FULL TEXT (Article 1 of 2): Moscow – Passion and potassium cyanide have combined to make a ‘Soviet Borgia’ worthy of the famous Italian prisoners of the Middle Ages — worthy, that is, until she was caught by the police.
A
gruesome murder story based on these three ingredients unfolds over the past
ten years in Riga, capital of the Soviet Baltic Republic of Latvia.
Reported
in a few bare, toneless lines on the hack page of the local newspaper, ‘Soviet
Latvia,’ the story centres round an apparently respectable 50-year-old woman
named H. B. Zarin well-educated, and the mother of three grown-up children.
More
than 10 years ago she developed an insatiable passion far a young man. T. F.
Kreizberg, a jeweller by trade, with whom, according to ‘Soviet Latvia’ she
‘entered into co-habitation.’
Moreover,
consumed by jealousy for her young rival, Margotta Grinblat, Kreizberg’s
finacee, she slipped some potassium cyanide into a glass of lemonade and gave
it to Margotta to drink.
The
newspaper does not say whether Kreizberg found out about the crime but in any
case he continued to live with Zarin.
Six
years later, however, in 1952, he himself fell victim to her jealousy. She
killed him, too, with cyanide.
On
his death, ‘Soviet Latvia’ comments: ‘Only skilful dissimulation saved the
murderess at that time from punishment.’ Many people at the Housing Committee
where she worked, it reports, suspected the truth.
Last
April, this ‘Soviet Borgia’ decided that A. Klavin, the woman who looked after
the committee’s accounts, knew too much, and she struck again.
But
this time her attempt to poison A. Klavin failed. She was arrested, tried and
sentenced to death.
[‘Passion and Potassium Cyanide,’ syndicated (Reuter), The
Sunday Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica), Jan. 13, 1957]
***
FULL TEXT (Article 2 of 2): Moscow, Dec. 17 – A murder made
the news here today.
The newspaper Soviet Latvia reported a woman named Zarin,
50-year-old mother of three, was sentenced to death for killing a former lover
and his intended bride six years ago. She dispatched them with lemonade spiked
with poison.
This passed undetected until recently, when she tried the
same recipe on a fellow employe on a construction project and somehow bobbled
it.
Crime usually gets little attention in Russian newspapers.
Soviet Latvia gave the Zarin case two paragraphs on its back page.
[‘Murder Now Soviet ‘News,’ syndicated (AP), Dec. 17, 1956,
p., 4B]
***
***
***
***
***
[701-12/31/20]
***
No comments:
Post a Comment