48 Hours - The Case of the Poison Cheesecake
Episode Date: June 4, 2023Viktoria Nasyrova is accused of using cheesecake as a murder weapon. Her motive was to steal the identity of Olga, who looks a lot like her. "48 Hours" correspondent Peter Van Sant repor...ts.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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In 2014, Laura Heavlin was in her home in Tennessee
when she received a call from California.
Her daughter, Erin Corwin, was missing.
The young wife of a Marine
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She doesn't do the in-your-face type of homicidal maniac kind of thing.
She's not a shooter. She's not a stabber.
But I haven't seen somebody this ruthless in a long time.
I've seen a lot of murders.
I've seen people killed with knives and machetes and guns,
with vehicles, strangulation, suffocation.
I have never seen anyone try to kill another person with a piece of cheesecake.
Until now.
Until now.
I'm a private investigator here in New York City.
I was hired to hunt down and assist in the apprehension of Victoria Nassirova.
As a perpetrator, she's one in a million.
There was a call from patrol saying that we have a woman, Olga,
who's lying in bed, who appears to be under the influence of something, and she's advising that there are items missing from her bedroom.
and she's advising that there are items missing from her bedroom.
Then she tells me this tale of how this woman, Victoria Nazirova, came to her home.
She arrived with what she described as the best cheesecake in New York.
She says, please have this cheesecake.
Olga says, okay, I'll try the piece of the cheesecake.
Immediately she felt extremely ill, nauseous, sweaty, dizzy. dizzy and she said I've never felt like that before
I don't know what was going on
she passes out
within a very short amount of time
Olga is fighting for her life
someone was trying to kill you
who did you think?
Victoria
Victoria Nazarova
yep
sphinazepam in the cheesecake,
a sedative primarily used in Russia.
Apparently it has no taste,
and a little bit too much can produce an overdose.
Victoria found someone that resembled her.
I think she wanted to kill this woman
and assume her identity.
Victoria Naserova's dangerous, arrogant, cunning.
I didn't know how dangerous she was
until I found out the trail of bodies
that she was leaving behind in an unconscious state.
The only thing I remember,
I just took one bite of fish
and I was out of it in five minutes.
For a week, I was in the hospital.
Police soon discovered that she was wanted
for something far more serious.
This is for murder.
This is for murder right here.
I believe that Victoria felt that the walls
were closing in on her.
Victoria Nassirova had to be taken off of these streets.
I am not a killer.
I am woman.
Only woman.
I think anybody that trusts Victoria has something to fear. Hot shot Australian attorney Nicola Gaba was born into legal royalty.
Her specialty? Representing some of the city's most infamous gangland criminals.
However, while Nicola held the underworld's darkest secrets, the most dangerous secret was her own.
She's going to all the major groups within Melbourne's underworld, and she's informing on them all.
I'm Marcia Clark, host of the new podcast, Informants Lawyer X.
In my long career in criminal justice as a prosecutor and defense attorney,
I've seen some crazy cases.
And this one belongs right at the top of the list.
She was addicted to the game she had created.
She just didn't know how to stop.
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It's just the best idea yet. She is a very colorful criminal.
In his 20-year career as a New York police detective,
Kevin Rogers says he never met the likes of Victoria Nazarova.
Extremely brazen, diabolical.
met the likes of Victoria Nazarova. Extremely brazen,
diabolical. And even
the street smarts of a career cop
left him unprepared
for what he says she
did. I've never
dealt with a case where
cheesecake that's laced with
poison is utilized.
It started on
September 2nd, 2016
with what seemed like a routine call.
It was a call from patrol stating that we have a woman advising that there are items missing from her bedroom.
The woman was a beauty stylist named Olga Svik, who did eyelash extensions at a nearby salon.
Patrol officers told Rogers she'd reported items, including purses, had vanished from her
home. Grabbed my partner and we headed out to this woman's house. She told him she had just
returned home from the hospital, where she said she'd been in and out of consciousness
with severe dizziness and nausea. Olga's bedroom is the top right window. When he got to the scene, Olga, a Ukrainian
immigrant, still seemed a bit woozy. Can you remember at all the police asking you questions?
No, I don't remember. The only thing she remembered was that a frantic client from the salon had come
to her house, a Russian woman named Victoria Nazarova, who had wanted her eyelashes extended in a hurry.
I need an emergency eyelash repair done.
Please, please, please.
Olga said, I never have done that before.
Every bit of work that I do is in my salon.
Olga had told her client she had no appointments available,
but she says Victoria was in the habit of being pushy.
She'd repeatedly suggested they
spend time together outside of work. She started acting like she's my friend, you know. Feeling
uneasy, Olga refused Victoria's offers to hang out, and she noticed something else about Victoria,
something visually unsettling. I thought she looked like me.
An uncanny physical resemblance.
While Olga turned down socializing with Victoria,
she relented to her pleas for eyelash help and told her to come over.
Olga's uneasy feeling returned when Victoria showed up at her door with three small slices of cheesecake.
It's from like famous bakery, like famous cheesecake.
Olga says Victoria quickly gobbled up two of the slices and then insisted Olga try the last one.
Did you eat the entire piece?
Yeah, it's like small piece.
And what happened?
I got sick.
She says she threw up violently.
And then after that, I don't remember anything.
So she tells you this story. What are you thinking?
I'm suspicious.
With Olga acting woozy, Rogers wondered if she was a drug user.
I said to her, I said, Olga, I want to believe you.
However, this doesn't add up.
But she was adamant, adamant, this 100% happened,
and this woman is up to something.
In the garbage, Rogers did see something.
I walked over to the waste paper basket,
and right there was this plastic container with what appeared to be the remnants of pastry, something that looked good.
Olga identified it as the cheesecake box. Rogers told his evidence team to bag it and tag it.
Whatever had been in that box, Olga said it had made her very sick.
You almost died. Yeah, I was in coma
34 minutes. But Olga admits doctors didn't find anything suspicious in her system. Still, she told
Rogers she was hospitalized twice. He called the hospitals to confirm, but says they wouldn't
divulge patient information. Which, again, led me to believe that maybe she wasn't telling the truth.
Rogers did try to find Victoria Nazarova, but couldn't.
Well, it sounds like at that point, this case is almost over.
Dead.
But a few months later, the case came back to life when Rogers found a new witness, a neighbor of Olga's
who reported seeing a woman visiting her the day after the alleged cheesecake incident.
He told me that a woman had come and gone a few times. The neighbor said the mysterious woman
had told him Olga was sick. And when he went to check on Olga, he walked into a surreal scene and called an
ambulance. Her room was like a sauna. Someone had turned the heat on full blast, even though
it was a hot August day. And Olga was passed out in the bed, barely dressed. When she's discovered,
She's discovered in this sort of racy lingerie. Olga was stunned by this detail because she had been wearing sweatpants.
So someone changed you.
Yeah.
Changed your clothes.
Yeah.
And there was more.
Pills were strewn all over the floor.
Rogers wondered, had someone tried to kill Olga and then stage this scene to
make it look like a suicide? Rogers realized that Olga had probably been telling the truth
all along. I do have to make that sort of uncomfortable apology to her of I'm truly
sorry for not believing you 100% at first.
Rogers now turned his attention again to finding the suspect in this case,
Olga's client, Victoria Nazarova.
But where was she?
Rogers had no way of knowing that someone else was also trying to find her.
His name is Herman Weisberg.
He's a private eye and a retired New York City detective.
Weisberg was tracking Victoria through ads on Russian dating sites and social media,
where he says some of her outreach seemed designed for a niche audience. She was advertising her services as a dominatrix.
You could call it slash escort.
He believed Victoria was using online ads
to commit crimes of opportunity.
She would knock out with knockout drugs,
taking money, watches, jewelry, whatever she can get.
And he suspected Victoria had done something much worse.
Who murdered your mother?
Victoria Nasciro.
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With the fog of her mysterious illness behind her,
Olga Sviks says she went back to work,
sharing the story of her harrowing ordeal.
That's when another client told her something
she never expected to hear. She said, you know, one of my husband's friends,
I think somebody also drug him. His name is Ruben.
Meet Ruben Borukhov. Hi Tina, how are you?
About two months before Olga ate that cheesecake,
Ruben, who ran a nearby dry cleaning business,
met a woman on a Russian dating site.
Her name? Victoria Nazarova.
She said she's a good cook and I said I love to eat.
The two arranged to meet at her place for dinner.
I just took one bite of fish and I was out
of it in five minutes. Ruben says he passed out and Victoria allegedly went on a shopping spree.
She took like $800, maybe $1,000 in my altogether in cash, $2,400 in American Express. So she's
living high on the hog on your money.
Absolutely.
And then she brought me here.
Two days later, Ruben was still out of it when Victoria literally took him to the cleaners.
One of Ruben's employees took this video.
She's walking here and there and making some stories to my workers.
Oh, we had wine.
He drank two bottles of wine. I don't remember
nothing. As Victoria talks to the workers, the camera catches a glimpse of her sitting
in the boss's chair. Luckily, Ruben's sister called an ambulance. Victoria would flee the scene before it arrived, but not before cleaning him out.
I had someone in the basement, a couple hundred here.
She took it.
She took the watch.
And Ruben believes Victoria nearly took a lot more than that.
Did you almost die?
I think so.
That's how I was.
Oh, he was a sick man.
I think so. That's how I was.
Oh, he was a sick man.
But private eye Herman Weisberg says when it comes to Victoria Nazarova, Olga and Rubin may have been the lucky ones.
In 2017, Weisberg began working with this woman, Nadia Ford.
Nadia said her mother, Ala Alexenko, with whom she was very close, had gone missing back home in Russia. And so every day you would talk to her? Every day. Nadia says before her mother
disappeared, she had mentioned making a new best friend. The friend's name? Victoria Nazarova.
Before Victoria came to New York, she was living in Russia
and had become Allah's neighbor in the apartment next door.
Here is your mother, standing next to you.
Right.
And here is Victoria.
Right.
And they seem like an odd couple.
You just wouldn't think they'd hang out with each other.
She was always trying to be very friendly to her.
And my mom,
she trust everyone. In the fall of 2014, Ala had told Nadia she would be sending her daughter
special gifts. Her new best friend, Victoria, would bring them. Victoria would be carrying
$6,000 in cash and other valuables, including two fur, to be hand-delivered to Nadia.
But Victoria never showed.
And on October 5th, Nadia tried to call her mother, but couldn't reach her.
How many times did you call your mother that day, October 5th?
Oh, a lot. A lot. About a hundred.
Really? A hundred times?
At least. At least. I tried everything.
And she would not answer?
No.
So what are you thinking?
I got afraid.
Because for eight years, it never happened that she didn't answer the phone. Never.
Nadia says she had found Victoria's sudden friendship with her mom suspicious.
And that suspicion only grew when she accessed her mother's cell phone records online.
And I saw the last person who called her. It was Victoria. The call had come in at 11 p.m. and there were no other calls after
it. And that's it. And then my heart dropped. I just started to have this feeling that something
happened. Something terrible. Something terrible happened. Nadia decided she had to go to Russia to find out the truth.
About two years later, 48 hours went with Nadia to retrace her steps.
We brought her back to her hometown of Krasnodar,
about 800 miles south of Moscow near the Black Sea, to show us how she launched
her own investigation into her mother's disappearance.
First, Nadia convinced Victoria to meet her outside her mom's apartment building, where
she confronted her.
She says Victoria loudly insisted Allah was alive.
And then she ran up the stairs.
And then I'm like, where are you going?
Why are you running?
And if she runs up here, are you chasing her?
Exactly, yeah.
Nadia told us she notified police and took them inside her mother's apartment.
So when I walk into the apartment...
She quickly realized the place had been looted.
Nothing.
Are the cards gone?
Nothing, nothing.
Family heirlooms and expensive jewelry gone.
Everything.
And whoever did this also stole most of her mother's life savings.
$40,000 Ala kept in a secret hideaway.
If you take this off.
It was gone.
And as far as Nadia could tell, so is Victoria.
What are the police and the district attorney and what are these people saying to you?
Just wait, she's gonna go. She's gonna come back. Undaunted, Nadia carried on her search,
crisscrossing the country, posting flyers like this one.
crisscrossing the country, posting flyers like this one.
She pleaded with Victoria by text.
Listen, I give you everything.
My apartment, money, you name it.
Please just give me my mom back.
Nadia feared she was getting nowhere when she had an idea.
Nadia, where are we right now?
We're in the highway that Victoria had my mom.
She noticed that most main roads had traffic cameras.
What if one of them had photographed Victoria the night Nadia's mother went missing?
But you've got to get access to these photographs.
How do you do that?
It's Russia. You buy things.
You have money, you buy things.
Nadia got access to images from
local traffic cameras. About 100 miles from the apartment, Nadia hit pay dirt. That's the camera
that showed that my mom was with Victoria. These are the pictures that changed everything. The
pictures look blurry, but Nadia was certain that this
is Victoria Nazarova behind the wheel, and equally sure she knew who was sitting in the passenger
seat, her mom. No doubt in your mind. No. What's the date that this picture was taken? October 5th
in the morning, 10 o'clock. October 5th, the day that you lost all communication with your own mother.
If the picture could be believed, it meant her mother could still be alive.
This camera gave me hope.
Nadia called Russian police about the pictures and was shocked at their response.
What does the detective say?
He said, I know, I have these pictures. With investigators now working the case,
Nadia says they confirmed Victoria rented this car with these plates,
tracked her down, and brought her in for a lie detector test.
But before the results could come back,
unbeknownst to the cops,
Victoria caught the first flight out of Russia.
She cannot get away with this.
With Victoria on the run, Nadia desperately continued her search for her mother,
hoping against hope to find her alive.
I dedicated my life to that. I quit everything and everyone. I didn't believe that my mom is not alive.
But hope turned to heartbreak in April of 2015 when she got a disturbing phone call.
Charred human remains had been found in a remote area about a two-hour drive from Ala's apartment.
Authorities called Nadia in to make an identification.
I said, no, it's not her, no.
It's just remains.
And then a few minutes later, I started looking at her teeth.
And you knew? You knew it was your mother?
Yeah. Yeah.
So I basically recognized my mom by her teeth.
Behind me is the Russian town of Armavir.
It's about 110 miles from Krasnodar.
And it's important to this case
because it's where Victoria Nasarova grew up.
Why is that significant?
Because less than a quarter mile from where I'm standing right now is where Ala's body was dumped.
The body was here.
Victoria took everything from me, my family, my life, my mom, everything.
By this time, Interpol already had issued an international arrest warrant
for Victoria Nazarova in Ala's murder.
Nadia went home to Brooklyn, determined as ever to track down Victoria Nazarova.
On a whim, she turned to Facebook.
And you'll never guess whose face popped up on the screen.
Victoria was posting pictures all over Facebook.
Checking in at this place, that place.
Beautiful life.
She flew to Mexico.
Having a great time.
Yeah.
From Mexico, she flew to New York.
Nadia reported all this to U.S. police and immigration officials,
but they couldn't find Victoria.
That's when Nadia started working with private investigator
and former New York City detective Herman Weisberg.
He combed through Victoria's Facebook profile with an experienced eye for
detail. I never look at what people want me to see on these sites. I'm used to looking at
everything except for what's supposed to draw your attention in. Late at night, Weisberg meticulously
studied every photograph and made a remarkable discovery right on Victoria's face.
This particular picture was the most beneficial. She's wearing the Ray-Ban sunglasses that are
mirrored, and she took a great picture for us to see the dashboard of the car. But more importantly,
the stitching on that back headrest, yeah, that's just black leather with a light gray stitching on
it. I decided the next morning I was going to be at a big parking lot at a train station.
He walked row after row of vehicles, peering into windows, hoping to find the make and model that had that stitching.
And it's a big hub for the railroad.
Hundreds of cars in here.
Yeah, probably thousands all over the place.
So it's real easy to look for the kind of detail I was looking for. Then a Chrysler sedan caught his
eye. So you look inside the car and what do you see? All right, it's got the same stitching.
And show me on your phone. There's her mirrored sunglasses. The stitching over here. Turns out that only a Chrysler 300 had this stitching and
dashboard layout. Now the hard part, finding the specific car Victoria was driving. Again,
this was such a wild goose chase at this point. But Weisberg saw that a series of likes on
Victoria's Facebook page were clustered around Sheep's Head Bay, a Russian neighborhood in Brooklyn.
So you sent some of your investigators to look for one of these Chrysler 300s.
Did they have any luck?
Well, yeah, we found a bunch of them.
Then the next day I had somebody run the license plates.
And luckily we found one that came back to a Russian sounding name.
Weisberg took our 48 H hours crew into the area he searched
and called me to the scene when he again found the Chrysler 300 at the heart of this investigation.
This is it. Yeah. This is the car. This is the car. Yeah. Take a look inside. Do you see the
stitching? Yep. It's hard to miss now. Oh, there it is. Now you see how unique it is, right? Yeah.
It's hard to miss now.
Oh, there it is.
Now you see how unique it is, right?
Yeah.
This is only an area of 8.5 million people.
You found the car.
It wasn't a needle in a haystack.
You had to find a haystack first.
And when Weisberg went to the address connected to that car,
the building looked familiar.
Weisberg had seen it before in another one of Victoria's selfies. When you look at it and you see that telephone pole and the location of that manhole cover and that manhole cover,
and if you look over there, you've got the telephone pole and you've got the two manhole
covers. This is brilliant, Herman. Through that reflection in her glasses, you figure out this is the apartment building
where the man who owns that Chrysler 300 lives.
And with Victoria in the picture, you're thinking she might be living with this guy?
It looks like she took a selfie there, and it all starts to make sense.
Amazingly, the woman Russian authorities wanted for the
murder of Nadia's mother was now living with her boyfriend in Nadia's own backyard.
Four or five blocks away. You got to be kidding me. No. Did you try to go find her? No. Why?
Because I would kill her. We got lucky early on, and we spotted Victoria and her boyfriend out here.
The boyfriend was the owner of the Chrysler 300 and lived in that apartment building.
That boyfriend told us that he eventually became one of Victoria's victims himself.
He says not only did she steal from him, but that she killed his beloved beagle, Joey.
Apparently, Victoria got very jealous of the dog getting some of the spotlight in their house
and decided to poison the beagle, allegedly, on the beagle's birthday.
I'm a dog lover, so that stuff.
That guy, I've seen him on TV.
And Joey the beagle's demise didn't sit well with Victoria's neighbors either. She killed his dog, that stuff. And Joey the Beagle's demise didn't sit well with Victoria's neighbors either.
She killed his dog, that bitch. Killed his dog.
Every time you learn something else about this woman, you realize that if she was left
unarrested, this could have really ended poorly for Brooklyn.
this could have really ended poorly for Brooklyn.
But now, Weisberg knew the hunt was finally over.
He says he called Interpol and Homeland Security,
but neither one agreed to take action. So he alerted the NYPD.
And on March 20, 2017, the police made their move.
The woman who had once posed as a dominatrix
suddenly found herself in handcuffs.
I just cried.
I couldn't believe that it's actually happened.
It's a miracle.
Detective Kevin Rogers couldn't believe it
when his phone rang.
Brooklyn advises us that they had this woman, Victoria Nazarova, in their custody.
Rogers says the cheesecake case suddenly started making sense.
Olga had something that Victoria wanted, and it wasn't money, and it wasn't handbags.
He says the instant he started reviewing police evidence photos,
he saw something that made it clear exactly what Victoria was after.
This ID of Olga's was found in Victoria's apartment.
The picture looked eerily similar to Victoria herself.
I think she wanted to kill this woman and assume her identity.
To back up his theory, Rogers knew he would need to prove that Olga's cheesecake had been poisoned.
When he sent the container found in Olga's house to a lab, they found nothing.
But when Rogers decided to send it for more extensive testing, he got a hit.
Phenazepam is a sedative primarily used at the time in Russia.
It makes you sleepy.
Yeah, sleepy, then coma, then death.
Rogers learned that phenazepam is especially dangerous in a hot environment.
Remember, the heater in Olga's room had been left on high.
And Victoria's DNA was on the cheesecake box.
All these pieces of the puzzle, they've come together.
So you think this was a planned murder?
Absolutely.
Victoria was charged with attempted murder for the attack on Olga, assault, and grand larceny.
Before trial, she agreed to sit down with us at New York's Rikers Island Jail.
Victoria Nazarova? Yes.
What do you make of Herman Weisberg's investigation? To see more, go to 48hours.com. We'd heard cruel and colorful stories about Victoria Nazarova for months.
So in 2017, when we interviewed her in jail as authorities investigated her for attempted murder in Olga's case.
Victoria Nazarova? Yes.
Peter Van Sant, please have a seat. Thank you.
We weren't sure what to expect.
Would you look at this? Yeah.
This is Ala. Yes.
She insisted she had nothing to do with the disappearance of Nadia's mother, Ala.
Victoria, did you kill Ala? No.
You did not? No. There's a woman named Olga who looks a lot like you, who claims that
you tried to kill her by giving her a piece of poisoned cheesecake. You wanted her dead so you could steal her identity.
Victoria delivered her answer using the careful language of someone with a lot to lose.
I know whom you mean. I know this young woman. I can tell you that.
I did not force her to eat it.
You're telling me all of these accusations against you, all of that is false.
No, I admit doing a part of it, but I will only talk about it at the trial.
Victoria Nazarova would be in custody for nearly six years as the pandemic caused delays.
Before she stood trial for the poisoning of Olga Svik.
When the case went to court in January of 2023.
The trial of a woman accused of poisoning her lookalike with cheesecake.
The media were watching.
There are elements of this case that you won't find anywhere else.
The beautician, the cheesecake.
In all the evidence you have, what is the most important in your opinion?
We're looking at it right here. It's this container.
The cheesecake box from Olga's garbage still has crumbs left inside.
Outlandish as it is, Assistant District Attorney Dino Latourgis tells jurors in opening statements,
This is not a joke. It's not just a story.
They should see it as a potential murder weapon.
This defendant intended to kill this woman and steal her identity.
He calls Olga first to highlight the human consequences. And she's
going to explain to you everything that happened to her, everything that she can remember, of course.
She was poisoned with something that impacted her memory. Cameras were not allowed to record
witness testimony. Olga makes it clear that talking about the details of her ordeal is still like reliving a bad dream.
And testifying in front of her alleged attacker traumatizes her all the more.
Was she looking at you?
Oh, yeah. She looked at me.
What did you see on her face, in her eyes?
You know, she's smiling.
She was smiling. She was smirking. The state also calls Nadia Ford.
I was trying to get her, look, look at me. Look at the person whose mother you killed.
Look, look into my eyes. Remember them for the rest of your life. The judge has strictly limited
prosecutors from going into specifics about the murder charges facing Victoria in Russia.
So they're hoping Nadia can finesse the details and still get the point across.
I'll tell you, it was a risky strategy.
What has she told them that you think helps your case?
What she told the jury is that something serious happened in Russia.
It's one thing for me to say the crime was serious,
and it's another thing for a witness to come in
and show with her body language, with her eyes,
with her overall demeanor,
that this was an incredibly serious crime
that Victoria Nasarova was wanted for.
I was staring at her.
I just want her to look at me.
She didn't look at me once.
I was almost certain in the beginning of the trial that Victoria was going to testify.
And I know that she likes to talk.
As it turned out, Victoria declined to testify and answer questions.
But something she did say made it into the trial.
Something she said to me in a part of her 48 hours interview
published online. It's in evidence. Peter Van Zandt asked this woman in English,
there is a woman named Olga. There's a woman named Olga. Who claims that you tried to kill her
by giving her a piece of poison cheesecake. Latourgis has someone read Victoria's answer into the record.
I know whom you mean. I know this young woman. I can tell you that.
I did not force her to eat it. I did not force her to eat it? For me as an individual,
she's guilty with that statement. Where in that answer does she say, I didn't poison anybody?
Ms. Nazarova is not guilty of these charges.
But defense attorney Christopher Hoyt doesn't call a single witness to help him prove it.
Instead, he argues the spectacle of this case obscures the specifics, details that amount to reasonable doubt.
There's no direct evidence of anyone seeing Victoria Nazarova putting finazepam in cheesecake.
He reminds the jury Olga's doctors didn't find anything unusual in her system.
And he says there was nothing particularly unusual about Victoria's life in New York either.
She's been just living in the U.S. using her normal name.
That's just the point, says the prosecutor.
Victoria's U.S. visa was set to expire.
She was scared of facing charges in Russia and needed a new identity
to help her hide. There's only two categories of people that need someone else's ID.
You have college kids under the age of 21 who want to borrow their buddy's ID to go drink.
And then on the other hand, you have international fugitives who need someone's ID
as a lifeline to stay in this country and not go back to Russia.
This is not a case about what happened in Russia.
And the defense insists that even if Victoria poisoned the cheesecake,
it's not enough to prove she wanted Olga dead.
I submit to you that they have not proven that intent.
This case has more than you need to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that this defendant is guilty.
But will the jury agree?
As they file back in, what are you seeing on their faces?
When this jury goes off to deliberate, what's going through your mind?
What's going through my mind is that they understand the diabolical calculation that occurred for this crime.
Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz says Victoria Nazarova
is a lot smarter and more committed than the average criminal defendant.
It takes patience and it
takes planning. But it takes the jury in her trial only an hour and a half to reach a verdict.
How say you to count number one of the indictment charging the defendant Victoria Nassarova
with attempted murder in the second degree guilty or not guilty? Guilty. Guova was attempted murder in the second degree. Guilty or not guilty? Guilty.
Guilty of attempted murder in the second degree.
Were there tears?
Yeah.
At sentencing, Olga tells the court her suffering went on long after Victoria's attack.
She caused me to lose trust in people.
I have difficulty trusting people and I cannot know for sure what their true intentions are.
I am grateful that this person will be punished for what she did to me.
The maximum punishment is 25 years in prison.
You are an extremely dangerous woman. I sentence you to 21 years in jail.
Judge Kenneth Holder decides a 21-year sentence is enough.
With credit for time served, Victoria may be out in 15.
Even so, she has some choice words for the court as she is led away, barely audible under her mask.
She's a narcissistic homicidal maniac. That's what narcissistic homicidal maniacs say when they
something everything goes bad for them. Victoria's time behind bars has already been rough. In 2018
at Rikers Island in New York, she was assaulted by fellow inmates and suffered multiple injuries
to her face. And when she's done serving her time in America,
Victoria faces deportation and murder charges back in Russia.
I know there's great satisfaction for you that Victoria's finally going to prison,
but it's not for what she did to your mom.
Is that still an emptiness inside for you?
I feel better.
At least I know now that for the next 15 years she's not going to hurt anyone.
Two of the people Victoria has hurt most have resolved to draw strength from each other.
Since tragedy unexpectedly brought them together, Nadia and Olga have become the best of friends.
When we met, I feel like I knew Nadia all my life.
She's very kind, very nice, open-hearted, like, you know, kind of remind me of my mom.
Nadia, she went through hell.
They seem to know it takes one victim of Victoria Nazarova to truly understand another.
Do you think the two of you will be friends for life?
I think yes.
I don't know if it would be clear.
The heartbreaking case of Gabby Petito.
Insider disappearance.
The story you haven't heard.
Hear from Gabby's close friend.
A lot of couples look nice on Instagram.
There's everything behind the scenes you don't know.
Follow and listen to the 48 Hours Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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