Random Mail-Order Bride Horror Stories (15 items)

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  (#6) Reina Swierski Was Strangled By Her Husband And Dumped In The Santa Cruz Mountains

  In 2008, hikers in Castle Rock State Park in Los Gatos, California came upon a human skull. It took two years until authorities discovered the skull belonged to Reina Swierski, a Filipino mail-order bride who had been married to American man Gary Swierski before going missing in 2005. A year after her skull was identified, Gary's adult daughter confessed she helped her father get rid of Reina's body after he strangled her; his daughter was 19 at the time of Reina's death. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The rest of Reina's remains remain undiscovered, and there is speculation that Gary, who had a long history of abusing Reina and other women, got away with murdering another girlfriend 10 years before Reina.
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  (#9) A Mail-Order Bride Kills Her Husband And Mother-In-Law And Tries To Sell Twins

  Lai Binghao, a Chinese man, married a Vietnamese mail-order bride named Ayou and brought her to his home in the Guangdong province of South China. After the coupled welcomed a pair of twin boys, Lai Binghao's mother moved in to help take care of the babies. A few months later, Ayou and three Vietnamese men bound and strangled her husband and mother-in-law to death; Ayou then fled with the babies only to be caught a short time later. At the time of her arrest, Ayou was attempting to sell the twins for more than $9,000 each.
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  (#4) David Sartin Plotted A Bizarre, Sinister Revenge On His Mail-Order Fiancée

  A Texas man named David Sartin met Kiev-native Elena Barykina on a mail-order bride matchmaking site. He visited her multiple times in her home country, wining and dining her, and spending tens of thousands of dollars on jewelry, gifts, and her singing career. They agreed to wait until marriage for sex, but when Sartin learned she was sleeping with a former boyfriend, he hatched a strange and profoundly evil plan to get back at her. He hired a group of Russian mob figures to kidnap Barykina and ship her to him in a shipping crate. Even more twisted, Sartin planned to keep Barykina trapped in his home while he slowly poisoned her to death. But those Russian mob guys? They turned out to be federal agents. Sartin received a 10-year prison sentence.
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  (#5) Lester Barney Killed Alla Barney In Front Of Their Four-Year-Old

  Alla Barney, a 26-year-old, Ukrainian-born engineer, was the mail-order bride of Lester Barney, a man over 30 years her senior. When the marriage went sour, Alla filed a restraining order against Lester and gained custody of their four-year-old son, Daniel. One afternoon, as she picked up him from daycare and strapping him into his car seat, Lester attacked her with a steak knife. Alla bled to death before Daniel's eyes. Lester's galling attempt to claim the murder as self-defense failed, and he is currently serving life in prison.
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  (#3) A 'Fast Woman' Pulled The Wool Over Dr. Leo Berson

  To show that mail-order bride horror stories exist way before the age of email, take this story from San Francisco, 1886. Dr. Leo Berson procured the services of the San Francisco Matrimonial Bureau to find a wife, which they did: the lovely Kate Grant. Dr. Berson pampered his fiancée with upwards of $1,500, not a small price back in the 19th century. But on the day of the wedding, Miss Grant was AWOL. The Los Angeles Herald, who called Grant a "fast woman," recounted: "By letters found in a satchel left behind, the hitherto happy Doctor discovered that he had courted a woman who had been three times married, and was undivorced. The woman is well known in this city and in Portland, Oregon, where one of her husbands resides."
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  (#12) Mail-Order Bride Pou Was Sold Into And Destroyed By Sexual Slavery

  State department official John R. Miller testified before Congress on human trafficking and revealed that mail-order bride situations can provide a starting point for horrific trafficking nightmares. In one story he recounts, Pou was 17-years-old "when a man came to her village and arranged through her sister to marry her." Not long after the wedding, Pou's new husband sold her to a brothel, where she endured years of abuse. Fortunately, the brothel eventually let her go, but only because sickness and abuse rendered her body undesirable.\

  "Today her body is ravaged by disease," Miller said. "And this woman in her 20s looks decades older than her real age."

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