First wife tells of rages, threats
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The first wife of Indle King Jr., the Mountlake Terrace man under investigation in the slaying of his mail-order bride, said she came to this country from her native Russia with no intention of marrying King, then a college finance professor with whom she was exchanging letters.
Ekaterina Kazakova said yesterday she went to Ohio as a exchange student, eager to study biology at Wright State University. She had seen a notice in the Moscow News announcing an opportunity to study in the United States. She answered it and began a correspondence with King, who had placed the ad.
In September 1993, Kazakova agreed to come to the U.S. as a visiting student and King's guest. Within weeks of arriving, King proposed, explaining the only way for her to remain in the United States was to marry him.
After consulting her parents, who lived in the Siberian city of Omsk, and learning they approved of the match, she accepted King's proposal. The couple were married Oct. 11, 1993.
"Being a 19-year-old Russian student at the time, I had no idea how everything works here," Kazakova, now 26, said yesterday from her home in the Columbus, Ohio, area. "To me, he seemed a very nice, intelligent person."
But what began as a relatively smooth partnership began to unravel by 1995, Kazakova said.
By then, her husband was having financial problems, running up credit-card debts in her name and unable to renew his positions with various area colleges as a finance and marketing instructor. He once got angry at a neighbor and stole his mail, she said. He began shoplifting items such as steak, milk and fruit, she recalled.
Then came the fights.
"We started having arguments," said Kazakova, now a dentist who has remarried. "At first they were just verbal arguments."
Later they turned violent.
"It kind of became a pattern when it was easier for him to hit me ... I got very threatened by his behavior," she said.
Jeff Robinson, a Seattle attorney representing King, could not be reached for comment. Ultimately, Kazakova said, she packed her bags in the summer of 1996 and, while her husband was working at a bookstore, found the couple's car in the parking lot and drove to Columbus, where she stayed. She then filed for a protection order, alleging that King had warned her "he would find her and kill her if she tried to leave him."
She saw him only twice more - both times at legal proceedings - and the couple divorced in July 1997.
She heard nothing further about King, she said, until the FBI contacted her late last month after Snohomish County authorities found the body of King's second wife, 20-year-old Anastasia Solovieva King, buried at an illegal dumping ground near Marysville.
Earlier this month, prosecutors filed preliminary murder charges against King but then decided they weren't ready to refile final charges. King is now in the Snohomish County Jail on a perjury charge in connection with the September disappearance of Anastasia King.
Jim Townsend, chief criminal deputy prosecutor, said prosecutors and Mountlake Terrace police are working full time on the case and may file murder charges against King and a male roommate, who allegedly told investigators the two were lovers and together killed the woman in September.