A Woman Scorned: The Rita Gluzman Story

Broken Promise

By late winter, Rita Gluzman was becoming desperate, and some say her behavior had become erratic. She had burned through $90,000 that Yakov Gluzman had given her when he had moved out a year earlier, and yet she had found it impossible to control her cravings for luxuries, large and small. It was a measure of just how desperate she had become, when in January, she was arrested after pocketing some small items at a North Jersey pharmacy and was charged with shoplifting.

Her business was continuing to suffer. The divorce -- bitter to begin with -- was becoming even more acrimonious as the couple traded escalating charges and counter-charges. It's not clear exactly when Rita Gluzman hit on the plan. But by early March, she had apparently made up her mind and was ready to enlist her cousin Zelenin.

If Zelenin was shocked by Rita's plan to do away with her husband, he didn't mention it, certainly not to investigators, and as far as anyone knew, not to Rita Gluzman either. His only stated reservations, according to the confession he gave to authorities, seemed to involve his job. He fretted about what might happen to ECI Technology if its vice president and occasional benefactor Yakov Gluzman suddenly vanished.

But Rita Gluzman had an answer for that. She put it this way, Zelenin told his interrogators: "There would be no company and nobody would have work," once Yakov and Rita Gluzman's divorce was final.

Her plan was as simple as it was brutal.

In the months leading up to Easter, Rita Gluzman managed to get a key to her estranged husband's apartment. She had persuaded him to give it to her during one of those lulls in combat and had copied it. She knew her ex-husband's schedule, and knew that he often spent Saturday evening at the lab, and generally got home at about 11:30 p.m.

Zelenin, she knew, had an axe that he kept in his home. She managed to get her hands on one too, and packed the other tools they'd need: a hacksaw, a scalpel, a knife, and lots and lots of cleaning products.

On the night of April 6, 1994, a few hours before Yakov Gluzman was scheduled to return home, Rita Gluzman and Zelenin drove north from Bergen County in a late-model Ford Taurus that had been registered to ECI Technology. There wasn't much chatter as they drove across the New York state line, headed down the Palisades Parkway and pulled off onto the Pearl River exit.

They parked in a shadowy spot some distance from the front door of Yakov Gluzman's apartment, and as Zelenin toted the tools, Rita fumbled with the key. They stood in silence in the living room, and they waited.

Yakov Gluzman was nothing if not punctual. And, right on schedule, at 11:30 p.m. he eased his Nissan Maxima into his parking spot, turned off the engine and bounded up the brick steps to his apartment.

Zelinin struck the first blow, he told the investigators. In the darkness he couldn't tell precisely where he hit Gluzman, but the 48-year-old scientist crumpled to the floor. Then Rita Gluzman swung into action, hacking the groaning man with such pent-up rage and vicious force that at one point her axe slipped and struck Zelenin on the right hand. It wasn't a serious wound, but it bled, and bled profusely. Still, Rita Gluzman insisted that they had no time to spare and would deal with Zelenin's wound later.

Taking the knife from the bag, she plunged it into her ex-husband's chest, just to make sure. Then Zelenin told investigators, they dragged his bloody corpse into the bathroom, where they hacked the body to bits. Rita, Zelenin told authorities, was so adamant that there be no piece of the man large enough to be identified, that they cut off his fingertips to prevent fingerprint identification and even removed his nose and lips so no one who might find the body would ever recognize it.

As Zelenin continued the ghoulish task of butchering the body, Rita Gluzman went into a cleaning frenzy, trying to make sure that there would be no evidence of the crime. In a measure of how manic she was, Zelenin made the mistake of lighting a cigarette, and the instant that Rita Gluzman caught a whiff of the smoke, she flew into a rage. "No smoking in here!" she hissed. The irony of that was not lost on the detectives who listened to Zelenin's tale. Murder and dismemberment were acceptable, but not smoking.

It's hard to imagine that such violence could go on within the paper-thin walls of a garden apartment without the neighbors noticing. But as detectives from the Rockland County District Attorney's Office would soon learn, that was precisely the case. Only one neighbor, Kathy Armstrong who lived a floor below Gluzman heard anything at all, some thumping and banging at about 3 a.m. on Easter, and she thought nothing of it. "I thought they were moving furniture," she told investigators.

What they were actually moving was what remained of Gluzman. His body parts and bloody clothing had been stuffed into nine black plastic garbage bags. The tools they had used to dismember him were stuffed into another. Then the bags were loaded into the trunks of the two cars. According to the plan, they would drive the 30 miles to ECI's East Rutherford office in the two cars, Zelenin in the Taurus, Rita in the Maxima. Then Zelenin would drive Rita Gluzman back home in her dead husband's Nissan, leaving the Taurus in the parking lot of ECI where it belonged. He would then return to East Rutherford, dump Gluzman's remains in the Passaic River and then dispose of the car before sunrise.

But now there was a hitch. They were off schedule.

While loading one of the cars, Zelenin, it seemed, had accidentally triggered its theft alarm. It was only a brief wail in the night and if anyone in the apartment complex heard the alarm, they didn't bother to investigate. All the same, Rita Gluzman panicked, hopped into the Taurus and ordered Zelenin to speed away. He cruised the neighborhood for some time before they ventured back to the apartment complex, realized the coast was clear and resumed their grim work. What's more, it had taken longer to dismember Yakov Gluzman and to clean his apartment than Rita Gluzman had originally estimated. The schedule was also thrown off by the fact that they had to do something about the wound on Zelenin's hand. As they made their way south, Zelenin and the widow Gluzman stopped at a CVS pharmacy in the town of Fair Lawn and, as a surveillance camera recorded the moment, she bought $32.02 worth of bandages.

The sun was already up and people were rousing themselves for Easter services when Gluzman finally reached her Peachtree Street home. And by the time Zelenin made it to the riverfront parking lot at ECI Technology, Officer Richard Freeman was well into his Easter morning shift, a shift that up until the moment Freeman pulled onto Madison Street had been delightfully quiet.