http://nypost.com/2010/03/09/seagate-identity-thieves-nabbed-for-murder/
Police said that Malezhik was last seen leaving her apartment building in Brighton Beach.
The Yakovlevs were implicated in her disappearance a few months later after they cashed over $6,500 in checks from the missing woman’s account, officials alleged.
The couple was arrested last spring, charged with stealing the woman’s identity.
Believing that Malezhik was the victim of foul play, FBI investigators converged on the gated community last August, searching the couple’s Manhattan Avenue home for her remains.
Investigators reportedly tore up the back yard and basement, but turned up nothing, although it became clearer and clearer that people tend to disappear or die around the couple, especially after they gave them large sums of money.
While Dimitry Yakovlev has been implicated in Malezhi’s murder, the woman’s body has never been found, officials said.
In interviews, Yakovlev shrugged off the identity theft charges, claiming that his using of Malezhi’s and Malezhik’s credit cards were repayments of loans he had given them before they disappeared.
Yakovlev met Malezhik when she acted as a translator on a court case he was implicated in. He also claimed she had tutored him in English, according to published reports.
http://bklyner.com/three-years-behi...ed-dead-manhattan-beach-woman-sheepshead-bay/
“You personally represented yourself as Irina Malezhik [while making purchases using her credit card]…to stand here and tell me you had no idea what you were doing, is startling,” Glasser chided Yakovlev, who avers she had no idea Malezhik was missing or harmed.
The case took a desperate turn when Yakovlev’s lawyer told the court that the Seagate resident was fearful of her husband Dmitriy, who she alleged was abusive, but Glasser wasn’t buying any of it: “You knew how to divorce a husband — you did it twice before,” the judge scolded the thrice-married identity thief.
While her husband is, indeed scary — he was convicted of not only stealing the identity of Malezhik, but of Alekseyev,*whose dismembered remains were discovered inside of three garbage bags in a New Jersey woods, alongside a disquieting Dracula mask — the alleged abuse was not enough to force Julia Yakovlev out of the couple’s $700,000 Sea Gate, Coney Island home.
Nearly four years after Malezhik first disappeared, the feds have yet to find any trace of her, although a 2009 excavation of the couple’s basement produced panties on the floor of the boiler room with Malezhik’s DNA on them, as well as “a thick envelope containing photos of Alekseyev and an unidentified woman ‘involved in intimate situations,’,” according to FBI agent*Tracie Razzagone, in a quote to The Daily News.
Klein, a resident of Greenpoint, who reportedly “lived like a hoarder” in a squalid home, is still missing.
