Random Mail-Order Bride Horror Stories (15 items)

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  (#1) Anastasia King Died By Her Husband's Hand

  Kyrgyzstan native Anastasia Solovieva King was just 18 when she married Indle King Jr, a 36-year-old man from Washington State she met through a mail-order bride matchmaking service. Indle King, who came off as a charming University of Chicago graduate with a taste for classical music, ended up being a textbook abuser: starting off suave (he won the approval of Anastasia's parents, too) only to morph into a monster following the wedding. He demanded to know her location at all times, put pressure on her to have kids right away, wouldn't let her get a driver's license, and said he would kill her if she left him. Indle also lied about his income, requiring Anastasia to take up work as a waitress; Indle would funnel money from her accounts into his own pocekts. 

  Eventually, Anastasia returned to Kyrgyzstan to spend an extended period of time with her family, but Indle followed her there. When Indle returned to his life in Washington, Anastasia was nowhere to be found. He said she left him at the Moscow airport, but in December of 2000, one of the King's own tenants led authorities to where she lay buried beneath a dirty mattress on the Tulalip Indian Reservation. The tenant admitted to strangling Anastasia while Indle held her to the floor. Indle received a 28-year prison sentence for her murder.
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  (#2) Jerry Mentzel Lost Thousands Of Dollars To His Mail-Order Bride

  69-year-old Pennsylvania man Jerry Mentzel lost his wife of 42 years, only to be swept off his feet by a woman named Valantina Vlba, a 24-year-old Moroccan citizen he met on a mail-order bride website. He brought her to the U.S. and proposed, but she only agreed to marry him if he sent her brother-in-law in London $32,000. Mentzel agreed, and he and Vlba married soon after. Less than two weeks later, the marriage ended, Vlba dipped out, and Mentzel was in the midst of a divorce. And…he had to pay her alimony. Mentzel ended up losing around $100,000, and Valantina Vlba turned out to be the alias of a con artist.
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  (#3) A 'Fast Woman' Pulled The Wool Over Dr. Leo Berson

  To show that mail-order bride horror stories exist way before the age of email, take this story from San Francisco, 1886. Dr. Leo Berson procured the services of the San Francisco Matrimonial Bureau to find a wife, which they did: the lovely Kate Grant. Dr. Berson pampered his fiancée with upwards of $1,500, not a small price back in the 19th century. But on the day of the wedding, Miss Grant was AWOL. The Los Angeles Herald, who called Grant a "fast woman," recounted: "By letters found in a satchel left behind, the hitherto happy Doctor discovered that he had courted a woman who had been three times married, and was undivorced. The woman is well known in this city and in Portland, Oregon, where one of her husbands resides."
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  (#4) David Sartin Plotted A Bizarre, Sinister Revenge On His Mail-Order Fiancée

  A Texas man named David Sartin met Kiev-native Elena Barykina on a mail-order bride matchmaking site. He visited her multiple times in her home country, wining and dining her, and spending tens of thousands of dollars on jewelry, gifts, and her singing career. They agreed to wait until marriage for sex, but when Sartin learned she was sleeping with a former boyfriend, he hatched a strange and profoundly evil plan to get back at her. He hired a group of Russian mob figures to kidnap Barykina and ship her to him in a shipping crate. Even more twisted, Sartin planned to keep Barykina trapped in his home while he slowly poisoned her to death. But those Russian mob guys? They turned out to be federal agents. Sartin received a 10-year prison sentence.
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  (#5) Lester Barney Killed Alla Barney In Front Of Their Four-Year-Old

  Alla Barney, a 26-year-old, Ukrainian-born engineer, was the mail-order bride of Lester Barney, a man over 30 years her senior. When the marriage went sour, Alla filed a restraining order against Lester and gained custody of their four-year-old son, Daniel. One afternoon, as she picked up him from daycare and strapping him into his car seat, Lester attacked her with a steak knife. Alla bled to death before Daniel's eyes. Lester's galling attempt to claim the murder as self-defense failed, and he is currently serving life in prison.
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  (#6) Reina Swierski Was Strangled By Her Husband And Dumped In The Santa Cruz Mountains

  In 2008, hikers in Castle Rock State Park in Los Gatos, California came upon a human skull. It took two years until authorities discovered the skull belonged to Reina Swierski, a Filipino mail-order bride who had been married to American man Gary Swierski before going missing in 2005. A year after her skull was identified, Gary's adult daughter confessed she helped her father get rid of Reina's body after he strangled her; his daughter was 19 at the time of Reina's death. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The rest of Reina's remains remain undiscovered, and there is speculation that Gary, who had a long history of abusing Reina and other women, got away with murdering another girlfriend 10 years before Reina.
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  (#7) Oksana Makarova Married A Florida Doctor So Her Young Son Could Have Better Opportunities--But Her Husband Had Other Ideas

  Oksana Makarova raised a two-year-old son whom she wanted to ensure would have the brightest future possible. Unfortunately, prospects proved to be limited in her native Ukraine. But then she met Carl, a 50-something emergency room doctor from Florida, at a mail-order bride agency mixer in Odessa. "Here was an educated man from America, promising my child the world," Oksana said, an opportunity even her parents told her not to pass up.

  But after Makarova got to Florida and married Carl, things changed, Carl no longer the kind-hearted, affable family man he'd pretended to be. He set exacting standards for cooking and cleaning; started pressuring her immediately to have a family, going so far as to buy ovulation kits to keep meticulous track of her fertility periods; and dyed her toddler son's hair so he would look more like Carl.

  Then, in typical abuser fashion, he began isolating Makarova from the world, mainly contact with her family back home, and he used her son as leverage, threatening to have the child deported if Makarova did not tow the line. Carl was also physically abusive, once punishing the child so hard in a Walmart, social services were called. Makarova told them her whole story, and they saved her from marriage safely. But she knows she's one of the lucky ones.
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  (#8) Susana Remerata Was Pregnant When Her Husband Shot Her To Death…In A Packed Courthouse

  Timothy Blackwell met Susana Remerata through a mail-order bride catalog in 1991, and the pair married two years later in her hometown of Cartaingan, Philippines. Ten days later, after they arrived back in Blackwell's Seattle home, the marriage was over. Blackwell choked, beat, and threatened Remerata, who became terrified for her life. During their divorce trial, Blackwell shot and killed Remerata, who was pregnant from another relationship, along with two friends planning to testify on her behalf as they waited in the courthouse lobby. He was immediately apprehended, and just over a year later, he stood trial, resulting in a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
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  (#9) A Mail-Order Bride Kills Her Husband And Mother-In-Law And Tries To Sell Twins

  Lai Binghao, a Chinese man, married a Vietnamese mail-order bride named Ayou and brought her to his home in the Guangdong province of South China. After the coupled welcomed a pair of twin boys, Lai Binghao's mother moved in to help take care of the babies. A few months later, Ayou and three Vietnamese men bound and strangled her husband and mother-in-law to death; Ayou then fled with the babies only to be caught a short time later. At the time of her arrest, Ayou was attempting to sell the twins for more than $9,000 each.
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  (#10) Emelita Villa Was Killed By Her Army Master Husband

  Filipino-born Emelita Villa met her husband, Jack Reeves, through a mail-order bride agency when she was 18 and he 46. After eight years of troubled marriage, Villa had enough. She made plans to leave Jack, who was once an Army Master Sergeant, but she never got the chance. Her body was found in Lake Whitney, where, probably not coincidentally, his previous wife - another mail-order bride - had "drowned" years before. In 1996, a court found Reeves guilty of Villa's murder, as well as the murder of yet another one of his wives, Sharon, whose death by shotgun in 1978 was originally ruled a suicide.
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  (#11) Nina Sharanova Was Killed By Her Computer Whiz Husband

  As part of a plea bargain, computer programmer Hans Reiser led authorities to the body of his Russian mail-order bride, which he dumped near Redwood Regional Park in Oakland, California. But Nina Sharanova Reiser was not an ordinary mail-order bride. An obstetrician and gynecologist, Nina met Hans while serving as a translator on his date with a woman he met through a Russian mail-order bride agency. Hans and Nina married in 1998 and had two children. They separated in 2004, and Nina disappeared two years later.

  After both forensic and circumstantial evidence linked him to her murder, Hans stood trial and was found guilty, though Nina's body hadn't yet been found. In accepting a plea deal that reduced his prison sentence, Hans pled guilty and admitted to strangling Nina while their children played in another room of their home.
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  (#12) Mail-Order Bride Pou Was Sold Into And Destroyed By Sexual Slavery

  State department official John R. Miller testified before Congress on human trafficking and revealed that mail-order bride situations can provide a starting point for horrific trafficking nightmares. In one story he recounts, Pou was 17-years-old "when a man came to her village and arranged through her sister to marry her." Not long after the wedding, Pou's new husband sold her to a brothel, where she endured years of abuse. Fortunately, the brothel eventually let her go, but only because sickness and abuse rendered her body undesirable.\

  "Today her body is ravaged by disease," Miller said. "And this woman in her 20s looks decades older than her real age."
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  (#13) Both Ahn Jae-sung And His Mail-Order Bride Were Suckered By A Marriage Agency

  Ahn Jae-sung flew from Seoul to meet his future wife in Uzbekistan. After they married and returned to South Korea, they realized the mail-order bride agency that brought them together also duped them. They told Ahn that his wife came from a wealthy family (she was from a broken home), while they told his wife Ahn would buy her a house (he did not have the financial means to do this). After his wife slit her wrists in front of Ahn and his mother, they separated and she returned to Uzbekistan. But upon return, the wife found she was pregnant by Ahn, who now sends her regular child support payments.
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  (#14) Her Husband Kept Katerina Brunot As A Slave

  Brought together by a mail-order bride matchmaking service, 22-year-old Katerina Brunot, a Siberian college student, married Frank Sheridan, a 45-year-old plumber from Atlanta. Once she arrived in Georgia, Sheridan informed Brunot he only married her for "housekeeping and sex." Brunot advertised herself as someone with "old fashioned values," which often translates to "submissive" in the matchmaking community.

  He beat her regularly and kept an eagle-eye on her at all times, lording over her cleaning to ensure everything was done to his specifications. When she tried to get away, he stabbed himself and told the police Brunot did it. She was jailed for a month before being returned to Sheridan. She managed to get away again, finding refuge in a women's shelter, but Sheridan kept stalking her.

  Police attempted to arrest Sheridan once for his stalking, only to discover he traveled to Russia to meet another mail-order bride. During a second arrest attempt, Sheridan shot one of the officers, who fired back and ended up killing Sheridan. Brunot now speaks out about her ordeal and warns others about the real dangers of being a mail-order bride.
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  (#15) Mail-Order Couple Met ... And Called It Off

  After all the tragedy of mail-order bride horror stories, here's one that is more witty than depressing. It comes from 1895 Chicago, where an unidentified man and one Mrs. J.A. Freeman met face-to-face for the first time after being introduced through a mail-order bride agency. They exchanged "letters, photographs and promises" for months leading up to their first meeting in Chicago. But upon seeing each other, both were immediately turned off. She asked him whose picture he'd sent her.

  "I thought you were handsome," she said. "Well, that's what I thought of you, judging from the picture," he replied. After disclosing that neither of them had money or attraction for the other, they both left town. Likely horror story averted.

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