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Authors: Christopher Barry-Dee;Steven Morris
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couple’s problems exceeded mere incompatibility. “He started getting frustrated with her,” Natasha remembered. “And then it got to the point where Anastasia came into work crying one day because he had smacked her during a driving lesson.”
Yet Natasha, a music teacher, later described Anastasia as “amazingly hard-working” and a “universal favorite, constantly
surrounded by friends. She persevered and even thrived in America.”
Anastasia studied with determination when she wasn’t working as a restaurant hostess and within two years gained admittance to the prestigious University of Washington, where she intended to study law.
At the same time, she appeared to be bracing for her own legal battle. She began keeping a diary and journals to document the increasingly dysfunctional relationship with her husband and eventually stored them in a safety deposit box at a local bank, away from his controlling eye.
According to court documents, the diary detailed “instances where [Anastasia King] was the victim of domestic violence, invasion of privacy and sexual assault.” It also included mentions of her ensuing disgust with her husband and evidence of her own extramarital affairs.
Indle King filed for divorce in 2000. In September of that year, Anastasia visited her parents in Kyrgyzstan and then flew back to Seattle, but never returned to work. Co-workers reported her missing on October 2. Then, on December 28, police found her body wrapped in a dog blanket and buried in a shallow grave at a scrapyard on the Tulalip Indian reservation north of Seattle. But, just when Anastasia’s already stunned family and friends were expecting murder charges to be filed in Snohomish County Superior Court against her husband, the investigation began to focus on Daniel Kristopher Larson, a 20-year-old registered sex offender who himself had rented a room briefly at the Kings’ home.
It was Larson who first brought investigators to Anastasia King’s body, after he claimed that Indle King had made a confession to him. However, further questioning led them to conclude
that Larson himself had strangled her while her 270-pound husband pinned her down. Furthermore, investigators said, one of the reasons for the murder was that Anastasia had discovered that Larson and her husband were lovers.
At King’s trial, Anastasia’s father shook his finger at the killer and berated him in Russian for his cruelty. “You dragged her to the grave you dug… You stripped her corpse, mocking her. You saw the ring on her finger and you cut off her finger. What cruelty! You placed her body face down into the dirt—your beloved wife. An ordinary person cannot even imagine it.”
Because Larson was already in jail for soliciting sex with a 16-year-old Ukrainian girl, prosecutors had worried that he was an unreliable witness. Anastasia King’s funeral took place in Seattle on Saturday, February 3, 2003, at St. Nicolas’s Cathedral on Capitol Hill. Her grave is under a young evergreen tree in a local cemetery.
Whatever the specifics of why, how or even who committed the crime, people agree that the woman from Kyrgyzstan was ultimately a victim of the leap of faith her family took to help her find a new life in the United States.
Ironically, in the process of trying to come to terms with their grief in this faraway country, Anastasia’s father, 63, and mother, 55, had also fallen under America’s spell. At the end of two weeks which had included grueling interviews with the prosecution, at a tearful Orthodox memorial service for their daughter the grieving couple held what was to be their final press conference. “I hope,” Anatoly Solovyov told the assembled reporters wearily, “that authorities will find a possibility to allow us to remain here for the rest of our lives.”
On March 23, 2002, Larson was sentenced to 20 years in prison and King to 29 years.
The case of Anastasia Solovyova was not the first internet-related homicide
Yet Natasha, a music teacher, later described Anastasia as “amazingly hard-working” and a “universal favorite, constantly
surrounded by friends. She persevered and even thrived in America.”
Anastasia studied with determination when she wasn’t working as a restaurant hostess and within two years gained admittance to the prestigious University of Washington, where she intended to study law.
At the same time, she appeared to be bracing for her own legal battle. She began keeping a diary and journals to document the increasingly dysfunctional relationship with her husband and eventually stored them in a safety deposit box at a local bank, away from his controlling eye.
According to court documents, the diary detailed “instances where [Anastasia King] was the victim of domestic violence, invasion of privacy and sexual assault.” It also included mentions of her ensuing disgust with her husband and evidence of her own extramarital affairs.
Indle King filed for divorce in 2000. In September of that year, Anastasia visited her parents in Kyrgyzstan and then flew back to Seattle, but never returned to work. Co-workers reported her missing on October 2. Then, on December 28, police found her body wrapped in a dog blanket and buried in a shallow grave at a scrapyard on the Tulalip Indian reservation north of Seattle. But, just when Anastasia’s already stunned family and friends were expecting murder charges to be filed in Snohomish County Superior Court against her husband, the investigation began to focus on Daniel Kristopher Larson, a 20-year-old registered sex offender who himself had rented a room briefly at the Kings’ home.
It was Larson who first brought investigators to Anastasia King’s body, after he claimed that Indle King had made a confession to him. However, further questioning led them to conclude
that Larson himself had strangled her while her 270-pound husband pinned her down. Furthermore, investigators said, one of the reasons for the murder was that Anastasia had discovered that Larson and her husband were lovers.
At King’s trial, Anastasia’s father shook his finger at the killer and berated him in Russian for his cruelty. “You dragged her to the grave you dug… You stripped her corpse, mocking her. You saw the ring on her finger and you cut off her finger. What cruelty! You placed her body face down into the dirt—your beloved wife. An ordinary person cannot even imagine it.”
Because Larson was already in jail for soliciting sex with a 16-year-old Ukrainian girl, prosecutors had worried that he was an unreliable witness. Anastasia King’s funeral took place in Seattle on Saturday, February 3, 2003, at St. Nicolas’s Cathedral on Capitol Hill. Her grave is under a young evergreen tree in a local cemetery.
Whatever the specifics of why, how or even who committed the crime, people agree that the woman from Kyrgyzstan was ultimately a victim of the leap of faith her family took to help her find a new life in the United States.
Ironically, in the process of trying to come to terms with their grief in this faraway country, Anastasia’s father, 63, and mother, 55, had also fallen under America’s spell. At the end of two weeks which had included grueling interviews with the prosecution, at a tearful Orthodox memorial service for their daughter the grieving couple held what was to be their final press conference. “I hope,” Anatoly Solovyov told the assembled reporters wearily, “that authorities will find a possibility to allow us to remain here for the rest of our lives.”
On March 23, 2002, Larson was sentenced to 20 years in prison and King to 29 years.
The case of Anastasia Solovyova was not the first internet-related homicide
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