Millionaire boyfriend sought in connection with murder of young Kyiv native
California police announced Aug. 5 that a corpse found in the back of a pickup truck in a Los Angeles neighborhood belongs to Iryna Singerman, a 21-year old Ukrainian citizen.
The autopsy could not determine conclusively the cause of death, according to Lt. Richard Hanna of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office, who said additional tests could take up to three months.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry and the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv were unprepared to comment on the case or say whether they had notified Iryna’s relatives as the Post went to press on Aug. 10.
L.A. police began investigating Singerman’s disappearance on July 26 after being notified that a man had thrown two bags of bloody towels, a baseball bat and documents into a trash bin.
Police found Singerman’s decomposing body in the bed of a truck belonging to her 59-year-old millionaire boyfriend, Brian Joseph Cullen. LAPD detectives found more blood and signs of a struggle when they searched Cullen’s home the next day.
The husband of the victim, 50-year-old Ronald Singerman, claims to have had no knowledge of his wife’s affair.
Singerman said she was a model who would frequently be gone for days at a time, according to LAPD detective Rick Swanston, who said Iryna drove a gold 2005 Mercedes Benz registered to both her and her husband.
According to Barry Greenberg, a lawyer representing the Singerman family, Ronald didn’t know his wife bought the car or “anything about another man.”
In a telephone interview with the Los Angeles Independent newspaper monitored by Greenberg, Singerman said that he met Iryna during his third trip to Ukraine.
“I had met several other ladies, but the minute I saw Iryna I knew. The rest is history. There was something about her, something in her eyes,” he was quoted as saying.
Singerman, an accountant, represents himself on the Internet as a summa cum laude accounting graduate of California State University with an IQ of 148. He attributes his success to his involvement with Scientology, a controversial non-profit religious organization.
From 2002-2003, Singerman meticulously chronicled the progress of his fiancee’s visa application in discussion forums hosted by Internet sites that specialize in introducing English-speaking men to Russian and Ukrainian women.
According to one entry made in Global7Network dated May 21, 2003, the Singermans’ petition was received on Jan. 27, 2003 by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and approved in April 2003 by the U.S. National Visa Center.
In an earlier entry on Russian Women Guide (www.rwguide.com), Singerman expresses gratitude to Michael Muinov, a lawyer specializing in background checks, for vetting his would-be bride.
“Your report gives me confidence in continuing to develop my relationship with I. L.,” he wrote, including his full name, home and work telephone numbers, and company Web site address.
High-profile nightmares
In 1998, 68 Ukrainian citizens were admitted to the United States with permanent resident status after receiving fiance (K1) visas, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which reported a twelve-fold increase by 2002. The agency, incorporated in March 2003 into the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, issued 1,400 K1 visas to Ukrainian citizens in 2004, according to the U.S. yearbook of immigration statistics.
The U.S. Embassy’s Consular Section in Kyiv began conducting interviews for receiving fiance (K1) visas in June 2003, eliminating the need to travel to the U.S. embassy in Warsaw for an interview, the final step in the fiance visa application process.
Iryna Singerman’s bizarre death follows the gruesome murder in October 2003 of Mykolaiv native Alla Chevanov, whose mail-order marriage ended abruptly when her husband slit her throat in a parking lot in New Jersey.
In another high-profile fiasco, Kyiv-native Nataliya Derkach successfully sued an international matchmaking service in Virginia. She contended the service failed to tell her about a provision in the immigration law protecting her from deportation if she left her abusive American husband. The jury also held the marriage agency liable for assuring Derkach that her American husband had been carefully screened.
