A Russian man arrested in Israel in connection the deaths of two women in New York has committed suicide in a Jerusalem prison cell.
Eugene Perchikov, 62, was found dead Sunday in the cell he shared with seven other prisoners at the Russian Compound police jail in central Jerusalem.
New York prosecutors were seeking his extradition from Israel to face murder charges.
His suicide left a major mystery unsolved: did he kill two women and then collect $1 million in life insurance, a 'perfect murder' echoing a plot he wrote in a short story that was published a decade before they died?
Eugene Perchikov lived under three aliases in three countries with his wife and countless mistresses.
After a three-year manhunt, he was finally arrested in October in Israel on an extradition warrant for murder issued by a New York judge after his Brooklyn mistress and a Manhattan widow died in mysterious circumstances.
Perchikov was suspected of killing Russian immigrants Larysa Vasserman in 2002 in Brooklyn and Tatiana Korkhova, 54, in 2004 in Manhattan.
Both women were found dead in bed and were thought to have died of natural causes – until investigators found the short story Perchikov wrote under the pen name Eugene Pepperou and began to suspect he may have poisoned them with a drug that left no traces.
The nature of the charges were under seal, but Israeli authorities say that extradition papers filed in Jerusalem District Court described him as wanted for the murders of both Vasserman and Tatiana Korkhova, a widowed bookkeeper who knew Perchikov from Russia.
Meanwhile, Perchikov had collected $1 million from a life insurance policy on Vasserman and was claiming a similar amount on a policy on Korkhova’s life filed in his name and the name of a woman friend in Israel.
Perchikov had persuaded Vasserman, a lonely divorcee who met him through a personal ad, to take out multiple life insurance policies naming him as the beneficiary, but he was only able to collect on one of them.
The insurance companies and heirs of both women filed civil suits against him, accusing him of murder.
Last January, a federal court judge in New York issued a $6.8 million judgment against him on suspicion of murdering his Brooklyn mistress for her insurance.
Meanwhile, he had fled to Israel, where his wife lived but denied all knowledge of his whereabouts.
Israeli police caught up with him in October after he was indicted by a grand jury in New York.
On Sunday, as he was awaiting a hearing on the extradition process, Perchikov took his own life, bleeding to death in a Jerusalem prison cell he shared with seven other inmates after slashing himself with a disposable razor.
Jailers believe he used his medical training to cut himself in a place on his body that would have fatal results.
The Israeli Prison Service and the police have opened an investigation into his death.
His lawyer, Mechael Ironi, told Haaretz that Perchikov stood a good chance of beating the extradition request.
Decreasing term life insurance is a type of life insurance where the policy amount to be paid in case of your death would generally decrease as time went on. Hypothetically, with a 20-year decreasing term life insurance policy, you might get paid a certain amount early into the policy, and less later into the policy.
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