At first it looked like Russian emigre Eugene Perchikov committed the perfect murder, twice. Right out of an old school playbook, Perchikov would, allegedly, seduce women into getting multiple life insurance policies with him as the beneficiary and then kill them using a poison, norepinephrine, that wouldn't show up in tissue tests (he had medical training). It worked as planned, until a pesky lawyer for the estate of his first victim, Larysa Vasserman, noticed that Perchikov's playbook was actually cribbed from a story he had written himself in a self-published volume under the penname Eugene Pepperou.
At which point Perchikov was also tied to the similar death two years later of Tatiana Korkhova. Perchikov never collected the money from the latter (and only got one of the three policies he took out on Vasserman), instead fleeing the country. After a three-year manhunt he was finally caught in Israel last year.
And now, though he was fighting extradition, Perchikov appears to have killed himself in prison. Reportedly his medical training even came back into play—his cuts were reportedly carefully placed so as to be fatal.
The moral of the story? If you've written a story about how you'd commit a murder and then decide you want to kill someone? Don't use the method you wrote about. And certainly don't use it twice. Also? Be careful with those life insurance polices!
