Editor’s Note: We admit this story is neither environmental nor political, but it’s such a good read we wanted to share it.
By Meagan Flynn inThe Washington Post
The body was found in the bushes along a dirt road in a rural town in Moldova on the morning of Oct. 1, 2011, and within a matter of hours, Irina Vorotinov’s phone was ringing halfway across the world.
From her home in Maple Grove, Minnesota, she shared the dreadful news with her two grown sons: The body belonged to their father, Igor Vorotinov.
The circumstances were strange. The well-dressed dead man didn’t appear to be beaten or shot, at least as far as the one investigating police officer could tell, but his body was already decomposing. Enlisting the help of his son, the police officer promptly brought the body to a state morgue, an old dilapidated building without refrigeration or air conditioning, whose single green door was reachable only by a dirt path. There, the medical examiner determined that the man found in the bushes had died of a heart attack. He was carrying Igor Vorotinov’s passport, among other identifying documents.
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Irina Vorotinov hopped on a plane. She arrived in the village of Cojusna and, accompanied by a U.S. Embassy representative, traveled to the morgue to confirm that the dead man really was Igor Vorotinov, her ex-husband. She told authorities it was, electing to cremate his remains in Ukraine before returning home with the ashes in an urn.
On Nov. 4, 2011, she arranged his funeral at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, attended “widely” by the local Russian community who knew Igor well, according to federal prosecutors.
But before long, Igor’s oldest son, Alkon, was about to discover a $2 million secret.
