Passaic River, New Jersey (AP)

Police Officer Richard Freeman slipped his coffee mug into the cup-holder, adjusted the sun visor on his patrol car and eased his cruiser into the phalanx of warehouses and office buildings clumped along the banks of the Passaic River. It was Easter morning, April 7, 1996.

The sun was bright, the sky was as blue as it gets in the northern part of New Jersey and the day was comfortably warm, pleasant enough for shirt sleeves but not so warm that it would stir up the stink of rotting leaves and oily garbage buried in the river mud.

Halfway through his shift, Freeman was starting to feel like he had made the right call, agreeing to work on Easter. To cops like Freeman, Easter is almost like a day off with pay. It's a day when everybody in the world, it seems, is either in church or at a home with family. Even the lowest of the lowlifes seem to get religion on Easter. The way most cops figure it, the most stressful situation they can usually expect to face is a fender-bender in a church parking lot, and even when that happens on an Easter morning, the people involved tend to be more forgiving and serene than they might otherwise be.

Freeman turned the cruiser onto Madison Street, fully expecting his routine swing through the industrial neighborhood at the edge of East Rutherford to be one of the quietest parts of the quietest days a cop could possibly work.

Then something caught his attention. Right at the river's edge, at the far end of the parking lot behind the offices of ECI Technology company, Freeman spotted two cars both with their trunks open. He pulled to a stop, and watched as a lanky man in a T-shirt, with what appeared from a distance to be a single glove on his right hand, hefted a large black trash bag from the trunk of one of the cars. Then he grabbed another. He made his way to the river's edge and tossed in one of the bags.

It was slowly dawning on Freeman that the day was not going to go as seamlessly as he had hoped.

"This guy just looks like he's up to no good," Freeman said as he grabbed his baton, slipped into his belt ring and stepped out of his cruiser, assuming that he was soon going to find himself wasting a beautiful Easter morning writing out a ticket book full of citations for illegal dumping.

As Freeman eased closer the man froze. Freeman could tell by the expression on the man's face -- a storm front of fear and perhaps even revulsion -- that he had just stumbled onto more than a run-of-the-mill littering case.

The cop studied the silent man for a moment. He was alone, and yet there were two cars there. For the first time, he noticed splotches of brownish red on the man's pants and shoes. The glove Freeman had spotted from a few yards away -- a surgical glove -- was also splattered with what appeared to be blood. Then Freeman noticed the sickly sweet stench, a smell he recognized as drying blood. He looked down at the bag that remained on the ground between the late-model Ford Taurus and the Nissan Maxima.

Inspection of the bag turned up a set of bloody tools; a hacksaw, a pair of axes, knives and a scalpel. In the other bag were clothes, all of them drenched in blood. But that wasn't the worst of it.

In the trunk of the two cars, there were eight other bags. One contained blood-soaked clothing. The others contained the earthly remains of Yakov Gluzman, a 48-year-old millionaire scientist who had spent most of his life trying to find a cure for cancer. His body had been hacked to pieces -- 65 pieces to be precise. In fact, he had been dismembered so thoroughly that even his nose and his lips had been removed.

Yakov Gluzman, victim (AP)

  
Gluzman, a Russian-born microbiologist, who, along with his wife, Rita, had once made international headlines for his principled defiance of -- and his bid to escape from -- the hard-line regime in the former Soviet Union, was about to make headlines again. This time as the victim of murder. The strange and sordid case with its tales of love and betrayal, of phenomenal courage and undisguised greed-- would test the mettle of investigators in two states. Ultimately it would break new ground in federal law, and test the limits of the federal courts to enforce that law.

But all of that was still to come.

At that moment, as Freeman waited with the sullen, silent Russian man with the bloodstained pants, the only thing the cop knew for certain was that his Easter shift had suddenly become a lot less peaceful.