A Woman Scorned: The Rita Gluzman Story

The Irony of Life

On April 30, 1997, a little more than a year after the Yakov Gluzman slaying, Rita Gluzman stood before U.S. District Court Judge Barrington D. Parker.

Judge Barrington D. Parker (US District Court)

"I did not do it, and I still say that in front of the world," Rita Gluzman stated.

But Parker was unmoved. A jury, convinced by Zelenin's testimony, had found that Rita Gluzman and her cousin had ambushed her husband as he walked into his Pearl River apartment, that they had hacked his body into 65 pieces, and that they planned to dump his body in the Passaic River so he would vanish completely.

"You were a woman of considerable courage and capacity," Judge Parker began, as he looked down from the bench at the weeping defendant. "For whatever reasons, you allowed yourself to disintegrate around the relationship and the pain that grew out of that relationship."

"None of us can really know what happened between you and your husband," he said. "The only thing we can know with any certainty is that nothing can justify what you did to him."

With that, Parker handed down his sentence. The woman, who, a generation earlier, had been the poster child for the campaign to bring freedom to an entire class of people in the Soviet Union, would spend the rest of her life behind bars in her adopted homeland.

Rita Gluzman in court (AP)

Even now, years later, Rosen gets agitated when he talks about the federal government's last-minute intervention in the Rita Gluzman case. "I've debated this in law schools ever since," he says. "If this case didn't have that Violence Against Women Act, it would never have been tried. There was no physical evidence tying her to this crime. There wasn't one bit of forensics. The only evidence against Rita was her cousin's testimony and because he was an accomplice, his testimony alone would not enable state prosecutors in Rockland County to even indict her."

But the final word on the subject appears to have come from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999, when it refused to hear Rita Gluzman's appeal.