John Jefferson
Inset: Lola Karabaeva (Philadelphia Police Department). Background: The house Karabaeva lived and died in (Google Maps).
Mystery and memory swirl prominently in a Pennsylvania criminal investigation after a woman’s body was found covered in plastic and stashed inside a closet of her own home earlier this week.
Lola Karabaeva, 61, was found deceased at her residence on Diplomat Place in the Bustleton neighborhood of Philadelphia on Wednesday, according to the Philadelphia Police Department.
Now, her husband, Vladimir Lushevskiy, 65, stands accused of one count of abuse of a corpse. Additional charges may be in the offing “depending on the outcome of the investigation,” police say. That inquiry is currently being conducted by homicide detectives.
And yet another death may prove to play a significant role in the still unwinding case — a death that occurred some 20 years prior.
In 2004, Evgeniy “Eugene” Lushevskiy, 19, the couple’s son, was on a gap year journey. The Uzbekistan-born traveler went hiking up Mount Baldy in Claremont, California. But he never made it down.
The son was last seen alive on Oct. 31, 2004, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue unit. An “an unseasonably early snowfall came in that night,” the sheriff’s office said in a lengthy write-up of the investigation into his disappearance.
“On Saturday November 6, 2004 Eugene’s backpack was found near the summit of Mt. Baldy,” the sheriff’s office of the initial search narrative reads. “Among the items located in the backpack was Eugene’s video camera. The images on the camera showed portions of his trip to the mountain, night hiking, cooking over a fire and sunrise on the morning of Monday November 1, 2004. Early winter storms hampered the search, but it continued both on the ground and via helicopter over the next couple of weeks with as many as 115 Search and Rescue members on the mountain in a single day.”
Over the next six or so years, the searches continued — but were consistently hampered by inclement weather and the steep slopes of the mountain terrain. Finally, in 2010, human remains were recovered from one “extremely hazardous” canyon area. In April, 2011, the remains were confirmed to belong to the long-missing teenager.
Police believe the years-ago loss of their son may have caused a fatal argument between Karabaeva and her husband, according to law enforcement sources cited by CBS News. Part of this line of thought has to do with the date the woman herself went missing.
Karabaeva last spoke to friends — and was last seen alive — on Oct. 12, which just so happens to be her son’s birthday.
Police say the same friend who phoned in the missing person report said they talked to Karabaeva around 2:30 a.m. that night.
Proof of life was confirmed in surveillance footage obtained by Philadelphia-based ABC affiliate WPVI. In that footage, Karabaeva can be seen driving up to the residence, getting out of her car, and then struggling with the front door for a few minutes.
One neighbor said the woman had just returned from abroad.
“She has been in Europe two weeks, maybe three weeks, I don’t know,” the neighbor said. “I saw just her car.”
Multiple neighbors told the TV station they saw Vladimir Lushevskiy the next day — going in and out of their house and then moving the vehicles that belonged to both him and his wife.
“That’s what was strange,” another neighbor said. “On Saturday, he was moving the cars a lot. Shuffling in and out. In and out.”
Eventually, the woman’s car was found in a nearby church parking lot.
Then came the distressing find — a woman wrapped in some kind of plastic, sealed with duct tape, and taped to a board in a closet.
“The police were here — what I know of — Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” the second neighbor continued. “They went in the house each day, and then they found it yesterday.”
Karabaeva’s cause of death has yet to be determined, police said.
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