June 16, 2021 • 56 mins
Welcome to week three of SISTER MONTH. The three Khachaturyan sisters liked to take selfies and go to the movies. They looked like typical teenage girls from the outside—but behind the scenes, they were locked in a house of horrors with their cruel father and a wall covered in angels.
Email your sister stories to criminalbroads@gmail.com.
Sign the change.org petition: https://www.change.org/p/stop-prosecution-of-khachaturyan-sisters-victims-of-sexual-and-domestic-violence
Read Matthew Luxmoore’s story: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/10/khachaturyan-sisters-killing-of-abusive-father-russia-trial-family-values
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Music: Matthew Noble and Stereodog Productions (Dan Pierson & Peter Manheim). Intro and conclusion: “Sisters” by Irving Berlin, sung by Anna Telfer. Ad break: “The Great One Step” by Victor Dance Orchestra, via Free Music Archive, licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Sisters.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Sisters, there were never such.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Tea voted sisters, never had to have a chaperon.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
No soon, I'm MUDI key myon who.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Hello, my loves. Welcome to another episode of Criminal Broads,
a true crime podcast about wild women on the wrong
side of the law. We are in the thick of
Sister Month, and as you probably noticed, we have a
brand new theme song just for this month. Oh how
I wish I had had the foresight to get it
for the past two episodes. But here we are. Sister
(00:44):
Month theme song, recommended by an amazing listener who I'll
thank in just a sec, sung by fittingly my own sister,
Anna Telfer. So I hope you like it and you'll
hear it next week too. Okay, guys, you might remember
I was away, like I was traveling for the past
two episodes, so they weren't recorded in real time. We're
(01:05):
back in real time, and I have so much to
tell you that I'm literally going to give you a
table of contents right now because I have things to
tell you in the intro. I need to tell you
what we're talking about today, and then I have things
to tell you in the outro. And it's just going
to be crazy. So here's the table of contents. I'm
going to tell you the table of contents. I'm going
(01:25):
to thank the listener who recommended last week's episode because
she sent me an amazing anecdote. Then I'm going to
read you to sister anecdotes from listeners. Remember I asked
you to send me your sister anecdotes, while I got
two amazing ones. Then I'm going to tell you about
this episode and who you're gonna hear from. Then we're
going to get into the story. But then please stick
(01:48):
around for the conclusion, because not only am I going
to thank my new patrons and tell you about a
change dot org petition, but I have an update on
Lloyd Dean. Remember Lloyd Dean, Marie Dean Harrington's son. We've
been raising money for him. Oh my gosh, I have
an update. Everything's okay, Everything's fine, I think, but I'm
(02:09):
sort of embarrassed because the narrative is different than what
I thought it was. Okay, so there with me, My
loves will get there. Okay, I'm opening up our table
of contents. Oh, I have a listener to thank. So
last week we learned the amazing story of the incredible
Mirabelle Sisters. And I said that someone had recommended it
(02:31):
to me, but I couldn't remember who it was. Well,
it was Carla, my dear Carla. She recommended it, and
she also told me something incredible. So Carla's family is Dominican,
and she said that there's a story in her family
that her grandma was married to her grandpa real fast
to keep her out of Trujillo's clutches. Can you believe it?
(02:55):
And she says that it's a rumor her grandmother doesn't squelch.
Isn't that fast? Fascinating? So, Carla, thank you for recommending
last week's episode, which I know a lot of you
really liked. And your grandma's awesome. We love her. Glad
she's safe too. Okay, So now I have two really
cool sister anecdotes for you. I put out a call
(03:17):
I wanted to hear if you and your sister have
any I don't know, cool things you'd like to share
with the rest of my listeners. And here are two
I got. So this first one is from Carrie. She says,
here's a story from me and my identical twin sister.
We often find the questions like, can you feel what
your sister is feeling? And do you know what she
(03:37):
is thinking about? Funny, but there have been times when
you just know. I was kind of the wild one
of the two of us as teens. My sister was
always concerned about me. One night, when I was out
late and she knew I was with some people I
shouldn't be with, she couldn't go to sleep. She tried
and tried, but just laid there, awake until two am.
(03:58):
The next morning, she asked me what time I had
come home. I told her too. Okay, And this anecdote
is from Emma, She says. My sister is my stepsister.
She and I never lived together. Our parents got together
when we were both in our mid twenties. We grew
(04:18):
up on the same small island in Maine, though, and
I had always looked up to her because she was beautiful, artistic,
and queer, something I didn't dare come close to admitting
about myself back then. I don't know that we ever
spoke before our parents fell in love. We finally bonded
for real while caring for my stepdad through the end
of his life. We were both with him when he died.
He was a complicated and very beautiful man, and I
(04:41):
know that I got to experience the best of him
in his final years, when he was sober and gleefully
in love with my mom. This January, my sister was
pregnant with her and her wife's second child. It was
the pandemic, and I wanted so badly to be with her,
rub her feet and make her tea and fresh bread.
I couldn't, of course. Instead, I woke from a dream
one morning and immediately texted her, I had a dream
(05:03):
that you were going into labor and your feet were
cold and your lips were chapped, and so I was
running around trying to find you socks and chapstick. I
love you. In response, I got you are amazing because
I did go into labor at one am this morning.
My feet are very cold on the kitchen floor and
my lips are chapped. Pacing the house. As someone who
has worked so diligently to build my chosen family of queers,
(05:25):
this connection, without a share drop of blood, felt like
such a gift, like recognition that all the ways I
believe family to be huge and shifting and absolutely magical
is as real as anything else. Ultimately, like a final
little spark that my stepdad left behind for us to
revel in the glow of years after he was gone.
I just love that anecdote. Both of them are so
(05:47):
so beautiful, and I love that one is a pair
of identical twin sisters and one is a pair of
stepsisters who aren't related at all but still have a
magical connection. If anyone else has a sister anecdote, maybe
a creepy one or a beautiful one, send them to
criminal broads at gmail dot com. All right, so let's
move on to today's set of sisters. Last week, I
(06:09):
told you this episode was going to involve chopped up
body parts. Let's see. I have a confession to make.
I was going to do the case of the Scissor Sisters.
They are is a very gruesome Irish case and it
was a listener request and I started researching it and guys,
I just couldn't. I just couldn't do it. You. I mean,
(06:31):
I know it's a true crime podcast, like you wouldn't
think I would be so squeamish, But you may notice
I rarely do super super gory cases here. I just
hate them. It's just too much for me. I don't
want to like put it in your ears either necessarily.
There are plenty of amazing podcasts that do those. So
(06:52):
I was researching it and it's just so graphic, and
I was reading this book that had like a blow
by blow explanation of what happened, and basically the story
is two down and out sisters did a lot of drugs,
killed a very abusive man, and hacked up his body parts.
(07:13):
There's not like a redeeming element. It's just really sad.
So anyway, I pivoted. I couldn't do it. I'm sorry.
And so I was looking for other sister cases because
I had been planning on that one, and I'm actually
really glad I pivoted because I found this case. I
had never heard of this case. It's very recent, it
had never crossed my path. I bet it'll be new
(07:35):
for a lot of you, and it's very of the moment,
especially in Russia where it takes place. So we're going
to talk about the three Khachaturian sisters. This is a
case that happened in Moscow just a couple of years
ago and is still very much ongoing. You're also going
(07:56):
to hear a couple times from the journalist Matthew Luxmore,
who is the Moscow correspondent for Radio Free Europe. His
Guardian article about the sisters, which I will link to
in the show notes, was one of my main sources
for this article, so I had to bring them on.
As always, all of my sources are linked in the
show notes. You know that, right, Hope you know that.
(08:16):
And last, but not least, this episode deserves a trigger
warning for abuse sexual abuse. Yeah, nothing fun to say there,
just trigger warning. Okay, you're ready to get into the story.
Let's travel to Moscow, where the bulk of the action happens.
(08:37):
In the year twenty eighteen, a man named Mikhail Kataturian
(09:04):
had three daughters, all in a row. He hadn't wanted girls,
and now here they were three of them. There was
Christina age nineteen, Angelina who was eighteen, and Maria seventeen.
In some ways, they were typical teenage girls. They knew
how to take a good modern selfie, not the old
(09:26):
school MySpace kind where you hold your phone above your head,
but the Kylie Jenner kind where you hold the phone
a little bit below you and you purse your lips sexily.
They liked to go shopping and go to the movies
and invite their friends over for parties. Christina, the eldest,
was incredibly friendly. Her best friend, Victoria, remembers that when
(09:47):
they met, Christina's first words to her were, how are you.
Let's get acquainted. We need to take a selfie. Even
though her two sisters were only slightly younger than she was,
Christina referred to them as the in her WhatsApp messages,
the little ones as in quote the little ones begin
to sob and resuscitate me. It was fucking crazy. Behind
(10:11):
the selfies and the occasional trip to the movies, the
sisters had a secret life, a terrible life. They lived
on a tight budget and were responsible for buying groceries
and paying the household bills. They weren't allowed to spend
more than their father gave them. They cooked and cleaned
and ironed his shirts. They weren't allowed to date, like
(10:32):
they really weren't allowed to date. From the outside, people
could sense that their father was behind all this. Angelina
went to the movies with a boy once, but her
father called halfway through and she raced home. Best friend
Victoria remembers going over to the sister's house for the
first time, and noticing that there was an entire wall
covered in religious icons at the entrance, a whole wall
(10:55):
of angels. Victoria tried to touch one of them, and
all the sisters panicked at once. Don't touch, don't touch,
they said, our father will notice and freak out. If
Victoria had looked up when she entered the apartment, she
would have seen a camera there watching her. Their father
had installed it. He wanted to know when his daughters
(11:16):
were coming and when they were going. Christina loved math,
and she wanted to study it further at a place
called the All Russia State Tax Academy. But she couldn't
continue her education because she was missing too many school days.
Sometimes her father wouldn't let her go to school. Other
times she was just too exhausted to show up. Once
(11:39):
her father made her stay up all night ironing fifty
of his shirts. Another time, when Christina missed an important lesson,
her teacher asked her what had happened, and Christina responded,
I cooked for my dad. This became a joke in
the classroom. Hah, she missed school because she cooked for
her dad. Anecdotes like these were just the tip of
(12:02):
the iceberg. That was the Hachiturian household. Let's take a
(12:24):
quick break to hear from this episode's sponsor, Hello Fresh,
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(13:54):
That's HelloFresh dot com slash criminal Brods twelve. That's the
number twelve one two code criminal Broads one two for
twelve free meals including free shipping. Mikhail was a cruel, strange,
(14:34):
corrupt father. He was extremely superstitious, and so his daughters
weren't allowed to say certain words because he thought they
were bad luck. They couldn't say salt, well, the Russian
word for salt. They couldn't say words that sounded like salt.
They couldn't say pain or words that sounded like pain.
(14:54):
Mikhaiel hated the numbers six and eight, but he loved
three and seven. If you wanted to get into his apartment,
you had to dial seven seven to seven on the intercom.
He also had three sevens on his license plate. He
disliked barcodes. He wouldn't get in a taxi if it
was a Hyundai Solaris. If a random guy on the
(15:15):
street crossed his path, Mihail would race to catch up
with him and get ahead of him so that his
path was no longer crossed. His work history was mysterious
and suspicious. He had spent some time in the army
where he was seriously wounded, and because of that he
took tranquilizers and had frequent doctors' visits. Then he began
(15:36):
to work amongst criminals as a fixer, a racketeer, basically
a minor Tony soprano figure, someone who would force local
businesses to pay him money in order for him to
protect them. So not only was he connected to the
criminal underworld, but he also had friends in high places,
like the police. He was very close with the police.
(15:57):
He carried around fake business cards that said he was
an employee of the Federal Security Service, Russia's major intelligence agency,
and he owned a bizarre arsenal of weapons, not just
guns and knives, but a crossbow and sixteen spears. He
used these weapons too Sometimes he'd fire off a gun
(16:18):
inside his apartment. Once he pulled out a pistol. When
a neighbor tried to mildly critique his parking, he pointed
it at her head and told her never to tell
him where to park again. There's one more important thing
to know about this man. He was a very religious person.
(16:38):
He was passionate about his Orthodox faith. He traveled regularly
to Israel, where he visited holy sites, and at home
he prayed at a shrine and always took his daughters
to church. They attended an Armenian church, as Mikhaiel was
ethnically Armenian. According to his wife, Mikhail truly considered himself
a religious right place man of God. He didn't see
(17:02):
any inconsistency between what he did at church and what
he did at home. For example, one day he went
to church with his daughters and he brought along his dog,
a Labrador. He locked the dog in the car during church,
and when he came out, the dog was dead of heat.
(17:23):
Mihaiel went home, beat up his entire family, and bought
a new dog. That was just the sort of church
going father he was. The girls had a mother, Aurelia
(17:51):
Aurelia knew better than anyone else how violent Michael could be,
and yet he managed to keep his darkest secrets from her.
The two of them when she was seventeen and he
was thirty five. There was nothing romantic about it. She
was waiting with her mom and aunt at a bus stop,
and Mikhail drove up, had a hushed conversation with her mother,
(18:13):
and then took Aurelia home with him. After that, he
started helping out her mother's business. It was as though
Aurelia had been sold to this strange man. Aurelia didn't
want to date him, but what choice did she have.
He made it very clear that she had none. At
(18:33):
one point, she tried to leave, and he coerced her back,
and then eventually locked her inside his apartment. Before long,
she was pregnant. As her stomach grew, she felt the
walls closing in on her. I had nowhere to go,
she told the Russian newspaper Novia Guzietta. I could not resist.
I did not dare to run away. I was afraid
(18:55):
of shame. If you live with a man, you cannot
just leave. So the two got married. We got married
with tears in our eyes. She told Novaya Guzietta. He
beat me up and we went to get married, and
it didn't stop for twenty years. In front of his relatives,
in front of strangers, he could scream obscenities, beat me bloody,
(19:19):
and then say as if nothing had happened, Arika, make
me some tea. Aurelia and Mikhail had four kids together,
a son, Serge, and then the three girls, all in
a row. Mikhail beat his son regularly, trying to make
him more tough and manly. Instead, Sergey grew more and
(19:41):
more withdrawn and suspicious, until he was sixteen, when his
father chased him out of the house for good. As
far as the girls went well, Mikhail didn't want daughters,
and Aurelia knew that. Every time she gave birth to
yet another girl, she worried that her husband would kick
her out. He didn't kick her out, not yet, but
(20:05):
the abuse grew and grew. She had no idea what
would set him off next. One minute, you're talking to
him normally, she told journalist Matthew Luxmore for The Guardian,
and then suddenly he might begin shouting and cursing. He
would beat her for paying attention to the children and
not enough to him for not giving him the five
star service he felt he deserved. He treated her like
(20:29):
a maid, and he would even ring a bell when
he wanted something from her. No one in the family
was allowed to sleep or eat without getting permission from him. First,
one terrible day, he threw his wife out of a
moving car. She ended up in the hospital, but he
only let her stay there one night before yanking her
out again. The family lived in a two room apartment.
(20:53):
All six of them slept in one room, and guess
who lived in the other room. Mihail's mother, sister, and nephew.
All three of these relatives would have witnessed or overheard
this abuse, but none of them thought Mikhail's behavior was troubling.
Enduring is a woman's duty, they told Aurelia. They said
that since Mikhaiel supported her financially, she had to put
(21:16):
up with his violence. If he hits you, they said,
it's your own fault. And they weren't the only ones
in Russia who felt this way. No one would come
right out and say that domestic violence was a great thing.
But there was a whole movement in Russia, backed by
the conservatives and by Mikhail's own beloved Orthodox Church that
(21:38):
wanted domestic violence to stay behind closed doors with no
interference from the law or from politics. Here's Matthew Luxmore.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
This is kind of where they tapped into the whole
broader state narrative about preserving what Russia caused and what
Putin caused traditional values against this perceived Western campaign to
dilute Russia's traditional values and impose its values on Russia.
These activists, many of whom are tied to the Orthodox Church,
(22:08):
including lawmakers conservative lawmakers. They argue that a man, or rather,
you know, we shouldn't interfere in people's families. Families should
be kept apart from the state. But it's a very
it's kind of I guess you could say, a very patriarchal,
the view that the man is the head of the family.
He should not be questioned on how he governs the
(22:33):
affairs of his family, of his children. And there's a
very widespread view amongst such people that if your woman
is acting up, you need to put her in a place.
If you viciously beat her, then you should be held
accountable for that. But you know, if you slap her
on the wrist or I don't know, do something slightly
worse than that.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
It's fine.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
We should all just get over it. We shouldn't be
causing such a fuss over it. You know, once a
year is fine, which is currently what the Russian law permits.
One light beating of your wife's the year is currently
allowed under a law that was passed in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
In an atmosphere like this, victims of domestic violence could
try calling the police, but it probably wouldn't work, as
one officer told a woman when she called to say
that her boyfriend was threatening to kill her. If he
kills you, we'll come to examine the body. Don't worry.
Forty minutes after the call, that woman was dead. Aurelia
(23:31):
herself learned quickly that there was no point in asking
the police for help. Not only did they not take
domestic violence very seriously, but in her particular case, the
police were friends with her husband. Once, when Aurelia's kids
were still tiny, she fled from the apartment and begged
the police for help, but Michael showed up right behind her.
(23:53):
He was smiling. He pulled back his hand and hit
her right in front of the police officers. Nobody did anything,
and then one day in twenty fifteen, Mikhaiel forced his
wife to leave. It was a strange reversal of his
behavior early on in their relationship, where he locked her
(24:15):
inside his apartment. Now, he put a gun to Aurelia's
head and hissed, I'm going to leave now, and if
you're still here when i'm back, I'll kill you all.
Aurelia fled, afraid that he'd murder her and her daughters.
After that, she hardly saw her girls. Every now and then.
They'd sneak a phone call, but that was about it.
(24:39):
She knew that he was beating them, but she didn't
know the rest of it. Mikhaiel had been sexual abusing
(25:00):
his daughters long before he kicked their mother out of
the house, but the girls kept it secret from their mom.
They didn't want her to worry, and at first Michael
had managed things so that the girls kept it secret
from each other too. He had the ingenious craftiness of
a hardened abuser. He began assaulting his two older daughters,
(25:23):
Christina and Angelina, in secret, banking on the fact that
they wouldn't confide in each other, and he avoided Maria,
the youngest, because he thought she'd tell her mother. His
divide and conquer approach worked for a while, but eventually
the girls found out he had been assaulting them since
(25:43):
at least twenty fourteen, the year before he threw their
mother out. It was that year that he took his
middle daughter, Angelina on a trip to Israel and assaulted
her there. On another trip two years later, he forced
Christina into his hotel room. She raced out of the
room and tried to kill herself by swallowing pills. He
(26:05):
would claim that various sexual acts were good for him,
good for his health, good for his prostate. He would
ask for massages. When he wasn't with the girls, he
was terrorizing them from Afar. On one of his solo
trips to Israel, he learned that Angelina wasn't at home. Furious,
(26:29):
he sent her WhatsApp messages saying that he was going
to rape her when he got back. He also sent
his daughter's messages saying things like quote, I'll beat you
up for everything, I'll kill you, leave, leave, don't drive
me to sin. Here's another one. You are prostitutes and
you will die as prostitutes. The sick irony to all
(26:54):
of this was that Mikhael was very preachy about sex
before marriage. He always warned his daughters that it was
a sin to have sex with someone you weren't married too.
But then he'd say, as Angelina told police later, because
we're his blood and his daughters, he can do with
us as he wishes, and we should submit ourselves to it.
(27:17):
It's not that nobody knew what was happening. There was
plenty of evidence to be seen or heard if you
paid attention. The Krachaturian neighbors were used to hearing screams
coming from their apartment. People had seen Mikhail beat his
daughters in public, and at least one of Christina's friends knew.
Christina had described one assault to her friend over WhatsApp,
(27:40):
once saying that this sort of thing happened almost every day.
I lost consciousness during the night, she texted. He began
to chase me out at one in the morning because
he didn't like the fact that one of his shirts
isn't ironed. I became anxious and started crying, and then
began suffocating and fell on the ground. Ones begin to
(28:01):
sob and resuscitate me. It was fucking crazy, And to
top it off, he whacked them over the head with
his gun. The abuse went on and on. By January
twenty eighteen, the girls had stopped attending school, and their
father hardly let them leave the house. He gets worse
(28:21):
every day. Christina texted her friend, but the sisters had
no one to turn to. Their father was too well connected,
and they feared that if they told their relatives, no
one would believe them, And so the abuse continued. Three
girls and their father alone in a household of weapons.
(28:51):
On the last day of Mikhail Kachaturian's life, he screamed
at his daughters. It was July twenty seventh, eighteen. He
was furious because the apartment was messy. According to one source,
there were hairs on the floor of his apartment, and
this was simply the last straw for this poor belaguered
(29:14):
church going man. His daughters were going to have to pay,
so one by one he called them into his room.
He was waiting there with an unusual weapon, pepper spray.
He sprayed his daughters in the face, one at a time,
three in a row. Then, with his work done, he
(29:38):
plopped himself down in his rocking chair and took a nap.
Christina had taken the most pepper spray in the face.
She also had asthma, according to some reports, so she
started choking. She groped her way back to her bed,
and she fainted there. Her little sisters watched this happen. Now,
(29:59):
it wasn't the they hadn't seen this sort of thing before,
but today they just couldn't take it anymore. Later, they'd
refer to this moment as the final straw. Angelina was
preparing food, she says, when she and Maria decided that
it was time to kill the man who'd made their
(30:19):
life such a nightmare. So they crept out of the
apartment and they went to their father's car. There they
found a hammer and a hunting knife. They snuck back
in and moved towards their sleeping father. Maria had the
knife and Angelina had the hammer. Maria drew back and
(30:43):
began to stab her father. As Angelina bludgeoned him over
the head twice, he woke up, stood up and pushed
them away, confused and bloody, yelling that he needed to
wash himself. By then, Christina was waking up. She heard
screams coming from the living room, and she thought that
(31:06):
her father was abusing her sisters again, so she ran
into the chaos. There on the floor, she saw the
bottle of pepper spray, so she grabbed it and sprayed
her father in the face. Then, terrified, she sprinted out
of the apartment. Her father lumbered after her. Angelina grabbed
(31:28):
the hunting knife and ran after him, and on the landing,
Angelina stabbed her father in the heart repeatedly. He fell
The sisters panicked. There's CCTV footage of one of them
in the hallway just after the killing. She's pacing around
(31:49):
in shock, wiping her nose and covering her mouth with
her hands. The girls cut themselves with the knife a
few times to make it look like their father had
stabbed them, and then they called the police. They claimed
self defense, and they were arrested for murder in December
(32:23):
of twenty nineteen. Five months later, investigators turned their findings
into the prosecutor's office. They declared that the three sisters
had killed their father in a premeditated manner, that they
had conspired together to kill him. The investigators said that
because of the long standing physical and sexual abuse the
sisters had experienced, they hated their father and so they
(32:46):
basically created a murder plot. This narrative from the investigators
admitted that the girls suffered from PTSD and something quote
resembling battered child syndrome, but since it declared that they
had pre met meditated the murder, the girls were now
facing down decades in prison. But other people disagreed with
(33:07):
this narrative of premeditation. In fact, a few weeks later,
the Deputy prosecutor General, a man named Victor Grinn, asked
investigators to change it. He thought the sister's crime should
be classified as self defense, which would mean that the
girls would be set free. But then in July of
twenty twenty, a year after the crime, Victor Grinn reversed
(33:30):
his stance. No one knows why, or if they do,
they're not saying. The killing was classified not as self
defense but as murder, which meant that the girls were
going to have to stand trial. In the meantime, the
sisters had become famous or infamous, depending on your news source.
(33:51):
Their story was splashed across every newspaper and talk show
in the country. People began protesting the murder charges in
the streets, holding concerts and plays to raise funds for
their legal fees, and circulating a petition online to drop
the charges against the sisters that now has over four
hundred thousand signatures. Not only was it a shocking story
(34:14):
three daughters stabbed their father to death, but it hit
a raw nerve in Russia because Russia had a terrible
history when it came to prosecuting domestic violence, or rather
not prosecuting domestic violence whatsoever. In the Khatchaturyan girls case
was only the latest example of the country's refusal to
admit that domestic violence was a problem. The fact that
(34:38):
their mother couldn't go to the police, the fact that
no one stepped in to help the sisters, This was
all too normal for many many Russian women. A twenty
twelve survey by the Russian government found that one in
five women had been assaulted by a partner. Despite shocking
numbers like that, a law passed in twenty seventeen riminalized
(35:00):
domestic violence, reducing it to a minor offense. This law
declared basically that if you beat your wife, but you
don't beat her hard enough to land her in the hospital,
you get a small fine about the same amount as
a parking ticket, or maybe you get fifteen days in jail.
If you do it again, you might get a slightly
longer prison stint, But if it's been a year since
(35:25):
the first beating, you'll just get another small fine, No
big deal. Russia's conservative movement, which is in bed with
the Orthodox Church that Mikhail Khachaturian was such a passionate
part of, fueled fears that legislation against domestic violence was
somehow anti family, and Putin let this all happen since
(35:46):
he needed the church's support.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
There's always been a kind of link between Put's government
and Putin personally and the Church. He portrays himself as
a very pious person and go to the church on
Orthodox Easter, another major church holiday. But he allied himself
much more close to the church, and the church became
the main champion of this decriminalization law. On the law
to decriminalize the first time battery. You know this bearded
(36:13):
men in all kinds of funny hands go to the
Russian Parliament and make kind of fire and speeches about
how we need to defend our families from Western interference,
and how you know, the units of the CIA are
trying to infiltrate our kids' minds, and all these kinds
of things. The one guy I talked to who has
nine kids, you know, which is something he's very proud of,
and also uses this evidence of the fact that he's
(36:35):
been able to build you a great family in the
traditional mold. He's one of the people who's been the
public based on this project, and he's very closely allied
with the Orthodox Church. So I think it's fair to
say that the Authodox Church is kind of the main
official channel that's pushing this backlash, or rather pushing this
campaign against the initiatives, the legal initiatives that are pushed
by extender pushkin On, this liberal lawmaker who's trying to
(36:57):
pass Russia's first law and violence. And because the Orthodox
Church is closely allied in the state and in many
ways back by the state, people like Pushkina are in
a very tight spot because to push through a law
and domestic violence in the current climate in Russia is
pretty much an insurmountable task.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Because the Church is so against any legislation that cracks
down on domestic violence. Mikhail himself would have been absorbing
that message consciously or unconsciously Sunday after Sunday, and he
wasn't the only one.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
It does seem ironic. There's someone who hovered a whole
wall of his apartment in icons Orthodox icons. At the
same time, was from what we know, a pretty despicable character.
I mean, someone who is involved in all kinds of
criminal activity in the nineties, viciously beat his wife and
did much worse to his daughters. Was at the same
(37:52):
time a religious man who again had icons in his apartment,
took trips to Israel to go to the holy sites.
So it's funny. Actually, I was initially going to end
my piece in another fresh example that a case that
came out just as I was finishing the piece of
a man who lived in Leningrad region, which is the
(38:13):
region that Saint Petersburg is the capital of, who had
nine kids. He kept them essentially, this is quite a
grim story, as slaves in his home and abuse them
quite seriously. His wife gave birth to all these kids
inside the home and outside the building. He erected this
enormous Orthodox cross, which he built himself, and when police
(38:34):
came to raid his home, he also had walls covered
in icons all kinds of religious memorabilia. He was based
on what his neighbours said A pious, a guy who
went to church and forbid his wife from doing all
kinds of things that I was forbidden by the Orthodox Church.
And there's at least one case or even a couple
of cases that I've seen connected with the mestic violence
(38:56):
where the men were very religious, at least on the outside.
Some men in Russia who are very religious and who
see themselves as supporters of the Orthodox faith may see
all the statements that are coming out by the Orthodox Church,
including that they're the heads of the Orthodox Church, and
Patriarch Hero, who's the head of the the Russian Orthodox Church,
(39:16):
you know, speaking out against laws of domestic violence, saying
that we need to stay out of what's happening in
the family, that we need to preserve the family whatever happens,
regardless of what's taking place inside the household. They may
see all these statements and essentially kind of think that
they have carte blanche to do what they want to do.
I do think, at least in the case of mehiologically
(39:38):
and he definitely saw cues from the statements that the
church was making.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
After domestic violence was decriminalized in twenty seventeen, domestic violence
itself spiked Perhaps the most famous incident was the case
of Margarita Gratcheva. Margarita was in an abusive relationship, but
the police wouldn't press charges against her violent husband, and
then one winter day, her husband drove her into the
(40:07):
forest and chopped off both her hands with an axe.
Just like with the Hachiturian sisters, no one took her
situation seriously until it was far too late. The sister's
(40:39):
trials were delayed and delayed again. The pandemics certainly didn't help.
Maria was going to be tried separately from her sisters,
as she was only seventeen when the killing happened, and
when doctors evaluated her afterwards, they found her mentally unsound
and recommended psychological treatment. Her trial began in August of
(40:59):
twenty Jury selection for the trial of Christina and Angelina
was delayed five times due to all sorts of factors,
including the coronavirus. First one of the sisters got it,
and then some of the jurors got it. Now during
all of this, the family of Mikhail Kataturyan was trying
(41:20):
to paint the sisters as the depraved ones.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
One of the things that really surprised people perhaps one
of the most surprising things about these cases was how
much of a kind of down to earth and completely normal,
for lack of a better words, kind of outward profile.
Definitely the social media footprint these young women had. I
mean they posted phoses themselves trying on new dresses, videos,
(41:46):
singing to pop songs, videos, you know, kind of clips,
shots from all the different parties that they had. The
family of Mikhail Lashtrian, his sisters, one of them is
called Naira, I think the other was called you know
by maybe Mistaken, who are very strongly pushing against the
sister's version of what happened and their mother's version as well.
(42:09):
They have used all these photos in the social media
footprint to portray these women as essentially depraved. They said
that they or they did when you know, Uliana would
go for his regular checkups to the local clinic because
he had all kinds of health issues. They would, you know,
host these raucous parties in the apartment, take all kinds
(42:31):
of drugs, drink, invite boys over. Then one of them said, oh,
you know, they completely missed treated their father. They didn't
cook for him what they were supposed to cook for him.
They gave him dog food, all these kinds of things,
and every single time he came back home, the apartment
was a mess.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
In fact, Mikhael's mother and one of his sisters tried
to sue Aurelia, his wife, because Aurelia told a journalist
that Mikhaiel had raped her. His mom and sister responded
that a husband cannot rape his wife. But then, just
this March, something shocking happened. Suddenly the sisters weren't the
(43:11):
only ones waiting for a trial. Their dead father was too.
Russian investigators declared that the three sisters were victims in
the criminal case against their father. According to the Moscow Times,
there was now an open case against Mikhail Kataduryan. He
(43:32):
was being charged posthumously with sexual assault, coercion into sex acts,
and torture. His family had tried to stop this entire
case from happening, but a district court said that that
was illegal. And what does this all mean. It means
that the sisters won't be tried until their father's trial
(43:53):
is over, and if their father is found guilty, the
sisters might just go free. And that's not the only
update from twenty twenty one. Just this past April, Russia's
Constitutional Court said that the penalties for being a repeat
domestic violence offender weren't strong enough. The court ordered stronger
(44:14):
laws and better protections for victims. Activists say that this
still isn't enough. Police need to start taking domestic violence
complaints seriously, and there aren't very many organizations that help
the victims, just to name a few other problems. But
it's not nothing. And the sisters today they're under house arrests, waiting,
(44:38):
waiting after almost two decades spent with each other, isolated
in the same nightmare house. They've been separated. They're not
allowed to talk to each other or to the press.
They can't use the internet. They're spending the last of
their teenage years in this strange isolation, waiting for a
(45:00):
trial that may never come. It feels tragic, but is
it possible that they're happier this way. Christina's lawyer says
that the first time they met, Christina told him that
she was better off in jail than she was living
at home. The sisters would have done anything to be free,
(45:23):
even if it meant giving up their freedom, and so
they wait for the courts to decide the end. My
(45:54):
dearest listeners, what did you think about that? I couldn't
believe it when I came across it. It has that
tabloidy like sleazy headline potential, and then you get into
it and it's so awful and then also so relevant
to the situation in Russia in a very morbid way.
(46:18):
It has it all. Thank you so much to Matthew
Luxmore for coming on the podcast and giving me that
you know, boots on the street perspective that it is
impossible to get until someone increases my ad budget enough
that I can fly to Moscow myself. All right, before
I let you go, I have a big update on
Lloyd Dean, so stick around. Okay, I don't know where
(46:39):
do I start with this. So we covered Marie Dean Arrington.
She was the second woman to make the FBI's ten
most Wanted list right in Florida in the oh gosh seventies.
I think we covered her a couple episodes back, and
then I told you all that I was corresponding with
her son, Lloyd Dean, who robbed a gas station when
(46:59):
he was not nineteen. No one was killed, but he
was given life in prison, which just seemed so outrageously unfair,
and he was such a nice guy. I'd been corresponding
with him over email, and I decided that we should
raise some money for him, and so I told you
guys that, and I kid you not. The donations came
(47:20):
pouring it and like such generosity from all of you.
I haven't added up the official number, but it's definitely
over five hundred dollars, maybe more like six hundred. And
that's from a lot of little individual donations and some
big donations too. So just, first of all, thank you.
It really touches me to see that from you. I
(47:42):
know that it's like there's so many things to give
money to and it's overwhelming. I feel that way too,
So thank you. It was really fun for me. My
phone kept going off with the like venmo sound is
it chit ching? It was cool. It was just cool
to see the money being raised. Okay, But it turns
out the story was not as straightforward as I thought
(48:04):
it was. And I'm just gonna tell you right up front,
if you donated money, it's I have not touched it, okay,
and you're gonna get to decide what we should do
with it. So one of my eagle eyed listeners, Andrena
sent me an email saying that she had looked into
Lloyd Dean's public records and actually he had been released
(48:25):
in nineteen seventy nine and then reincarcerated in nineteen eighty two,
and the records didn't say what for. And this was
actually something I remember seeing when I was researching the
Marie Dean Arrington episode, but there were no details on
what exactly had happened. And I knew he had gotten
life in prison for the original robbery charge, and I
(48:49):
so I just like, I don't know. I guess I
just didn't process it. I just thought he was still
there for the robbery charge, okay. So thankfully, Andrena emailed me,
and I was like, ooh, I need to look into this,
and I'll be honest, I got a horrible sinking feeling.
I was like, have I misled all my listeners? Am? I?
(49:09):
Despite assuring them I wasn't conning them, Am I actually
accidentally conning them? So over the past couple of weeks,
I've been emailing with Lloyd Dean and just kind of
awkwardly being like, HI, like, what did you get reincarcerated
for in nineteen eighty two, and would you mind telling
me about it because I want to let my listeners
(49:30):
know the full situation before they donate. It was an
awkward message to send, but it also felt really unfair
to you all to spend your money without you having
the full story. So he told me that he was
reincarcerated in nineteen eighty two for an assault charge. And
I think there was a typo in his email because
(49:51):
he said an assault charge I did commit. Now I'm
pretty sure he meant to write did not commit. But
my stomach dropped and I was like, oh no, oh,
I am anchorage. I've gotten my listeners all up in
arms to donate to this man who's been given this
sentence for something we thought was you know, we thought
it was one thing, but it's for an assault charge.
Like yikes. So again I awkwardly was like, I'm sorry,
(50:15):
I know this is potentially a sensitive subject, but can
you tell me more about this assault charge? What is
going on? So just a couple of days ago, he
emailed me back, and what he says is that it
was a wrongful assault charge and it had to do
with some family drama. I'm thinking, I'm just going to
read you the whole email. Okay, I know this episode
is already long, but then you can just be as
(50:38):
up to date as I am. Okay. So here is
what Lloyd Dean says. He had told me by the
way that he was he's been incarcerated for thirty eight
years for a crime he didn't commit, and I was like,
are you talking about the original robbery charge. Turns out
he's talking about the assault charge. So he says, dear toy, Hi,
the fact that I was incarcerated for thirty eight years
(50:58):
for a crime I did not commit is not related
to my original charge. In fact, when I was released
from prison in nineteen seventy nine, I went to Newark,
New Jersey to stay with my aunt while on parole.
I really don't know what came over me, but I
decided to return to Florida to stay with my grandmother.
I remember my aunt saying before I left Newark that,
in her own words, you don't know your grandmother like
I do. I understood that to mean if I'm not
(51:21):
for you, I'm against you. But I don't judge her.
But I believe that my aunt, in my opinion, had
more influence on my grandmother than anyone in the family.
I believe my aunt poisoned my grandmother's mind against me
to create a situation that would violate my parole, and
I believe my niece, also with my grandmother, played the
role as witness against me. In brief, my niece went
into the bath area, left there and went to my
(51:42):
grandmother and said that someone took a bath and did
not clean the bathtub. When she said that to my grandmother,
she got upset about it. That's the grandmother getting upset,
and she said to me and my niece that wasn't
going to be tolerated. So I put the newspaper aside
and said that I would clean the bathtub. So when
I went to the bath area, I noticed it was
spotless clean, So I left the bath area back to
(52:04):
continue to read the newspaper. By then, my grandmother was
so upset about what my niece had told her about
the bathtub. As I was going back to continue to
read the newspaper, by then she had reached a high
tone of voice. I stopped near her. Sorry, I'm reading
this awkwardly. The JPay, which I used to communicate with inmates,
(52:25):
is like formatted. It's hard to read okay, I mean
back up. So his grandmother is reaching a high tone
of voice with him. I stopped near her and was
listening to what she had to say. I was looking
down at the floor, and when I looked up, my
grandmother had found a frying pan and was coming towards
my face. What came to mind first was to push
the frying pan away from me to restrain her. I
(52:47):
told her to put the frying pan away, but she
drew it back, and she drew it back again, intending
to hit me with it. I grabbed her left wrist.
She fell on the floor and started laughing and told
my niece to call the police. So I let her
wrist go and walked over to my niece and told
her to put the phone down. She ran out of
the house and called the police. In matters of minutes,
the police came to the house. My grandmother told the
(53:10):
police that I had hit her with my fist and
knocked her down, and the officer turned to me and
asked me what happened, and I told him it's not true.
So my grandfather told the officer she wanted to press
charges for assault and battery. I don't know if that
was another one of my niece's schemes, but only God knows.
And my grandmother passed in two thousand and one, but
I still love her and forgive her, but I'm not
(53:30):
concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will.
Peace be unto you and your family. Lloyd. Okay, so
are you following this? Basically, Lloyd is saying he was
out on parole, his grandmother pressed these assault and battery
charges against him, that he kind of feels like he
was set up, and I'm assuming because of the nature
(53:51):
of the charges and the violating of the parole or
the alleged violating of the parole, he was given life
in prison for the second time in prison to this day.
So it's a different story than what I originally told you.
And guys, I'm so sorry that I got the facts
wrong and I'm embarrassed. I I'm just embarrassed. I wish
(54:12):
I had just dug further first, and you know, so
please forgive me for that. But I hope you feel
all caught up now. I'm going to reach out to
everyone who donated individually and ask if you want to
still send your money to Lloyd or take it back.
No judgment either way. I know this is a different
(54:33):
tale than the tale of being imprisoned from age nineteen on.
So I'm going to leave it up to you. I
will yep, I'll reach out to you and tell you
to listen to this episode so you can hear the letter.
But thank you anyway, all of you, just for caring,
for donating, for keeping me honest, et cetera. All right,
moving right along, I'm putting a change dot org petition
(54:54):
in the show notes. The ones that I the one
that I mentioned in the episode. It's the one. It's
titled stop Prosecution of Sisters Victims of Sexual and Domestic Violence.
It's the one that has over four hundred thousand signatures.
If you guys want to add your signatures to it,
couldn't hurt, Okay, So it'll be in the show notes.
So last, but not least, I have so many patrons
(55:16):
to thank for this episode. Am I am? I a
billionaire Now I'm not sure the patrons I have. The
new patrons I've gotten over the past couple of weeks
are Lauren V. Patrice KH, Elizabeth B, Michelle D and
Michelle B CCB, Andrana D B compos Emily d R.
(55:40):
Melissa B. Sam T and Rochelle L. Thank you all
so much for keeping Criminal Broads on its sturdy little legs.
I love you all, and there's one week left of
Sister Month. I may have saved the oddest tale for last,
so meet me back here. Until then, have a great week,
(56:02):
Love you all. Bye. Lord help the mister who comes
between me and my sister, and Lord help the sister
who comes between me and my man.
Sisters.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Sisters, there were never such.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Tea voted sisters, never had to have a chaperon.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
No soon, I'm MUDI key myon who.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Hello, my loves. Welcome to another episode of Criminal Broads,
a true crime podcast about wild women on the wrong
side of the law. We are in the thick of
Sister Month, and as you probably noticed, we have a
brand new theme song just for this month. Oh how
I wish I had had the foresight to get it
for the past two episodes. But here we are. Sister
(00:44):
Month theme song, recommended by an amazing listener who I'll
thank in just a sec, sung by fittingly my own sister,
Anna Telfer. So I hope you like it and you'll
hear it next week too. Okay, guys, you might remember
I was away, like I was traveling for the past
two episodes, so they weren't recorded in real time. We're
(01:05):
back in real time, and I have so much to
tell you that I'm literally going to give you a
table of contents right now because I have things to
tell you in the intro. I need to tell you
what we're talking about today, and then I have things
to tell you in the outro. And it's just going
to be crazy. So here's the table of contents. I'm
going to tell you the table of contents. I'm going
(01:25):
to thank the listener who recommended last week's episode because
she sent me an amazing anecdote. Then I'm going to
read you to sister anecdotes from listeners. Remember I asked
you to send me your sister anecdotes, while I got
two amazing ones. Then I'm going to tell you about
this episode and who you're gonna hear from. Then we're
going to get into the story. But then please stick
(01:48):
around for the conclusion, because not only am I going
to thank my new patrons and tell you about a
change dot org petition, but I have an update on
Lloyd Dean. Remember Lloyd Dean, Marie Dean Harrington's son. We've
been raising money for him. Oh my gosh, I have
an update. Everything's okay, Everything's fine, I think, but I'm
(02:09):
sort of embarrassed because the narrative is different than what
I thought it was. Okay, so there with me, My
loves will get there. Okay, I'm opening up our table
of contents. Oh, I have a listener to thank. So
last week we learned the amazing story of the incredible
Mirabelle Sisters. And I said that someone had recommended it
(02:31):
to me, but I couldn't remember who it was. Well,
it was Carla, my dear Carla. She recommended it, and
she also told me something incredible. So Carla's family is Dominican,
and she said that there's a story in her family
that her grandma was married to her grandpa real fast
to keep her out of Trujillo's clutches. Can you believe it?
(02:55):
And she says that it's a rumor her grandmother doesn't squelch.
Isn't that fast? Fascinating? So, Carla, thank you for recommending
last week's episode, which I know a lot of you
really liked. And your grandma's awesome. We love her. Glad
she's safe too. Okay, So now I have two really
cool sister anecdotes for you. I put out a call
(03:17):
I wanted to hear if you and your sister have
any I don't know, cool things you'd like to share
with the rest of my listeners. And here are two
I got. So this first one is from Carrie. She says,
here's a story from me and my identical twin sister.
We often find the questions like, can you feel what
your sister is feeling? And do you know what she
(03:37):
is thinking about? Funny, but there have been times when
you just know. I was kind of the wild one
of the two of us as teens. My sister was
always concerned about me. One night, when I was out
late and she knew I was with some people I
shouldn't be with, she couldn't go to sleep. She tried
and tried, but just laid there, awake until two am.
(03:58):
The next morning, she asked me what time I had
come home. I told her too. Okay, And this anecdote
is from Emma, She says. My sister is my stepsister.
She and I never lived together. Our parents got together
when we were both in our mid twenties. We grew
(04:18):
up on the same small island in Maine, though, and
I had always looked up to her because she was beautiful, artistic,
and queer, something I didn't dare come close to admitting
about myself back then. I don't know that we ever
spoke before our parents fell in love. We finally bonded
for real while caring for my stepdad through the end
of his life. We were both with him when he died.
He was a complicated and very beautiful man, and I
(04:41):
know that I got to experience the best of him
in his final years, when he was sober and gleefully
in love with my mom. This January, my sister was
pregnant with her and her wife's second child. It was
the pandemic, and I wanted so badly to be with her,
rub her feet and make her tea and fresh bread.
I couldn't, of course. Instead, I woke from a dream
one morning and immediately texted her, I had a dream
(05:03):
that you were going into labor and your feet were
cold and your lips were chapped, and so I was
running around trying to find you socks and chapstick. I
love you. In response, I got you are amazing because
I did go into labor at one am this morning.
My feet are very cold on the kitchen floor and
my lips are chapped. Pacing the house. As someone who
has worked so diligently to build my chosen family of queers,
(05:25):
this connection, without a share drop of blood, felt like
such a gift, like recognition that all the ways I
believe family to be huge and shifting and absolutely magical
is as real as anything else. Ultimately, like a final
little spark that my stepdad left behind for us to
revel in the glow of years after he was gone.
I just love that anecdote. Both of them are so
(05:47):
so beautiful, and I love that one is a pair
of identical twin sisters and one is a pair of
stepsisters who aren't related at all but still have a
magical connection. If anyone else has a sister anecdote, maybe
a creepy one or a beautiful one, send them to
criminal broads at gmail dot com. All right, so let's
move on to today's set of sisters. Last week, I
(06:09):
told you this episode was going to involve chopped up
body parts. Let's see. I have a confession to make.
I was going to do the case of the Scissor Sisters.
They are is a very gruesome Irish case and it
was a listener request and I started researching it and guys,
I just couldn't. I just couldn't do it. You. I mean,
(06:31):
I know it's a true crime podcast, like you wouldn't
think I would be so squeamish, But you may notice
I rarely do super super gory cases here. I just
hate them. It's just too much for me. I don't
want to like put it in your ears either necessarily.
There are plenty of amazing podcasts that do those. So
(06:52):
I was researching it and it's just so graphic, and
I was reading this book that had like a blow
by blow explanation of what happened, and basically the story
is two down and out sisters did a lot of drugs,
killed a very abusive man, and hacked up his body parts.
(07:13):
There's not like a redeeming element. It's just really sad.
So anyway, I pivoted. I couldn't do it. I'm sorry.
And so I was looking for other sister cases because
I had been planning on that one, and I'm actually
really glad I pivoted because I found this case. I
had never heard of this case. It's very recent, it
had never crossed my path. I bet it'll be new
(07:35):
for a lot of you, and it's very of the moment,
especially in Russia where it takes place. So we're going
to talk about the three Khachaturian sisters. This is a
case that happened in Moscow just a couple of years
ago and is still very much ongoing. You're also going
(07:56):
to hear a couple times from the journalist Matthew Luxmore,
who is the Moscow correspondent for Radio Free Europe. His
Guardian article about the sisters, which I will link to
in the show notes, was one of my main sources
for this article, so I had to bring them on.
As always, all of my sources are linked in the
show notes. You know that, right, Hope you know that.
(08:16):
And last, but not least, this episode deserves a trigger
warning for abuse sexual abuse. Yeah, nothing fun to say there,
just trigger warning. Okay, you're ready to get into the story.
Let's travel to Moscow, where the bulk of the action happens.
(08:37):
In the year twenty eighteen, a man named Mikhail Kataturian
(09:04):
had three daughters, all in a row. He hadn't wanted girls,
and now here they were three of them. There was
Christina age nineteen, Angelina who was eighteen, and Maria seventeen.
In some ways, they were typical teenage girls. They knew
how to take a good modern selfie, not the old
(09:26):
school MySpace kind where you hold your phone above your head,
but the Kylie Jenner kind where you hold the phone
a little bit below you and you purse your lips sexily.
They liked to go shopping and go to the movies
and invite their friends over for parties. Christina, the eldest,
was incredibly friendly. Her best friend, Victoria, remembers that when
(09:47):
they met, Christina's first words to her were, how are you.
Let's get acquainted. We need to take a selfie. Even
though her two sisters were only slightly younger than she was,
Christina referred to them as the in her WhatsApp messages,
the little ones as in quote the little ones begin
to sob and resuscitate me. It was fucking crazy. Behind
(10:11):
the selfies and the occasional trip to the movies, the
sisters had a secret life, a terrible life. They lived
on a tight budget and were responsible for buying groceries
and paying the household bills. They weren't allowed to spend
more than their father gave them. They cooked and cleaned
and ironed his shirts. They weren't allowed to date, like
(10:32):
they really weren't allowed to date. From the outside, people
could sense that their father was behind all this. Angelina
went to the movies with a boy once, but her
father called halfway through and she raced home. Best friend
Victoria remembers going over to the sister's house for the
first time, and noticing that there was an entire wall
covered in religious icons at the entrance, a whole wall
(10:55):
of angels. Victoria tried to touch one of them, and
all the sisters panicked at once. Don't touch, don't touch,
they said, our father will notice and freak out. If
Victoria had looked up when she entered the apartment, she
would have seen a camera there watching her. Their father
had installed it. He wanted to know when his daughters
(11:16):
were coming and when they were going. Christina loved math,
and she wanted to study it further at a place
called the All Russia State Tax Academy. But she couldn't
continue her education because she was missing too many school days.
Sometimes her father wouldn't let her go to school. Other
times she was just too exhausted to show up. Once
(11:39):
her father made her stay up all night ironing fifty
of his shirts. Another time, when Christina missed an important lesson,
her teacher asked her what had happened, and Christina responded,
I cooked for my dad. This became a joke in
the classroom. Hah, she missed school because she cooked for
her dad. Anecdotes like these were just the tip of
(12:02):
the iceberg. That was the Hachiturian household. Let's take a
(12:24):
quick break to hear from this episode's sponsor, Hello Fresh,
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(13:54):
That's HelloFresh dot com slash criminal Brods twelve. That's the
number twelve one two code criminal Broads one two for
twelve free meals including free shipping. Mikhail was a cruel, strange,
(14:34):
corrupt father. He was extremely superstitious, and so his daughters
weren't allowed to say certain words because he thought they
were bad luck. They couldn't say salt, well, the Russian
word for salt. They couldn't say words that sounded like salt.
They couldn't say pain or words that sounded like pain.
(14:54):
Mikhaiel hated the numbers six and eight, but he loved
three and seven. If you wanted to get into his apartment,
you had to dial seven seven to seven on the intercom.
He also had three sevens on his license plate. He
disliked barcodes. He wouldn't get in a taxi if it
was a Hyundai Solaris. If a random guy on the
(15:15):
street crossed his path, Mihail would race to catch up
with him and get ahead of him so that his
path was no longer crossed. His work history was mysterious
and suspicious. He had spent some time in the army
where he was seriously wounded, and because of that he
took tranquilizers and had frequent doctors' visits. Then he began
(15:36):
to work amongst criminals as a fixer, a racketeer, basically
a minor Tony soprano figure, someone who would force local
businesses to pay him money in order for him to
protect them. So not only was he connected to the
criminal underworld, but he also had friends in high places,
like the police. He was very close with the police.
(15:57):
He carried around fake business cards that said he was
an employee of the Federal Security Service, Russia's major intelligence agency,
and he owned a bizarre arsenal of weapons, not just
guns and knives, but a crossbow and sixteen spears. He
used these weapons too Sometimes he'd fire off a gun
(16:18):
inside his apartment. Once he pulled out a pistol. When
a neighbor tried to mildly critique his parking, he pointed
it at her head and told her never to tell
him where to park again. There's one more important thing
to know about this man. He was a very religious person.
(16:38):
He was passionate about his Orthodox faith. He traveled regularly
to Israel, where he visited holy sites, and at home
he prayed at a shrine and always took his daughters
to church. They attended an Armenian church, as Mikhaiel was
ethnically Armenian. According to his wife, Mikhail truly considered himself
a religious right place man of God. He didn't see
(17:02):
any inconsistency between what he did at church and what
he did at home. For example, one day he went
to church with his daughters and he brought along his dog,
a Labrador. He locked the dog in the car during church,
and when he came out, the dog was dead of heat.
(17:23):
Mihaiel went home, beat up his entire family, and bought
a new dog. That was just the sort of church
going father he was. The girls had a mother, Aurelia
(17:51):
Aurelia knew better than anyone else how violent Michael could be,
and yet he managed to keep his darkest secrets from her.
The two of them when she was seventeen and he
was thirty five. There was nothing romantic about it. She
was waiting with her mom and aunt at a bus stop,
and Mikhail drove up, had a hushed conversation with her mother,
(18:13):
and then took Aurelia home with him. After that, he
started helping out her mother's business. It was as though
Aurelia had been sold to this strange man. Aurelia didn't
want to date him, but what choice did she have.
He made it very clear that she had none. At
(18:33):
one point, she tried to leave, and he coerced her back,
and then eventually locked her inside his apartment. Before long,
she was pregnant. As her stomach grew, she felt the
walls closing in on her. I had nowhere to go,
she told the Russian newspaper Novia Guzietta. I could not resist.
I did not dare to run away. I was afraid
(18:55):
of shame. If you live with a man, you cannot
just leave. So the two got married. We got married
with tears in our eyes. She told Novaya Guzietta. He
beat me up and we went to get married, and
it didn't stop for twenty years. In front of his relatives,
in front of strangers, he could scream obscenities, beat me bloody,
(19:19):
and then say as if nothing had happened, Arika, make
me some tea. Aurelia and Mikhail had four kids together,
a son, Serge, and then the three girls, all in
a row. Mikhail beat his son regularly, trying to make
him more tough and manly. Instead, Sergey grew more and
(19:41):
more withdrawn and suspicious, until he was sixteen, when his
father chased him out of the house for good. As
far as the girls went well, Mikhail didn't want daughters,
and Aurelia knew that. Every time she gave birth to
yet another girl, she worried that her husband would kick
her out. He didn't kick her out, not yet, but
(20:05):
the abuse grew and grew. She had no idea what
would set him off next. One minute, you're talking to
him normally, she told journalist Matthew Luxmore for The Guardian,
and then suddenly he might begin shouting and cursing. He
would beat her for paying attention to the children and
not enough to him for not giving him the five
star service he felt he deserved. He treated her like
(20:29):
a maid, and he would even ring a bell when
he wanted something from her. No one in the family
was allowed to sleep or eat without getting permission from him. First,
one terrible day, he threw his wife out of a
moving car. She ended up in the hospital, but he
only let her stay there one night before yanking her
out again. The family lived in a two room apartment.
(20:53):
All six of them slept in one room, and guess
who lived in the other room. Mihail's mother, sister, and nephew.
All three of these relatives would have witnessed or overheard
this abuse, but none of them thought Mikhail's behavior was troubling.
Enduring is a woman's duty, they told Aurelia. They said
that since Mikhaiel supported her financially, she had to put
(21:16):
up with his violence. If he hits you, they said,
it's your own fault. And they weren't the only ones
in Russia who felt this way. No one would come
right out and say that domestic violence was a great thing.
But there was a whole movement in Russia, backed by
the conservatives and by Mikhail's own beloved Orthodox Church that
(21:38):
wanted domestic violence to stay behind closed doors with no
interference from the law or from politics. Here's Matthew Luxmore.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
This is kind of where they tapped into the whole
broader state narrative about preserving what Russia caused and what
Putin caused traditional values against this perceived Western campaign to
dilute Russia's traditional values and impose its values on Russia.
These activists, many of whom are tied to the Orthodox Church,
(22:08):
including lawmakers conservative lawmakers. They argue that a man, or rather,
you know, we shouldn't interfere in people's families. Families should
be kept apart from the state. But it's a very
it's kind of I guess you could say, a very patriarchal,
the view that the man is the head of the family.
He should not be questioned on how he governs the
(22:33):
affairs of his family, of his children. And there's a
very widespread view amongst such people that if your woman
is acting up, you need to put her in a place.
If you viciously beat her, then you should be held
accountable for that. But you know, if you slap her
on the wrist or I don't know, do something slightly
worse than that.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
It's fine.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
We should all just get over it. We shouldn't be
causing such a fuss over it. You know, once a
year is fine, which is currently what the Russian law permits.
One light beating of your wife's the year is currently
allowed under a law that was passed in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
In an atmosphere like this, victims of domestic violence could
try calling the police, but it probably wouldn't work, as
one officer told a woman when she called to say
that her boyfriend was threatening to kill her. If he
kills you, we'll come to examine the body. Don't worry.
Forty minutes after the call, that woman was dead. Aurelia
(23:31):
herself learned quickly that there was no point in asking
the police for help. Not only did they not take
domestic violence very seriously, but in her particular case, the
police were friends with her husband. Once, when Aurelia's kids
were still tiny, she fled from the apartment and begged
the police for help, but Michael showed up right behind her.
(23:53):
He was smiling. He pulled back his hand and hit
her right in front of the police officers. Nobody did anything,
and then one day in twenty fifteen, Mikhaiel forced his
wife to leave. It was a strange reversal of his
behavior early on in their relationship, where he locked her
(24:15):
inside his apartment. Now, he put a gun to Aurelia's
head and hissed, I'm going to leave now, and if
you're still here when i'm back, I'll kill you all.
Aurelia fled, afraid that he'd murder her and her daughters.
After that, she hardly saw her girls. Every now and then.
They'd sneak a phone call, but that was about it.
(24:39):
She knew that he was beating them, but she didn't
know the rest of it. Mikhaiel had been sexual abusing
(25:00):
his daughters long before he kicked their mother out of
the house, but the girls kept it secret from their mom.
They didn't want her to worry, and at first Michael
had managed things so that the girls kept it secret
from each other too. He had the ingenious craftiness of
a hardened abuser. He began assaulting his two older daughters,
(25:23):
Christina and Angelina, in secret, banking on the fact that
they wouldn't confide in each other, and he avoided Maria,
the youngest, because he thought she'd tell her mother. His
divide and conquer approach worked for a while, but eventually
the girls found out he had been assaulting them since
(25:43):
at least twenty fourteen, the year before he threw their
mother out. It was that year that he took his
middle daughter, Angelina on a trip to Israel and assaulted
her there. On another trip two years later, he forced
Christina into his hotel room. She raced out of the
room and tried to kill herself by swallowing pills. He
(26:05):
would claim that various sexual acts were good for him,
good for his health, good for his prostate. He would
ask for massages. When he wasn't with the girls, he
was terrorizing them from Afar. On one of his solo
trips to Israel, he learned that Angelina wasn't at home. Furious,
(26:29):
he sent her WhatsApp messages saying that he was going
to rape her when he got back. He also sent
his daughter's messages saying things like quote, I'll beat you
up for everything, I'll kill you, leave, leave, don't drive
me to sin. Here's another one. You are prostitutes and
you will die as prostitutes. The sick irony to all
(26:54):
of this was that Mikhael was very preachy about sex
before marriage. He always warned his daughters that it was
a sin to have sex with someone you weren't married too.
But then he'd say, as Angelina told police later, because
we're his blood and his daughters, he can do with
us as he wishes, and we should submit ourselves to it.
(27:17):
It's not that nobody knew what was happening. There was
plenty of evidence to be seen or heard if you
paid attention. The Krachaturian neighbors were used to hearing screams
coming from their apartment. People had seen Mikhail beat his
daughters in public, and at least one of Christina's friends knew.
Christina had described one assault to her friend over WhatsApp,
(27:40):
once saying that this sort of thing happened almost every day.
I lost consciousness during the night, she texted. He began
to chase me out at one in the morning because
he didn't like the fact that one of his shirts
isn't ironed. I became anxious and started crying, and then
began suffocating and fell on the ground. Ones begin to
(28:01):
sob and resuscitate me. It was fucking crazy, And to
top it off, he whacked them over the head with
his gun. The abuse went on and on. By January
twenty eighteen, the girls had stopped attending school, and their
father hardly let them leave the house. He gets worse
(28:21):
every day. Christina texted her friend, but the sisters had
no one to turn to. Their father was too well connected,
and they feared that if they told their relatives, no
one would believe them, And so the abuse continued. Three
girls and their father alone in a household of weapons.
(28:51):
On the last day of Mikhail Kachaturian's life, he screamed
at his daughters. It was July twenty seventh, eighteen. He
was furious because the apartment was messy. According to one source,
there were hairs on the floor of his apartment, and
this was simply the last straw for this poor belaguered
(29:14):
church going man. His daughters were going to have to pay,
so one by one he called them into his room.
He was waiting there with an unusual weapon, pepper spray.
He sprayed his daughters in the face, one at a time,
three in a row. Then, with his work done, he
(29:38):
plopped himself down in his rocking chair and took a nap.
Christina had taken the most pepper spray in the face.
She also had asthma, according to some reports, so she
started choking. She groped her way back to her bed,
and she fainted there. Her little sisters watched this happen. Now,
(29:59):
it wasn't the they hadn't seen this sort of thing before,
but today they just couldn't take it anymore. Later, they'd
refer to this moment as the final straw. Angelina was
preparing food, she says, when she and Maria decided that
it was time to kill the man who'd made their
(30:19):
life such a nightmare. So they crept out of the
apartment and they went to their father's car. There they
found a hammer and a hunting knife. They snuck back
in and moved towards their sleeping father. Maria had the
knife and Angelina had the hammer. Maria drew back and
(30:43):
began to stab her father. As Angelina bludgeoned him over
the head twice, he woke up, stood up and pushed
them away, confused and bloody, yelling that he needed to
wash himself. By then, Christina was waking up. She heard
screams coming from the living room, and she thought that
(31:06):
her father was abusing her sisters again, so she ran
into the chaos. There on the floor, she saw the
bottle of pepper spray, so she grabbed it and sprayed
her father in the face. Then, terrified, she sprinted out
of the apartment. Her father lumbered after her. Angelina grabbed
(31:28):
the hunting knife and ran after him, and on the landing,
Angelina stabbed her father in the heart repeatedly. He fell
The sisters panicked. There's CCTV footage of one of them
in the hallway just after the killing. She's pacing around
(31:49):
in shock, wiping her nose and covering her mouth with
her hands. The girls cut themselves with the knife a
few times to make it look like their father had
stabbed them, and then they called the police. They claimed
self defense, and they were arrested for murder in December
(32:23):
of twenty nineteen. Five months later, investigators turned their findings
into the prosecutor's office. They declared that the three sisters
had killed their father in a premeditated manner, that they
had conspired together to kill him. The investigators said that
because of the long standing physical and sexual abuse the
sisters had experienced, they hated their father and so they
(32:46):
basically created a murder plot. This narrative from the investigators
admitted that the girls suffered from PTSD and something quote
resembling battered child syndrome, but since it declared that they
had pre met meditated the murder, the girls were now
facing down decades in prison. But other people disagreed with
(33:07):
this narrative of premeditation. In fact, a few weeks later,
the Deputy prosecutor General, a man named Victor Grinn, asked
investigators to change it. He thought the sister's crime should
be classified as self defense, which would mean that the
girls would be set free. But then in July of
twenty twenty, a year after the crime, Victor Grinn reversed
(33:30):
his stance. No one knows why, or if they do,
they're not saying. The killing was classified not as self
defense but as murder, which meant that the girls were
going to have to stand trial. In the meantime, the
sisters had become famous or infamous, depending on your news source.
(33:51):
Their story was splashed across every newspaper and talk show
in the country. People began protesting the murder charges in
the streets, holding concerts and plays to raise funds for
their legal fees, and circulating a petition online to drop
the charges against the sisters that now has over four
hundred thousand signatures. Not only was it a shocking story
(34:14):
three daughters stabbed their father to death, but it hit
a raw nerve in Russia because Russia had a terrible
history when it came to prosecuting domestic violence, or rather
not prosecuting domestic violence whatsoever. In the Khatchaturyan girls case
was only the latest example of the country's refusal to
admit that domestic violence was a problem. The fact that
(34:38):
their mother couldn't go to the police, the fact that
no one stepped in to help the sisters, This was
all too normal for many many Russian women. A twenty
twelve survey by the Russian government found that one in
five women had been assaulted by a partner. Despite shocking
numbers like that, a law passed in twenty seventeen riminalized
(35:00):
domestic violence, reducing it to a minor offense. This law
declared basically that if you beat your wife, but you
don't beat her hard enough to land her in the hospital,
you get a small fine about the same amount as
a parking ticket, or maybe you get fifteen days in jail.
If you do it again, you might get a slightly
longer prison stint, But if it's been a year since
(35:25):
the first beating, you'll just get another small fine, No
big deal. Russia's conservative movement, which is in bed with
the Orthodox Church that Mikhail Khachaturian was such a passionate
part of, fueled fears that legislation against domestic violence was
somehow anti family, and Putin let this all happen since
(35:46):
he needed the church's support.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
There's always been a kind of link between Put's government
and Putin personally and the Church. He portrays himself as
a very pious person and go to the church on
Orthodox Easter, another major church holiday. But he allied himself
much more close to the church, and the church became
the main champion of this decriminalization law. On the law
to decriminalize the first time battery. You know this bearded
(36:13):
men in all kinds of funny hands go to the
Russian Parliament and make kind of fire and speeches about
how we need to defend our families from Western interference,
and how you know, the units of the CIA are
trying to infiltrate our kids' minds, and all these kinds
of things. The one guy I talked to who has
nine kids, you know, which is something he's very proud of,
and also uses this evidence of the fact that he's
(36:35):
been able to build you a great family in the
traditional mold. He's one of the people who's been the
public based on this project, and he's very closely allied
with the Orthodox Church. So I think it's fair to
say that the Authodox Church is kind of the main
official channel that's pushing this backlash, or rather pushing this
campaign against the initiatives, the legal initiatives that are pushed
by extender pushkin On, this liberal lawmaker who's trying to
(36:57):
pass Russia's first law and violence. And because the Orthodox
Church is closely allied in the state and in many
ways back by the state, people like Pushkina are in
a very tight spot because to push through a law
and domestic violence in the current climate in Russia is
pretty much an insurmountable task.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Because the Church is so against any legislation that cracks
down on domestic violence. Mikhail himself would have been absorbing
that message consciously or unconsciously Sunday after Sunday, and he
wasn't the only one.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
It does seem ironic. There's someone who hovered a whole
wall of his apartment in icons Orthodox icons. At the
same time, was from what we know, a pretty despicable character.
I mean, someone who is involved in all kinds of
criminal activity in the nineties, viciously beat his wife and
did much worse to his daughters. Was at the same
(37:52):
time a religious man who again had icons in his apartment,
took trips to Israel to go to the holy sites.
So it's funny. Actually, I was initially going to end
my piece in another fresh example that a case that
came out just as I was finishing the piece of
a man who lived in Leningrad region, which is the
(38:13):
region that Saint Petersburg is the capital of, who had
nine kids. He kept them essentially, this is quite a
grim story, as slaves in his home and abuse them
quite seriously. His wife gave birth to all these kids
inside the home and outside the building. He erected this
enormous Orthodox cross, which he built himself, and when police
(38:34):
came to raid his home, he also had walls covered
in icons all kinds of religious memorabilia. He was based
on what his neighbours said A pious, a guy who
went to church and forbid his wife from doing all
kinds of things that I was forbidden by the Orthodox Church.
And there's at least one case or even a couple
of cases that I've seen connected with the mestic violence
(38:56):
where the men were very religious, at least on the outside.
Some men in Russia who are very religious and who
see themselves as supporters of the Orthodox faith may see
all the statements that are coming out by the Orthodox Church,
including that they're the heads of the Orthodox Church, and
Patriarch Hero, who's the head of the the Russian Orthodox Church,
(39:16):
you know, speaking out against laws of domestic violence, saying
that we need to stay out of what's happening in
the family, that we need to preserve the family whatever happens,
regardless of what's taking place inside the household. They may
see all these statements and essentially kind of think that
they have carte blanche to do what they want to do.
I do think, at least in the case of mehiologically
(39:38):
and he definitely saw cues from the statements that the
church was making.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
After domestic violence was decriminalized in twenty seventeen, domestic violence
itself spiked Perhaps the most famous incident was the case
of Margarita Gratcheva. Margarita was in an abusive relationship, but
the police wouldn't press charges against her violent husband, and
then one winter day, her husband drove her into the
(40:07):
forest and chopped off both her hands with an axe.
Just like with the Hachiturian sisters, no one took her
situation seriously until it was far too late. The sister's
(40:39):
trials were delayed and delayed again. The pandemics certainly didn't help.
Maria was going to be tried separately from her sisters,
as she was only seventeen when the killing happened, and
when doctors evaluated her afterwards, they found her mentally unsound
and recommended psychological treatment. Her trial began in August of
(40:59):
twenty Jury selection for the trial of Christina and Angelina
was delayed five times due to all sorts of factors,
including the coronavirus. First one of the sisters got it,
and then some of the jurors got it. Now during
all of this, the family of Mikhail Kataturyan was trying
(41:20):
to paint the sisters as the depraved ones.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
One of the things that really surprised people perhaps one
of the most surprising things about these cases was how
much of a kind of down to earth and completely normal,
for lack of a better words, kind of outward profile.
Definitely the social media footprint these young women had. I
mean they posted phoses themselves trying on new dresses, videos,
(41:46):
singing to pop songs, videos, you know, kind of clips,
shots from all the different parties that they had. The
family of Mikhail Lashtrian, his sisters, one of them is
called Naira, I think the other was called you know
by maybe Mistaken, who are very strongly pushing against the
sister's version of what happened and their mother's version as well.
(42:09):
They have used all these photos in the social media
footprint to portray these women as essentially depraved. They said
that they or they did when you know, Uliana would
go for his regular checkups to the local clinic because
he had all kinds of health issues. They would, you know,
host these raucous parties in the apartment, take all kinds
(42:31):
of drugs, drink, invite boys over. Then one of them said, oh,
you know, they completely missed treated their father. They didn't
cook for him what they were supposed to cook for him.
They gave him dog food, all these kinds of things,
and every single time he came back home, the apartment
was a mess.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
In fact, Mikhael's mother and one of his sisters tried
to sue Aurelia, his wife, because Aurelia told a journalist
that Mikhaiel had raped her. His mom and sister responded
that a husband cannot rape his wife. But then, just
this March, something shocking happened. Suddenly the sisters weren't the
(43:11):
only ones waiting for a trial. Their dead father was too.
Russian investigators declared that the three sisters were victims in
the criminal case against their father. According to the Moscow Times,
there was now an open case against Mikhail Kataduryan. He
(43:32):
was being charged posthumously with sexual assault, coercion into sex acts,
and torture. His family had tried to stop this entire
case from happening, but a district court said that that
was illegal. And what does this all mean. It means
that the sisters won't be tried until their father's trial
(43:53):
is over, and if their father is found guilty, the
sisters might just go free. And that's not the only
update from twenty twenty one. Just this past April, Russia's
Constitutional Court said that the penalties for being a repeat
domestic violence offender weren't strong enough. The court ordered stronger
(44:14):
laws and better protections for victims. Activists say that this
still isn't enough. Police need to start taking domestic violence
complaints seriously, and there aren't very many organizations that help
the victims, just to name a few other problems. But
it's not nothing. And the sisters today they're under house arrests, waiting,
(44:38):
waiting after almost two decades spent with each other, isolated
in the same nightmare house. They've been separated. They're not
allowed to talk to each other or to the press.
They can't use the internet. They're spending the last of
their teenage years in this strange isolation, waiting for a
(45:00):
trial that may never come. It feels tragic, but is
it possible that they're happier this way. Christina's lawyer says
that the first time they met, Christina told him that
she was better off in jail than she was living
at home. The sisters would have done anything to be free,
(45:23):
even if it meant giving up their freedom, and so
they wait for the courts to decide the end. My
(45:54):
dearest listeners, what did you think about that? I couldn't
believe it when I came across it. It has that
tabloidy like sleazy headline potential, and then you get into
it and it's so awful and then also so relevant
to the situation in Russia in a very morbid way.
(46:18):
It has it all. Thank you so much to Matthew
Luxmore for coming on the podcast and giving me that
you know, boots on the street perspective that it is
impossible to get until someone increases my ad budget enough
that I can fly to Moscow myself. All right, before
I let you go, I have a big update on
Lloyd Dean, so stick around. Okay, I don't know where
(46:39):
do I start with this. So we covered Marie Dean Arrington.
She was the second woman to make the FBI's ten
most Wanted list right in Florida in the oh gosh seventies.
I think we covered her a couple episodes back, and
then I told you all that I was corresponding with
her son, Lloyd Dean, who robbed a gas station when
(46:59):
he was not nineteen. No one was killed, but he
was given life in prison, which just seemed so outrageously unfair,
and he was such a nice guy. I'd been corresponding
with him over email, and I decided that we should
raise some money for him, and so I told you
guys that, and I kid you not. The donations came
(47:20):
pouring it and like such generosity from all of you.
I haven't added up the official number, but it's definitely
over five hundred dollars, maybe more like six hundred. And
that's from a lot of little individual donations and some
big donations too. So just, first of all, thank you.
It really touches me to see that from you. I
(47:42):
know that it's like there's so many things to give
money to and it's overwhelming. I feel that way too,
So thank you. It was really fun for me. My
phone kept going off with the like venmo sound is
it chit ching? It was cool. It was just cool
to see the money being raised. Okay, But it turns
out the story was not as straightforward as I thought
(48:04):
it was. And I'm just gonna tell you right up front,
if you donated money, it's I have not touched it, okay,
and you're gonna get to decide what we should do
with it. So one of my eagle eyed listeners, Andrena
sent me an email saying that she had looked into
Lloyd Dean's public records and actually he had been released
(48:25):
in nineteen seventy nine and then reincarcerated in nineteen eighty two,
and the records didn't say what for. And this was
actually something I remember seeing when I was researching the
Marie Dean Arrington episode, but there were no details on
what exactly had happened. And I knew he had gotten
life in prison for the original robbery charge, and I
(48:49):
so I just like, I don't know. I guess I
just didn't process it. I just thought he was still
there for the robbery charge, okay. So thankfully, Andrena emailed me,
and I was like, ooh, I need to look into this,
and I'll be honest, I got a horrible sinking feeling.
I was like, have I misled all my listeners? Am? I?
(49:09):
Despite assuring them I wasn't conning them, Am I actually
accidentally conning them? So over the past couple of weeks,
I've been emailing with Lloyd Dean and just kind of
awkwardly being like, HI, like, what did you get reincarcerated
for in nineteen eighty two, and would you mind telling
me about it because I want to let my listeners
(49:30):
know the full situation before they donate. It was an
awkward message to send, but it also felt really unfair
to you all to spend your money without you having
the full story. So he told me that he was
reincarcerated in nineteen eighty two for an assault charge. And
I think there was a typo in his email because
(49:51):
he said an assault charge I did commit. Now I'm
pretty sure he meant to write did not commit. But
my stomach dropped and I was like, oh no, oh,
I am anchorage. I've gotten my listeners all up in
arms to donate to this man who's been given this
sentence for something we thought was you know, we thought
it was one thing, but it's for an assault charge.
Like yikes. So again I awkwardly was like, I'm sorry,
(50:15):
I know this is potentially a sensitive subject, but can
you tell me more about this assault charge? What is
going on? So just a couple of days ago, he
emailed me back, and what he says is that it
was a wrongful assault charge and it had to do
with some family drama. I'm thinking, I'm just going to
read you the whole email. Okay, I know this episode
is already long, but then you can just be as
(50:38):
up to date as I am. Okay. So here is
what Lloyd Dean says. He had told me by the
way that he was he's been incarcerated for thirty eight
years for a crime he didn't commit, and I was like,
are you talking about the original robbery charge. Turns out
he's talking about the assault charge. So he says, dear toy, Hi,
the fact that I was incarcerated for thirty eight years
(50:58):
for a crime I did not commit is not related
to my original charge. In fact, when I was released
from prison in nineteen seventy nine, I went to Newark,
New Jersey to stay with my aunt while on parole.
I really don't know what came over me, but I
decided to return to Florida to stay with my grandmother.
I remember my aunt saying before I left Newark that,
in her own words, you don't know your grandmother like
I do. I understood that to mean if I'm not
(51:21):
for you, I'm against you. But I don't judge her.
But I believe that my aunt, in my opinion, had
more influence on my grandmother than anyone in the family.
I believe my aunt poisoned my grandmother's mind against me
to create a situation that would violate my parole, and
I believe my niece, also with my grandmother, played the
role as witness against me. In brief, my niece went
into the bath area, left there and went to my
(51:42):
grandmother and said that someone took a bath and did
not clean the bathtub. When she said that to my grandmother,
she got upset about it. That's the grandmother getting upset,
and she said to me and my niece that wasn't
going to be tolerated. So I put the newspaper aside
and said that I would clean the bathtub. So when
I went to the bath area, I noticed it was
spotless clean, So I left the bath area back to
(52:04):
continue to read the newspaper. By then, my grandmother was
so upset about what my niece had told her about
the bathtub. As I was going back to continue to
read the newspaper, by then she had reached a high
tone of voice. I stopped near her. Sorry, I'm reading
this awkwardly. The JPay, which I used to communicate with inmates,
(52:25):
is like formatted. It's hard to read okay, I mean
back up. So his grandmother is reaching a high tone
of voice with him. I stopped near her and was
listening to what she had to say. I was looking
down at the floor, and when I looked up, my
grandmother had found a frying pan and was coming towards
my face. What came to mind first was to push
the frying pan away from me to restrain her. I
(52:47):
told her to put the frying pan away, but she
drew it back, and she drew it back again, intending
to hit me with it. I grabbed her left wrist.
She fell on the floor and started laughing and told
my niece to call the police. So I let her
wrist go and walked over to my niece and told
her to put the phone down. She ran out of
the house and called the police. In matters of minutes,
the police came to the house. My grandmother told the
(53:10):
police that I had hit her with my fist and
knocked her down, and the officer turned to me and
asked me what happened, and I told him it's not true.
So my grandfather told the officer she wanted to press
charges for assault and battery. I don't know if that
was another one of my niece's schemes, but only God knows.
And my grandmother passed in two thousand and one, but
I still love her and forgive her, but I'm not
(53:30):
concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will.
Peace be unto you and your family. Lloyd. Okay, so
are you following this? Basically, Lloyd is saying he was
out on parole, his grandmother pressed these assault and battery
charges against him, that he kind of feels like he
was set up, and I'm assuming because of the nature
(53:51):
of the charges and the violating of the parole or
the alleged violating of the parole, he was given life
in prison for the second time in prison to this day.
So it's a different story than what I originally told you.
And guys, I'm so sorry that I got the facts
wrong and I'm embarrassed. I I'm just embarrassed. I wish
(54:12):
I had just dug further first, and you know, so
please forgive me for that. But I hope you feel
all caught up now. I'm going to reach out to
everyone who donated individually and ask if you want to
still send your money to Lloyd or take it back.
No judgment either way. I know this is a different
(54:33):
tale than the tale of being imprisoned from age nineteen on.
So I'm going to leave it up to you. I
will yep, I'll reach out to you and tell you
to listen to this episode so you can hear the letter.
But thank you anyway, all of you, just for caring,
for donating, for keeping me honest, et cetera. All right,
moving right along, I'm putting a change dot org petition
(54:54):
in the show notes. The ones that I the one
that I mentioned in the episode. It's the one. It's
titled stop Prosecution of Sisters Victims of Sexual and Domestic Violence.
It's the one that has over four hundred thousand signatures.
If you guys want to add your signatures to it,
couldn't hurt, Okay, So it'll be in the show notes.
So last, but not least, I have so many patrons
(55:16):
to thank for this episode. Am I am? I a
billionaire Now I'm not sure the patrons I have. The
new patrons I've gotten over the past couple of weeks
are Lauren V. Patrice KH, Elizabeth B, Michelle D and
Michelle B CCB, Andrana D B compos Emily d R.
(55:40):
Melissa B. Sam T and Rochelle L. Thank you all
so much for keeping Criminal Broads on its sturdy little legs.
I love you all, and there's one week left of
Sister Month. I may have saved the oddest tale for last,
so meet me back here. Until then, have a great week,
(56:02):
Love you all. Bye. Lord help the mister who comes
between me and my sister, and Lord help the sister
who comes between me and my man.
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