Former Ballet Idaho artistic director Veniamin "Ben" Kuzmichev, once a protege of the arts patron wife of billionaire J.R. Simplot, was formally charged on Friday with the first-degree murder of his newlywed wife last September.
Magistrate Richard Schmidt set Jan. 19 for his preliminary hear-ing.The arrest of the mysterious Russian emigre capped a four-month investigation into the slaying of Wanda Cowger Kuzmichev, 61. Her nude body was discovered Sept. 21 in a brushy area across the road from a cottage that the Simplots for a time had provided for Kuzmichev and his previous wife.
Plastic grocery bags, apparently used to suffocate her, were found tied around the victim's head and feet. Her husband reported her disappearance six days before her body was found.
Boise police said Kuzmichev, 55, was arrested Thursday following his unexpected visit to detectives.
Lt. Jim Tibbs said Kuzmichev revealed new information that prompted investigators to contact prosecutors, who recommended an immediate arrest. A prosecutor told Schmidt that there was some fear Kuzmichev might be ready to leave the country.
"We're concerned about that," Tibbs said. "If he did flee to Russia it would be very difficult if not impossible to do any follow-up. I can't tell you specifically that's the reason, . . . but it's safe to say that during the conversation, the detectives heard something that made them seek the counsel of command staff and a prosecutor."
Police did not indicate what motive Kuzmichev might have had for the slaying but said they had physical evidence gathered at the crime scene and during the follow-up investigation that justified the arrest.
Mary Kolsky, the victim's sister-in-law, said Kuzmichev spoke recently of returning to the former Soviet Union because he was unable to find work amid publicity that he was a murder suspect.
Wanda Kuzmichev, who became her husband's third wife last May, was a cleaning woman with 35 grandchildren and great-grand-children.
"I'm saddened that someone who she loved and trusted, and was so excited about being with, would do such a thing," said Timothy Cowger, one of her four sons. He doubts money was a motive.
"Mom didn't have much, in standards that you and I would consider much," Cowger said.
Kuzmichev arrived in the United States with his second wife and young daughter in 1991, telling acquaintances that he was fleeing from a KGB attempt to kill him. After spending several weeks in the College of Southern Idaho's refugee program in Twin Falls, he was hired by Esther Simplot to be artistic director of Ballet Idaho.
When he fled Russia, Kuz-mi-chev said he had been kidnapped by agents associated with the KGB, stripped naked, put into a wooden box that was nailed shut and left in a snowy field to die. He never elaborated on how he escaped, according to those who know him.
In 1993 in Boise, he told police a gunman who looked like Watergate defendant H.R. Haldeman had threatened to kill him and his family if he did not leave town immediately.
He was fired from Ballet Idaho a few months later because of what was described as artistic differences.