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Suffering from a heroin withdrawal, the inmate asked for a paper and pen. She wanted to unburden herself. She said she knew who had murdered Gary Alderdice and Natalya Samofalova, a New Zealand barrister from Hong Kong and his Russian prostitute girlfriend, who were slain here in 1994. Bogdashevskaya herself was involved.
The confession ?€” part of which police released to me last week ?€” marks the apparent resolution of a case of love and murder. The slayings that drew feverish headlines here and in Hong Kong was not a gangland hit, as many had speculated, but a robbery gone bad. Bogdashevskaya had never meant for the couple to die. After all, she and Samofalova had worked together as prostitutes in Macao.
Samofalova, who was 20 when she died on June 24, 1994, was a call girl in Macao in 1994 when she met Alderdice, a wealthy barrister who had been living in Hong Kong for 21 years. Alderdice fell in love with the tall blonde Russian. From April 5 to May 9, the couple holed up in the five-star Westin Resort Hotel, a stay that cost him $43,864. He paid his bill in cash.
Samofalova's club withdrew its support when she moved in with Alderdice, and it appealed to Macao immigration authorities to cancel her visa. She was forced to return to Russia, but Alderdice promised to get her out.
When Alderdice came to Vladivostok that summer, Samofalova confided in her friend that she would soon be marrying him. Thus, Bogdashevskaya hatched a robbery plan. She finagled a dinner invitation for herself, her boyfriend, Andrei, and a friend named Sergei at Samofalova's apartment.
The five chatted in the kitchen, and then the women strayed to the living room. Sergei and Andrei made their move.
"Natasha and I were sitting in the living room, talking and listening to loud music," Bogdashevskaya wrote. "At that moment, Natasha and I heard a crack and the sound of some object falling down. Natasha and I rushed toward the kitchen, and at that time Sergei came out of the foyer and kept us both back. Natasha asked where Gary was, and he answered that he had struck Gary on the head, and in 15 minutes he would be better."
Sergei ordered Bogdashevskaya to come to the kitchen and wipe his fingerprints from the glass he had drunk from.
"When I went to the kitchen," she wrote, "I saw Gary lying on the floor. Gary was covered with a blanket. I didn't see any blood, either in the kitchen or the foyer."
Bogdashevskaya wiped Sergei's glass and fork, and then Andrei ordered her to go down and wait with him in the car, she wrote. She gave a last glance at Samofalova on the way out. Bogdashevskaya does not record her reaction.
"Sergei didn't show up for a long time, and then he came toward the car with bags stuffed with some items. After that, Sergei took me home where my parents live. On the way in the car he gave Andrei some money in rubles and dollars. I don't remember how much, somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500."
On the way home, Sergei warned Bogdashevskaya that he would kill her if she breathed a word to anyone, she wrote. She had a daughter, and she was afraid. She said nothing.
The next day police, called by Samofalova's mother, discovered that the killer had produced a TT-762 pistol and shot the barrister in the eye. While Bogdashevskaya sat in the car with her boyfriend, Sergei tortured Samofalova in an attempt to get what he thought would be an enormous sum of money, police say. Samofalova had left $20,000 of her own money with her mother, but she evidently never told Sergei about it.
For all its interest, the confession proved of minimal value to prosecutors. Bogdashevskaya died in jail amid the ravages of a heroin withdrawal, said Sergei Filatov, senior investigator with the Primorye prosecutor's office.
As for the men, police showed their photographs around among the informers, wise guys and thugs of the city's underworld. Everyone said the culprits were beyond reach.
"People said, 'These guys are dead,'" Filatov told me. "'They were killed in Zavodskoi village, and they threw them in the sewer.' But we were never able to find their bodies."
Russell Working is a freelance journalist based in Vladivostok.