Ballet Director A Murder Suspect

Veniamin “Ben” Kuzmichev is a talented ballet dancer and director, the former protege of a billionaire’s wife, a mysterious and perhaps paranoid Russian emigre, and maybe a killer.

Police say the former artistic director of Ballet Idaho, who fled from what then was the Soviet Union after what he claimed was a KGB attempt to kill him, murdered his wife last September. He was charged on Friday.

The motive for 61-year-old Wanda Cowger Kuzmichev’s slaying is as murky as her husband’s past.

She was living in a trailer park and working as a cleaning woman when she became Kuzmichev’s third wife last May. He was working as a security guard a year after parting ways with ballet officials who questioned his stability despite the patronage of the wife of J.R. Simplot - Idaho’s richest man.

On Sept. 21, Wanda Kuzmichev’s nude body was found dumped across the road from the Simplots’ hilltop mansion. Plastic grocery bags, apparently used to suffocate her, were found tied around her head and feet.

“When I first heard about this I couldn’t believe that this was our Benjamin,” said Alex Kochneff of Twin Falls, who translates Russian at a College of Southern Idaho refugee program and brought Kuzmichev and Esther Simplot together. “Benjamin, to me, was never a violent man.”

But few others are as clear about just what Kuzmichev is.

At 55, he claims to have been a dancer with the Shevchenko Academic Theatre in Kiev for 20 years, and later a ballet teacher and choreographer at the Choreographic College in Kiev. But he never produced any documents to back up his claims, and the only videotape of his work was the one Simplot saw before he was hired as Ballet Idaho’s artistic director in 1991.

“It was obvious that he was very well versed in ballet because he could teach and he could dance and he was very good,” said Betty Sinow, executive director of Ballet Idaho during Kuzmichev’s tenure. “His communications skills were very poor because of the language barrier, but he could get his point across. And Esther Simplot adored him, absolutely adored him.”

A spokesman for Esther Simplot - who came to Ballet Idaho’s rescue in 1990 when it was nearly $200,000 in debt - said she considered Kuzmichev “a capable artistic director during the period he spent there,” but that she had no comment on his arrest.

Kuzmichev had shocked colleagues after arriving at Ballet Idaho with his story about an incident in the Ukraine where, he said, he was kidnapped in the middle of the night by KGB agents, stripped naked and put into a wooden box that was nailed shut and left in a snowy field.

He somehow escaped and requested political asylum in the United States.

“He was in favor of a second party being established in Russia, and that didn’t go over too good with that government at that time,” Kochneff said. “When he came over here, for a long time - over a year - he was looking over his shoulder.”

But while most people gave him the benefit of the doubt before, they became more skeptical in late 1993 after Kuzmichev disappeared from Boise for almost a month amid preparations for a critical Ballet Idaho performance of “The Nutcracker.”

He later said he had been in Mexico and California trying to escape a man who looked like Watergate defendant H.R. Haldeman. The man was armed with a .38-caliber snub-nose revolver and “told him to leave Boise immediately or he and his family would be killed,” according to a police report.

“After his disappearance and some of the stories surrounding it that seemed very, very hard to believe, I think we all took a second look at what really did happen in Russia,” Sinow said. “His credibility seemed to disappear.”

She said it was decided to fire Kuzmichev in early 1994, and that Esther Simplot did not try to save his job. But Kochneff insists that “as far as she was concerned, all was forgiven,” and that Kuzmichev was not fired.

“They just ran out of money and couldn’t use him,” he said.

Annette Elg, president of Ballet Idaho’s board of directors, said Kuzmichev’s departure was “sort of a mutual agreement.”

Some blamed his sudden disappearance from Boise a few months earlier to the August 1993 divorce from his second wife, 29-year-old Valeriya Kvitko.

They remain friends, and Kvitko won’t talk about her ex-husband’s arrest.

“Did you ever think what’s going on in his daughter’s mind? She’s 10 years old and she has every reason to believe that he is a great man,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt her.”