina Kazakova, the same threat, >> [music] >> the same language, the same promise.
About a year into the marriage, someone called the police.
Officers responded to a domestic abuse call at the King residence in Mount Lake Terrace.
When they arrived, Anastasia showed them scratches across her chest and stomach.
She told them her husband had caused the injuries.
A report was filed.
Nothing else happened.
The officers left.
King remained in the home.
The violence continued.
Anastasia began keeping a diary.
She wrote about the abuse in detail.
>> [music] >> She documented instances of domestic violence, invasion of privacy, and sexual assault.
She described her fear.
She described King’s threats.
She described her growing disgust with the man she had married.
She did not keep this diary at home because she knew King would find it and destroy it.
Instead, she rented a safety deposit box at a local bank and stored the diary there along with other documents she believed she might need in the future.
She was building a legal case.
She was preparing for a battle she could see coming.
She was, in the most literal [music] sense, writing for her life.
And King knew that the marriage was failing.
He could see it in Anastasia’s growing independence.
He could see it in her refusal to be the obedient wife he had ordered from a catalog.
He could see it in her friendships, her studies, her ambition, her beauty, her youth, all the qualities that had drawn him to her in the first place, but that now represented a threat.
Because a woman who is building her own life is a woman who does not need a man like Inderjit King.
Here is what King did while his marriage was unraveling.
>> [music] >> Within 1 month of marrying Anastasia in 1998, Inderjit King began writing letters to other prospective mail-order brides.
1 month.
He had just received the product he had ordered, and he was already browsing the catalog for a replacement.
This was not a man experiencing marital difficulties and considering his options.
This was a man who had never stopped shopping.
The courtship, >> [music] >> the wedding, the visa sponsorship, the relocation, all of it was merely the latest transaction in a series.
And if this one didn’t work out, the next listing was already bookmarked.
He continued writing to foreign women throughout the marriage.
>> [music] >> In September 2000, the same month his wife was murdered, Inderjit King was corresponding with yet another prospective bride.
[music] In one of those letters, recovered from his computer by investigators, he told the woman that he would be a free man within a month.
A free man within a month.
He wrote those words while Anastasia was still alive, while she was still breathing, while she was still technically his wife.
He wrote those words knowing exactly how he was going to become free.
But that comes later.
First, there is the matter of the tenant.
At some point during the marriage, King began renting out rooms in the Mountlake Terrace townhouse >> [music] >> to supplement his income.
One of the tenants who moved in was a young man named Daniel Christopher Larson.
He was 20 years old.
He was a registered sex offender.
He had been convicted of a sexual offense and was on the registry when King invited him to live under the same roof as his 18-year-old wife.
Whether King knew about Larson’s status when he moved him in remains a matter of dispute.
But what is not in dispute is that the two men developed a relationship that went well beyond landlord and tenant.
King visited Larson in jail after Larson was subsequently arrested on an indecent liberties charge involving a 16-year-old Ukrainian girl.
Not once, not twice, repeatedly, frequently enough that prison guards took notice and reported the visits.
The prosecution later argued that King and Larson were involved in an intimate relationship.
The Moscow Times reported that prosecutors claimed King had enlisted Larson’s [music] help in killing Anastasia partly because the two men were lovers.
King denied this, but the visits were documented.
The frequency was documented >> [music] >> and the fact that King chose a convicted sex offender as both his housemate and his instrument of murder was documented.
The marriage reached a breaking point >> [music] >> in the summer of 2000.
Anastasia was 20 years old.
She had been in the United States for 2 [music] years.
She had a job, friends, a place at a prestigious university, and a diary full of evidence against the man who abused her.
She was not going to stay.
She was going to leave.
And King, who had watched [music] his first wife walk out the door and take half his assets with her, was determined not to let that happen again.
In the summer [music] of 2000, Anastasia traveled back to Kyrgyzstan to visit her parents.
She needed time away from King.
She needed the comfort of the only people in the world who loved her unconditionally.
She needed to think.
King, characteristically, followed her.
His arrival in Bishkek turned [music] the visit into a nightmare.
In July 2000, during an earlier trip to Kyrgyzstan, >> [music] >> King had stormed out of her parents’ apartment one morning carrying Anastasia’s passport and the travel documents you needed to return to the United States.
>> [music] >> He was trying to trap her.
If she couldn’t fly home, she couldn’t file for divorce.
Her father, Anatoly, [music] tried to physically restrain King from leaving the apartment with the documents.
King, despite being decades older and dramatically heavier, shrugged the older man off and left.
Eventually, Anastasia convinced King to return her passport.
But the message had been delivered.
He would decide when she came and went.
He would control her movement.
Her passport, her documents, her ability to travel, all of it belonged to him.
On August 21st, 2000, while Anastasia was still in Kyrgyzstan, Indel King filed for divorce back in Washington state.
This is an important detail that often gets lost in the narrative.
King filed for divorce, not Anastasia.
King.
He initiated the legal proceeding.
And then, almost immediately, he flew to Kyrgyzstan to join her at her parents’ home.
The divorce filing, it became clear, was not a genuine attempt to end the marriage.
It was a strategic move.
It was a way to control the terms, to position himself as the aggrieved party and to protect his financial interests.
He was thinking about money.
>> [music] >> He was always thinking about money.
His divorce from Ekaterina had cost him $55,000 and he was not going to let that happen again.
What happened during that September visit to Bishkek >> [music] >> is one of the most chilling details in this entire case and it has to be described carefully because the cruelty of it is quiet and bureaucratic >> [music] >> which makes it worse.
Endalkachew sat down with Anastasia’s father, Anatoly Solovyov and presented him with a written list.
A list.
>> [music] >> He had typed it up.
It was itemized.
It detailed his complaints about Anastasia.
His displeasures, as the court record later called them.
The list included her reluctance to prepare meals, her unwillingness to clean the house, her refusal to engage in sexual activity.
He handed this [music] list to her father.
To the father of the woman he was abusing.
He sat in that small apartment in Bishkek and complained to a 63-year-old retired music teacher that the 18-year-old girl they had sold him, for that is how he understood the transaction, >> [music] >> was not performing to specification.
Think about the psychology of that moment.
Think about the kind of man who reduces a human being to a set of domestic and sexual functions, types up his grievances when those functions are not performed to his satisfaction, and then presents those grievances to her parents as if filing a product complaint.
[music] As if returning a defective appliance.
As if requesting a refund.
And think about Anatoly Solovyov, 63 years old, sitting in his apartment, reading a list [music] that reduced his only daughter to a set of household chores and sexual obligations.
What does a father do with [music] that? Where does that rage go? It has nowhere to go because his daughter >> [music] >> is married to this man.
Because his daughter is in a foreign country.
Because the system that delivered his daughter to this man has no mechanism for returning her.
During that same visit, King’s behavior became increasingly erratic and controlling.
He did not want Anastasia out of his sight.
One day, she and her mother left the apartment to go shopping.
King, who had been in the bedroom, erupted.
He burst out of the room and chased them down the street in his underwear.
A 5-ft 7, 275-lb man in a t-shirt and shorts, sprinting after two women through a neighborhood where people do not go outside partially dressed.
He chased them until they flagged out a taxi and drove away.
Neighbors watched in astonishment.
Anastasia’s father later described [music] the scene in court.
And then, somehow, King convinced Anastasia to come back to Seattle with him, or perhaps convinced is the wrong word.
He had her passport.
He had filed for divorce, which meant that if she stayed in Kyrgyzstan, she would lose any legal standing she had in the United States.
He had leverage.
He always had leverage.
The system was designed to give men like him leverage over women like Anastasia, and he used every ounce of it.
On September 22nd, 2000, Indal and Anastasia King boarded a flight from Kyrgyzstan.
They changed planes in Moscow.
They flew together to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Customs records later confirmed that they cleared immigration within 1 minute of each other.
A shuttle driver dropped the couple off at their Montlake Terrace home at approximately 2:30 in the afternoon.
Anastasia Solovyeva King was never seen alive again.
What happened inside that townhouse on September 22nd, 2000 was eventually pieced together from the confession of Daniel Christopher Larson, the physical evidence recovered from the scene, and the forensic examination of Anastasia’s body.
The details are brutal, and they need to be stated directly.
According to Larson’s account, which he gave to investigators in December 2000, [music] after leading them to Anastasia’s burial site, Indle King had directed him to kill Anastasia.
Larson said he strangled her with a necktie.
He said King, weighing approximately 270 lb, [music] sat on Anastasia’s body to pin her down while Larson pulled the tie tight around her neck.
She was 20 years old.
She weighed a fraction of what King weighed.
She had just stepped off a transatlantic flight.
She had walked into her own home expecting whatever came next in the slow collapse of her marriage.
What came next was her husband’s body crushing her into the floor while a 20-year-old sex offender choked the life out of her.
After she was dead, they stripped her body.
They removed her clothing.
They took her diamond wedding ring.
They wrapped her in a dog blanket.
Then they drove to the Tulalip Indian Reservation north of Marysville and buried her in a shallow grave at an illegal dumping ground.
They covered the grave with a dirty mattress.
Then they went home.
And then Indle King did what Indle King always did.
He lied.
And he shopped.
When people asked about Anastasia, King told them she hadn’t come back from the trip.
He said they had argued at the airport in Moscow and she had decided to stay in Russia.
He told this story to friends, to co-workers, to Anastasia’s employer, [music] and eventually to the police.
He said she had gone crazy.
He said she had decided not to return.
He said he had come home alone.
It was a plausible story.
Mail-order brides left their husbands all the time.
The whole point of the industry, from the woman’s perspective, was to gain entry to the United States.
Once she had legal residency, the theory went, she no longer needed the man who had sponsored her.
King had told this story about Ekaterina.
Now he was telling it about Anastasia.
The woman had used him, abandoned him, taken what she could, and left.
He was the victim again.
But Anastasia’s parents were not buying [music] it.
When their daughter stopped calling, when the emails stopped, when the letters stopped, Alevtina Solovyova called the police and asked them to check on her daughter.
King told the police the Moscow airport story.
The police initially had no reason to doubt him.
So, Anastasia’s parents did the only thing they could do.
They flew to Moscow.
Anatoly and Alevtina Solovyov, retired music teachers from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, scraped together what money they had and flew to Moscow and began searching for their only child.
They went to hospitals, they went to clinics, they went to morgues.
They walked through rooms where strangers’ bodies were laid out under sheets and looked at every face searching for the face of their daughter.
They did this for days.
They went from building to building, city block to city block, showing photographs of Anastasia and asking if anyone had seen her.
Nobody had.
Nobody [music] could help because Anastasia was not in Moscow.
Anastasia was not in any hospital.
She was not in any morgue.
She was lying in a shallow grave on the Tulalip Indian Reservation, 6,000 miles away, wrapped in a dog blanket >> [music] >> with a dirty mattress over her body and her wedding ring gone.
Meanwhile, back in Mount Lake Terrace, Indle King was already shopping for wife number three.
In the weeks following Anastasia’s murder, King continued browsing the catalogs.
He continued writing to prospective brides overseas.
>> [music] >> He was, in the language of the industry, a returning customer.
He had paid his fees.
He had done his research.
[music] He had identified the product he wanted.
The only difference between this transaction and the previous two was that this [music] time the product he was replacing hadn’t walked away.
It had been disposed of.
Bren’s of Anastasia reported her missing on October 2nd, 2000.
The Mount Lake Terrace Police Department opened an investigation.
Almost immediately, detectives focused on King.
His story about the Moscow Airport didn’t hold up.
[music] A quick check of airline and customs records confirmed that Anastasia and Inderjit King had flown back to Seattle together on September 22nd.
They had cleared customs within a minute of each other.
>> [music] >> King had lied, and a man who lies about the last known whereabouts of his missing wife is a man who knows where his wife actually is.
But, proving it took time.
King maintained his innocence.
[music] He hired lawyers.
He stuck to his story.
And for 3 months, while Anastasia’s parents were searching Moscow morgues and police were circling King in Snohomish County, Anastasia’s body lay undiscovered on the Tulalip Reservation.
The break came from Larson, Daniel Christopher Larson, the 20-year-old registered sex offender who had rented a room in King’s house, was in the Snohomish County Jail [music] on the indecent liberties charge involving the 16-year-old Ukrainian
girl.
Guards at the jail had noticed something odd.
King was visiting Larson constantly, multiple times, far more often than a former landlord would typically visit a former tenant.
The visits were logged, and when detectives, following up on the unusual visitation pattern, went to talk to Larson, the story began to crack.
Larson’s initial account was evasive.
He told investigators that King had confessed to killing Anastasia and had shown him where the body was buried.
He said he had been afraid to come forward because he feared King would try to implicate him in the murder.
This story had the structure of self-preservation.
It put all the blame on King and cast Larson as a frightened bystander.
Investigators were skeptical.
On December 28th, 2000, >> [music] >> Larson led detectives to the Tulalip reservation.
He took them to an illegal dumping ground north of Marysville.
He pointed to a spot on the ground they dug.
They found a dirty mattress.
Beneath the mattress, they found a body wrapped in a dog blanket.
[music] It was Anastasia.
The Snohomish County Medical Examiner identified the remains and ruled the death a homicide.
The cause of death was strangulation.
And then, Larson’s story changed.
The following day, December 29th, he told detectives what had actually happened.
He said that on September 22nd, 2000, he had strangled Anastasia King with a necktie >> [music] >> while Inderjit King held her down.
He said King had directed him to do it.
He said he had acted under threats of death and coercion from King.
He said he had no choice.
The prosecution’s case, however, did not rest on Larson’s word alone.
Deputy Prosecutor Jim Townsend [music] was candid about the challenges of relying on a witness as compromised as Larson, a sex offender with a history of changing his story and an obvious motive to minimize his own role.
Townsend told the jury that neither King nor Larson could be fully trusted.
But the physical evidence, >> [music] >> combined with King’s documented lies, his history of violence, his letters to other prospective brides, [music] and his obsessive need to control every person and every dollar in his life, told a story that both men’s test and he merely illustrated.
Police arrested Inderjit King at his home on December 29th, 2000.
He was initially held on a perjury charge for lying to investigators about his wife’s whereabouts during the 3-month search.
He had told police Anastasia had left him in Moscow.
He had told them she had decided not to return to the United States.
He had maintained this lie for 92 days while his wife’s body decomposed in a shallow grave 20 miles from his house.
The perjury charge was the anchor that kept him [music] in custody while prosecutors built the murder case.
On the other side of the world, Anastasia’s parents received the news that every parent dreads.
Their only child was dead.
She had been murdered.
The man they had trusted with her life had killed her, and now they had to decide what to do with her body.
This is where the cruelty of the story takes on a dimension that is almost unbearable to describe.
Anastasia’s remains were in such condition that the medical examiner informed her parents that the body would need to be cremated before it could be transported back to Kyrgyzstan.
But Anatoly and Aleftina Solovyov were Russian Orthodox.
Their faith forbids cremation.
To cremate their daughter would be to violate the deepest principles of the tradition that had shaped their lives.
And beyond the religious prohibition, the thought of inflicting further damage on Anastasia’s body, a body that had already been strangled, stripped, buried in dirt, and left to decompose for 3 months, was more than they could bear.
So, they made a decision.
They would bury Anastasia in America.
They chose a plot at Floral Hills Cemetery in Lynnwood, Washington, under a young evergreen tree.
>> [music] >> And because their daughter’s body would remain in the United States, they decided that they, too, would remain.
They would not go back to Kyrgyzstan.
They would stay in the country that had taken their daughter’s life because it was also the country that held her body, and they could not be separated from her.
Not again.
They flew to Seattle with suitcases and little else.
They had no money.
They spoke no English.
Victim advocates from an organization called Families and Friends provided emergency assistance, housing, food, transportation, clothing, and most critically, an interpreter.
The Solovyovs settled into a basement apartment in South Everett.
Anatoly, 63 years old, found work at fast food restaurants.
He worked six days a week.
Alevtina gave piano lessons to Russian-speaking children in the neighborhood.
Every Sunday, they drove to Floral Hills Cemetery and visited their daughter’s grave.
They bought two plots next to hers.
They planned to be buried beside her when the time came.
In February 2001, at an emotional press conference, >> [music] >> Alevtina Solovyova told reporters through an interpreter that she wanted to remain in the United States for the rest of her life, that she and her husband had nowhere else to go, that their daughter had been their purpose, and now their purpose was to stay near [music] her.
Anatoly Solovyov said simply that Anastasia had been their only child, and that there was nobody left in Kyrgyzstan, nothing to return to.
They also expressed, remarkably, a love for America that had somehow survived the destruction of everything they held dear.
They had been embraced by Anastasia’s friends.
They had been supported by victim advocates and community members who rallied around them.
>> [music] >> Alevtina said she was pleased to discover that her daughter had had loyal and dedicated friends in this country.
The warmth and hospitality she encountered in Seattle had convinced her that America, despite everything, was where she belonged.
And then there was the guilt.
Alevtina, in an interview published years later, described it in terms that left reporters struggling to maintain their composure.
She said the burden was specially heavy because she and her husband had encouraged Anastasia to come to America.
She said the pain never went away because she felt she had played a big role in her daughter’s decision to leave Kyrgyzstan.
She had wanted Anastasia to marry a good man who would consider it an honor to have a beautiful young wife.
She had hoped, above all, that King would be a good friend to her only daughter.
She was wrong, and she would carry the weight of being wrong for the rest of her life.
The trial of Indle Gifford King Jr.
began in January 2002 in Snohomish County Superior Court.
The prosecution was led by Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor Jim Townsend.
The defense was handled by attorney David Allen.
The case lasted [music] 5 weeks.
Townsend’s strategy was methodical.
He did not ask the jury to take Daniel Larson at his word.
He acknowledged openly that Larson was a compromised witness, a sex offender whose story had shifted and whose credibility was questionable.
Instead, [music] Townsend built his case on the totality of the circumstances.
He presented King’s documented pattern of violence against women.
>> [music] >> He read aloud the letters King had written to other prospective mail-order brides within 1 month of marrying Anastasia.
[music] He He presented the letters King had written in September 2000, the same month Anastasia was killed, in which King told a prospective bride that he would be a free man within a month.
He presented King’s displeasure [music] list, the itemized complaint he had handed to Anastasia’s father during the September trip to Kyrgyzstan.
He presented King’s financial obsession, >> [music] >> the way every nickel and dime was critical to him, and the prosecution’s theory that King could not bear the thought of another expensive divorce.
He presented the customs records proving that King and Anastasia [music] had flown back to Seattle together, demolishing King’s Moscow airport lie.
He presented King’s repeated visits to Larson in jail, and he presented the physical evidence, the necktie, >> [music] >> the shallow grave, the dog blanket, the missing wedding ring.
Townsend told the jury [music] that King had never stopped looking for the perfect obedient wife, that his first marriage had failed because Ekaterina had refused to be controlled, that his second marriage was failing [music] because Anastasia had refused to be controlled, that in King’s own twisted mind, [music] he was not going to be used by another mail-order bride.
Alan’s defense was straightforward.
He argued that Larson, not King, had killed Anastasia.
That Larson was a schemer, a manipulator, and a conniver who had committed the murder alone and was now blaming King to reduce his own sentence.
Alan called the prosecution’s case a house of cards built on the word of a sex offender.
He [music] told the jury that King, whatever his faults, was not a killer.
He urged them to consider reasonable doubt.
The jury considered it for 5 hours and 20 minutes.
They found Indel Gifford King Jr.
guilty of first-degree murder and witness [music] tampering.
1 month later, King was sentenced to 28 years and 9 months in prison, effectively 29 [music] years.
At sentencing, he addressed the court.
He said he absolutely accepted the verdict [music] of the jury.
He said he did not want his family affected by him.
These were possibly the most self-aware words Indel King had spoken in his entire life, and they came decades [music] too late.
Daniel Larson had already pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in October 2001 as part of a plea agreement in which he agreed to testify against [music] King.
Under the terms of the deal, he received a 20-year sentence.
But Larson, apparently unsatisfied, attempted [music] to withdraw his guilty plea on the grounds that his attorney had pressured him into it and that the charges were unconstitutional.
The court denied the petition.
The appeals court upheld the denial, and because Larson had violated the terms of his plea agreement by attempting to challenge his conviction, Snohomish County prosecutors did something unusual.
They filed new charges, first-degree murder, the same charge King had been convicted of.
In January 2007, Larson went to trial for the second time.
The jury deliberated for less than 30 minutes.
They convicted him of first-degree murder.
At sentencing, Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Thomas Wynn added 12 years to Larson’s existing 20-year sentence.
Larson, who had gambled that he could reduce his time by challenging the plea, had instead increased it by more than half.
He told the judge that all he had wanted was to serve less time.
The judge was unmoved.
Larson’s total sentence rose to approximately 32 years.
A young man who strangled the life out of a 20-year-old woman wanted to do less time.
That was his primary concern.
Not what he had done.
Not who he had destroyed.
Not the parents who visited their daughter’s grave every Sunday.
He wanted to do less time.
He wanted a better deal.
He was, in the end, exactly the kind of person you would expect to find in the orbit of Indle Gifford King Jr.
A man for whom other human beings existed only as instruments or obstacles.
There is a video that was played during the trial.
It was home footage shot by Indle King during the couple’s September 2000 trip to Kyrgyzstan.
The video shows Anastasia and her parents at home, sightseeing, [music] shopping.
Then, for 55 minutes, the camera follows Anastasia at a disco.
She is dancing alone.
She is wearing a tight white and gray pantsuit.
Her nearly waist-length blonde hair whirls as she moves.
She is 20 years [music] old and she is alive and she is dancing by herself under colored lights.
And the camera that her husband is holding does not watch her face.
It watches her body.
It zooms in on her chest.
It lingers on her hips.
It focuses on her from behind.
At two points during the recording, Anastasia raises her hand to the camera lens as if to say, “Stop.
” The camera >> [music] >> does not stop.
They This footage was shot within days of her murder.
Possibly within hours.
[music] She is dancing in a disco in Bishkek and the man behind the camera is already planning how to kill her.
He is filming [music] her body because he regards it as his property and the footage is a last inventory of the asset before it is liquidated.
That video is the entire marriage in miniature.
A woman trying to live her life, >> [music] >> a man reducing her to a body.
A hand raised in protest and the camera rolling anyway.
After the convictions, the story shifted from crime to policy and the policy shift, when it came, was driven almost entirely by the horror of what had happened >> [music] >> to Anastasia King and another mail-order bride in Washington state named Susanna Blackwell who had been shot to death by her estranged husband in the King County Courthouse in 1995.
In Washington state,
lawmakers passed legislation effective September 1st, 2002 requiring international matchmaking organizations to screen prospective clients.
Under the new law, agencies would be required to ask potential suitors about their criminal histories, including any protection orders related to domestic violence.
If a man had a record of violence, the agency was required to disclose that information to the prospective bride [music] before the marriage could proceed.
The law was a start, but it was a state law.
It applied only within Washington.
The international matchmaking industry operated across borders and the vast majority of its operations were not subject to Washington state jurisdiction.
A federal response was needed.
Senator Maria Cantwell and Representative Rick Larsen, both Democrats from Washington state, took Anastasia’s story to Congress.
In July 2003, they introduced legislation to regulate the activities of international marriage brokers at the federal level.
The bill went through multiple iterations and faced resistance from the matchmaking industry, which argued [music] that regulation would be burdensome and unnecessary, the sponsors persevered.
Anastasia’s parents, Anatoly and Alevtina Solovyov, participated in the legislative process, testifying before Congress with the support of their victim advocate.
The result was the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act, known as IMBRA, which was signed into law by President George W.
Bush in January 2006.
The law required international marriage brokers to conduct background checks on American clients and to disclose any criminal history, >> [music] >> including domestic violence records, to prospective foreign brides.
It required
that the information be provided in the bride’s native language.
It limited the number of fiance visa petitions a man could file simultaneously, ending what advocates called the wife lottery, in which a man could apply for five visas at once and marry whichever woman arrived first.
And it provided foreign brides with information about their legal rights in the United States, including their rights under domestic violence statutes.
Under IMBRA, Anastasia Solovyova could have learned, before she ever left Bishkek, that Indle King’s first wife had obtained a domestic violence protection order against him.
She could have learned that his previous marriage had ended amid allegations of physical abuse.
She could have learned that the man browsing her Cat mob listing was not a respectable professional from a comfortable family, but a violent, controlling failure who had already driven one woman to flee across state lines in terror.
She could have learned
all of this before she packed her bags, before she said goodbye to her parents, before she boarded the flight that would take her to a townhouse in Mountlake Terrace, where a necktie and a shallow grave were waiting.
She could have learned it.
She could have stayed.
She could have lived, but the law did not exist when Anastasia needed it.
[music] It exists now because Anastasia did not survive to benefit from it.
This is the final cruelty of the catalog.
The system that sold Anastasia Soloveva to Intel King had no safeguards, no background checks, no disclosure requirements, no obligation to protect the women whose photographs and personal details it marketed to strangers.
The system treated women as inventory and men as customers, and the customer was always right.
Even when the customer had a protection order in his file and a history of beating his previous wife’s head against a wall.
The system did not fail Anastasia.
The system worked exactly as it was designed to work.
It delivered a young, beautiful, isolated woman to a violent man, >> [music] >> collected its fees, and moved on to the next transaction.
Anastasia Soloveva was not a listing.
She was not a profile.
She was not a product >> [music] >> in a catalog.
She was a pianist.
She was a student.
She was the daughter of two music [music] teachers who loved her beyond measure and who sacrificed everything they had to give her a chance at a better life.
She was a woman who taught herself English by babysitting the children of diplomats.
She was a woman who worked as a restaurant hostess while studying for admission to one of the best universities in the country.
She was a woman who kept a diary because she understood, with a clarity that none of the systems around her shared, that what was happening to her was wrong and that she would need evidence >> [music] >> when the time came to fight back.
She was a woman who raised her hand to a camera lens and said, “Stop.
” She was 20 years old when she died.
She had been in the United [music] States for 2 years and 5 months.
She had been married for approximately the same length of time.
She had been on this earth for barely two decades, and in that time she had accomplished more, learned more, and adapted more completely to a foreign country than most people manage in a lifetime.
She was, by every measure that matters, extraordinary, and she was killed because a man who weighed 270 lb decided [music] that the product he had ordered from a catalog was not performing to specification.
That she was not cooking enough, not cleaning enough, not submitting to sex often enough, that she was developing opinions and friendships >> [music] >> and ambitions and a life of her own, and that all of these things were defects in the merchandise.
>> [music] >> He could not return her.
He could not get a refund.
And he was not going to let her walk away the way his first wife [music] had.
So, he held her down and had someone else do the strangling while he sat on her body and felt the life go out of her.
Then, he went [music] back to the catalog because there were always more listings.
Anatoly Solovyov and Aleftina Solovyova lived in South Everett, Washington for years after the trial.
Every Sunday, they drove to Floral Hills Cemetery in Lynnwood and visited their daughter’s grave.
They had purchased plots beside hers.
They had nowhere else to go and no one else to visit.
Their daughter had been their only child, their purpose, their pride, their connection to the [music] future, all of it was buried under a young evergreen tree in a cemetery in a country they had never planned to live in.
Anatoly worked 6 days [music] a week, fast food restaurants mostly.
He was in his 60s.
His hands had spent decades [music] playing trumpet and piano, teaching music to children in Kyrgyzstan, conducting small orchestras in state-funded schools.
Now, they were assembling hamburgers and mopping floors.
He did not complain.
There was nothing to complain about that would bring his daughter back.
Aleftina gave piano lessons in their basement apartment.
Young Russian-speaking children from the Everett area came to her on weekday afternoons, and she sat beside them on the bench and taught them scales and arpeggios and the fundamentals of classical technique.
Sometimes, she played duets with them.
Good job, she would say in English.
It was one of the phrases she had learned.
She was, in her own way, continuing the work she and her husband had always done, teaching music, nurturing children, carrying on the tradition that had defined their lives.
The only difference was that their own child was gone, taken by a system that treated her as merchandise, and by a man who treated her as property.
And the legislation that bore her name, the law that might have saved her, arrived 5 years too late.
There is one final detail in this story that needs to be stated.
It is not dramatic.
It is not cinematic.
[music] It has no narrative arc or emotional crescendo.
But it is, >> [music] >> in many ways, the truest thing about this case.
When King was finally convicted and sentenced, when the appeals were exhausted and the prison doors closed behind both men, a group of jurors who had sat through the 5-week trial contacted the victim advocacy organization that had supported Anastasia’s parents.
The jurors asked if they could speak to someone.
They needed to debrief.
They needed to process what they had seen and heard during the trial.
The photographs, the testimony, the video of Anastasia dancing in the disco, >> [music] >> the camera zooming in on her body, her hand rising to block the lens, the displeasure list, the customs records, the dog blanket, the shallow grave.
These were ordinary citizens of Snohomish County who had been called to jury duty and had spent 5 [music] weeks immersed in the details of a transaction that ended in murder.
And when it was over, they could not simply go home and resume their lives.
The story had gotten inside them.
The details had settled in places that could not be easily reached, and they needed [music] help.
That is the measure of what Indal King did, not only to Anastasia, not only to her parents, but to every person who came close enough to the truth to see it clearly.
The jurors needed counseling because the facts of this case were that damaging.
Because the story of a woman ordered from a catalog and killed when she failed to comply is not a story that a normal human being can absorb without injury.
The International Marriage Broker Regulation Act was signed into law in January 2006.
It requires background checks.
It requires disclosure.
It limits the number of simultaneous visa petitions.
It provides foreign brides with information about their legal rights.
It is by most accounts a meaningful piece of legislation that has made the process of international matchmaking marginally safer for the women who participate in it.
But there is a line that one of the law’s advocates used during the legislative process >> [music] >> that captures the essential tragedy more precisely than any policy document ever could.
She was describing the provision that limits the number of fiance visa petitions a man can file at the same time.
Before IMBA, an American man could file five petitions simultaneously and marry whichever woman’s paperwork was approved first.
Under the new law, he can only file one at a time.
The advocate explained the provision this way.
We are not trying to stop anyone from having a second chance.
We just do not want them to have six chances at the same time.
And then she added, almost as an aside, that Indle King had another fiance visa in the works at the time he murdered Anastasia.
Another visa.
Another application.
Another listing pulled from the catalog.
Another photograph selected.
Another set of documents filed with the immigration authorities.
While Anastasia’s body was lying in a shallow grave on the Tulalip reservation.
While her parents were searching the morgues of Moscow.
While her friends were filing missing persons reports and her co-workers were wondering why she had not come back to work.
The man who had killed her was already processing the paperwork for her replacement.
That is the catalog.
That is how it works.
You browse.
You select.
You purchase.
You use.
>> [music] >> And when the product breaks or resists or develops a will of its own, you dispose of it.
You file the paperwork and you start shopping again.
Anastasia Soloveva King deserved better than every single thing that happened to her from the moment her photograph appeared in that listing.
She deserved a system that treated her as a person, >> [music] >> not a commodity.
She deserved a husband who saw her brilliance instead of her compliance.
She deserved a country that protected her instead of trapping her.
She deserved to finish her degree at the University of Washington.
She deserved to become the lawyer she wanted to be.
She deserved to grow old with her parents instead of being buried beside them.
She deserved to live.
She did not get what she deserved.
She got Indle Gifford King Jr.
She got a catalog [music] and a townhouse and a necktie and a shallow grave and a law named after her that arrived 5 years after it could have saved her life.
The law is there now.
It has her fingerprints on it in the sense that every word of it was written because she did not survive to see it written.
Every provision exists because she was not protected by it.
Every safeguard was built over the place where she fell.
That is the cost of legislation in the United States.
Someone has to die first.
Someone has to be ordered from a catalog, transported across an ocean, beaten, abused, sexually assaulted, chased down a street in Bishkek by a man in his underwear, presented as a list of defects to her own father, strangled with a necktie, stripped of her wedding ring, wrapped in a dog blanket, and buried in a shallow grave on a reservation.
And then someone has to find her body.
And then someone has to convict the men who killed her.
And then someone has to take her story to the floor of the United States Senate, and then, >> [music] >> finally, years later, the law changes.
Anastasia’s parents bought cemetery plots next to their daughter.
They planned to be buried beside her in a country they had never expected to call home.
[music] Every Sunday, rain or shine, they made the drive to Linwood and stood at her grave.
Two retired music teachers from Bishkek standing in a cemetery in Washington state looking at a headstone that should not exist.
The catalog is still out there.
The industry has evolved.
It has moved online.
The photographs are higher resolution.
The profiles are more detailed.
The fees are different.
The terminology has changed, but the fundamental mechanics are the same.
>> [music] >> A man in one country browses listings of women in another country, selects one, pays a fee, and arranges for her to be delivered.
The transaction proceeds.
The power imbalance remains.
And the question that Imbra tried to answer, the question that Anastasia’s life and death posed to the entire system, is the same question it has always been.
What happens to the woman after the transaction is complete? [music] Anastasia Solovyeva King answered that question.
She answered it with her diary entries and her bruises and her admission to the University of Washington and her hand raised to a camera lens >> [music] >> and her body in a shallow grave.
She answered it with everything she was and everything [music] she could have been and everything that was taken from her by a man who treated her as a line item in a ledger.
The answer is that it depends entirely on the man.
And [music] the system, even after Imbra, even after the background checks and the disclosure requirements and the visa limitations, still depends entirely on the man.
That is why Anastasia’s story is not a story about a crime.
It is a story about a system.
A system that treated a brilliant, ambitious, extraordinary young woman as a product to be purchased, used, and replaced.
[music] A system that gave a violent man with a documented history of abuse unrestricted access to vulnerable women in economically desperate circumstances.
A system that collected its fees [music] and looked away.
Anastasia raised her hand and said, “Stop.
” The camera kept rolling.
The catalog kept turning pages.
And the shallow grave on the Tulalip Reservation kept its silence for 97 days before anyone heard what it had to say.
