A search for status and mail-order wives
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As a student at Mercer Island High School, Indle King Jr. drove a mouse-gray Fiat coupe with a red-leather interior and an expensive, powerful stereo system that he hid from view with a custom-designed cover. He kept the car polished and tuned and, when he drove it, he blasted the music.
"He would want you to be very impressed with it," said Cartlund Monson, a high-school classmate.
As an adult, his friends say, King still had that desire to impress and to possess the best. As his physical appearance declined, that drive led him to seek young, beautiful women through the mail.
"His absolute obsession was to have a blonde, Nordic, obedient woman on his arm," said Monson, now a database consultant.
Today King, 39, sits in the Snohomish County Jail on a perjury charge related to the September disappearance of his striking and talented mail-order bride, Anastasia King, 20. Her body was found in late December at an illegal dump near Marysville, partly buried and under a mattress, surrounded by car parts and fish carcasses.
Finally released as evidence in a murder investigation, her remains will receive a formal burial today in Lynnwood, thousands of miles from her home in Kyrgyzstan.
Indle King's Mountlake Terrace roommate, 20-year-old Daniel Larson, has been charged with murdering Anastasia King. But Snohomish County prosecutors continue to investigate whether Indle King planned and abetted the slaying, as Larson has claimed.
King said his lawyers have warned him not to talk about the case.
"I pray some day I'll be free to tell my story," he said in a brief jailhouse interview last week.
King's parents, Indle King Sr. and Rosalie King, who still live on Mercer Island, have declined comment. Their attorney said they are devastated by the loss of their daughter-in-law and sure of their son's innocence.
"You just go through one day at a time," said Paige King, Indle King Jr.'s only sibling.
King's attorneys say the only suggestion that King was involved in his wife's death comes from Larson, a known liar who is trying to deflect his own guilt.
But as the mystery drags on, some who know King wonder whether a lifelong pursuit of status and attention, coupled with what they describe as a penchant for control, could have led to disaster.
'A good-natured kid'
Indy King, as he was known in school, was the only son of highly educated, successful parents.
Rosalie King is a university art professor with a doctorate in education. Indle King Sr., an award-winning industrial designer, worked for more than 30 years for the Fluke Corp. He, too, has taught university courses and is president of a prominent industrial-design firm. King's sister teaches art.
At Mercer Island High, Indy King played clarinet and saxophone in the school bands and lettered in tennis. The stocky teen is remembered as a good student, happy-go-lucky, ambitious, eager to please.
"He pushed himself pretty hard," said one friend.
"I remember Indy as being an enthusiastic player - a good-humored, good-natured kid," said Jack Dills, a former tennis coach and teacher.
Outside school, King hung out with brainy classmates on the fringe. They read science fiction, played board games, watched "A Clockwork Orange" repeatedly.
They liked pranks. In the name of the Mercer Island Beautification Project, they tore around the island, swiping plastic flamingos and lawn ornaments from front yards.
In the sweeping home his father designed, King had a wing to himself. His friends gathered there to talk, listen to music, paint models and play Risk, a board game in which players compete to control the world.
Indy King wanted to win.
"He would get really sweaty and stressed out when he wasn't dominating," one friend recalled.
A visit to the Soviet Union
In 1984, King graduated with honors in business from the University of Washington. He worked as an accountant with an oil company, living in Anchorage and Houston before enrolling at the University of Chicago business school, where he earned a master's degree in finance in 1987.
He earned high pay and reams of frequent-flier miles at a Pennsylvania plastics company - a job he lost within a year. In 1990, he was working as a pricing analyst in Dayton, Ohio, and an adjunct professor at Wright State University's business school. He decided to use his free airline miles to visit the Soviet Union and persuaded Cartlund Monson to go along.
It was the autumn before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The two spent 10 days touring Moscow and St. Petersburg, absorbing the tense atmosphere of a country on the verge of enormous change.
When they came home, one thing was clear, Monson said: Indle King was smitten by the young waitresses and call girls he saw in cafes and nightclubs. Soon after returning to the states, King talked about placing an ad in a Russian publication to meet a woman, Monson recalled.
Marriage to an 18-year-old
By the time King returned to the former Soviet Union, he was over 30 and struggling with self-image. He wore a hairpiece, fretted about his height, battled his weight. He talked about dieting and wore suits that were too tight.
While juggling temporary teaching jobs at several local colleges and working toward a doctorate in finance at the University of Cincinnati, King placed an ad in the Moscow News inviting a female Russian student to study in America.
By early 1993, he was corresponding with Ekaterina Kazakova, an 18-year-old from Siberia. That September, she came to Ohio as a visiting biology student. By October, she was married to King; she said he told her it was the only way for her to continue to study in the United States. In December, they had a large, formal wedding on Mercer Island.
Kazakova said the marriage soured in little more than a year. King dropped out of the doctoral program, and his teaching contracts weren't renewed. His cars were repossessed. He desperately tried to make money by investing.
"His own credit history was terrible," Kazakova said. "He made me go to the bank and get cash advances for $2,000 at a time."
Kazakova was working as a pharmacy technician while she went to school. When she began to refuse King money, their fights grew violent, she said.
"I tried to avoid him," said Kazakova, now a dentist, remarried and living in Ohio.
Despite their conflicts, she said, King was supportive of her studies. "All he talked about was money - my future earning potential."
King eventually got a job as a grocery-store clerk. On July 5, 1996, the night she left him, King was working an evening job at a B. Dalton bookstore.
Divorce left him bitter
Kazakova got a restraining order, telling the courts that King had assaulted her, then threatened to kill her if she called police or tried to leave him.
King filed for an annulment, arguing that the marriage was fraudulently obtained by Kazakova to gain permanent residency in America.
The divorce was final in July 1997, and the couple essentially split their debt, court records show.
King was bitter. He called friends to say Kazakova had used him to gain citizenship.
"The way he made it sound, it was just a horrendous situation - he was the victim," said Mitch Mason, who knew King at Mercer Island High. Mason, who ran a local travel company, offered King a job and a chance to come home.
"He had gained a lot of weight," said Mason, who hadn't seen King in nearly four years. "He had changed from the guy I used to know. He wasn't the happy-go-lucky guy."
But he soon began to pursue a new bride from the former Soviet Union. Western women weren't ambitious enough and couldn't be trusted, King told some. He wanted a smart, loyal, beautiful wife, and he would find her overseas.
"He had a great need to be married," said Jay Yanick Jr., a high-school friend. "He wanted kids. He had a great need for money."
"He said, `I'm going to find someone who's a little less independent' " than the first wife, Mason recalled.
A talented, lovely new bride
King found Anastasia Solovieva, then 17, in a catalog of prospective brides. She had placed her photo with an overseas matchmaking service after a cousin had entered a happy marriage that way and moved to Florida.
In the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan where she grew up, Solovieva was the top piano student at a musical college in Bishkek, graduating with honors. She spoke three languages and had worked as a travel agent, model, music tutor and translator.
After a brief correspondence, King traveled to Kyrgyzstan to meet Solovieva and her parents. When he invited her to visit the University of Washington, she accepted, living for a month with King's parents. At the end of the visit, she accepted King's proposal, and the two were married in April 1998.
She was 18; he was nearly 37.
Husband files for divorce
Anastasia King later confided to close friends that over time, King grew jealous and controlling. He once took away her passport.
In a safe-deposit box, she kept $2,500 and documents, including a list King had written of 48 traits he said he detested about her, including his limited daily contact with her. Also in the box was a July 2000 e-mail from King to a friend, thanking the person for helping him search for "a good wife," according to a search warrant.
Last August, King was fired from a job at Costco for undisclosed reasons. A month earlier, he was cited by Mountlake Terrace police for shoplifting two bananas and a 12-pack of soda. King told an officer he was in a financial bind because his wife was divorcing him.
In fact, Anastasia King had taken no formal steps toward divorce, but King filed for divorce a month after the shoplifting incident.
King's sister recently described the couple's marriage as harmonious. The two enjoyed working on their house and garden together, Paige King said.
In the 2-½ years she lived in the Seattle area, Anastasia King made friends, held jobs as a hostess at two Seattle restaurants and impressed those she met with her warmth and sense of style. She excelled at business courses at the University of Washington.
"She was an angel," said Patty Swaney, general manager at McCormick's Fish House, where Anastasia King worked. "I tried to talk her into moving in with me."
Swaney was pleased that her friend was traveling home to see her parents last September. She hoped the trip would spell the end of the marriage.
The role of the roommate
After filing for divorce in August, King flew to Kyrgyzstan in September to join his wife toward the end of her visit. He later told police he had hoped to reconcile.
On Sept. 22, the couple returned to Seattle together. Relatives and friends never heard from Anastasia King again.
When her reliable e-mails suddenly stopped, her frantic parents called an English-speaking friend, who contacted police.
King told investigators that he and his wife had fought in Moscow and that he had flown on to the U.S. alone. Detectives later confirmed that both had traveled to Seattle, clearing U.S. Customs within a minute of each other.
A missing-person search yielded nothing until Mountlake Terrace police learned in December that King was making regular visits to the Snohomish County Jail to see a former tenant.
Daniel Larson, 20, had been renting a room for about a year in the Kings' Mountlake Terrace home. In November, he was jailed for allegedly trying to have sex with a 16-year-old Ukrainian girl in an Alderwood Mall restroom.
During a jailhouse interview, Larson told police where Anastasia King's body was buried. He said King had strangled her.
In a later interview with detectives, Larson changed his story, saying he had strangled Anastasia King with a necktie at King's direction, while the 290-pound King lay on his wife's chest. The men were lovers, Larson told police, and Anastasia King had found them out.
After finding the young woman's body on the Tulalip Reservation, authorities arrested King and filed preliminary murder charges against him. They later let a deadline for final charges lapse, indicating they needed more time to make their case.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have filed first-degree-perjury charges against King, alleging he lied in connection with the disappearance of his wife.
In court papers, prosecutors say King had been corresponding with other women from Russia and the Philippines, seeking a new wife soon after he married Anastasia King.
As her parents and friends bury Anastasia King in Lynnwood today, Indle King remains behind bars in lieu of $200,000 cash bail.
"He had a lot of opportunity," said Yanick, the high-school friend. "It's very sad. Everything he's done is sort of down the drain."
Anne Koch can be reached at 206-464-3303 or akoch@seattletimes.com.