Stolen Roses and Crimes of Passion

Valentine's Day is coming up, and International Women's Day, a national holiday in Russia, will follow soon after. Maybe this guy, who was caught stealing 35,000 rubles ($1,040) worth of flowers from a kiosk in southwestern Moscow, was trying to stockpile with these two occasions in mind. He didn't seem to have a very good plan for the heist, it seems. The young fellow, a 19-year-old student, wanted to buy his girlfriend a bouquet of roses for her birthday, city police spokeswoman Marina Molokova told the popular daily Komsomolskaya Pravda. Unfortunately he didn't have the money even for a "crisis" bouquet, KP reported. Instead he smashed in the glass at a flower kiosk outside his girl's apartment building on Bolshaya Cheryomushkinskaya Ulitsa, in the "ecologically clean" area of southwestern Moscow. He grabbed an expensive bouquet off the wall before making the unwise decision to make off with as many flowers as he could carry. It was the greed that doomed him, it would seem, as he left "an entire trail of flowers" on the dirty Moscow snow that the cops used to trace his escape route. The flowers led to his girlfriend's apartment building, which was equipped with video surveillance cameras that captured footage showing which flat the thief disappeared into. He was promptly arrested and now faces up to two years in prison on theft charges. In a more disturbing love-related crime, a Perm region man, Leonid Sharin (first and last names changed), is facing up to 15 years in prison for purportedly beating his wife to death after he discovered that she was cheating with a man she met on the the dating site Loveplanet.ru Leonid loved his wife, Lena, very much, residents in the town of Chusovoi told Komsomolskaya Pravda. But they had marital problems, including difficulties conceiving. He had taken a job in the northern Tyumen region to help make ends meet. On Oct. 23, Leonid was back home and, after a birthday party, he opened up the family laptop to discover that Lena had Loveplanet.ru bookmarked on her web browser. She had registered under the nickname Angel and had been corresponding with a user named Nikas. Leonid discovered seven pages worth of messages, many of them describing the lovers' passionate, illicit encounters, KP reported. He shut the laptop and proceeded to beat his wife repeatedly. The woman died of brain hemorrhaging, Yevgeny Bendovsky, a senior detective with the local Investigative Committee, told KP. Fatal domestic violence often involves alcohol, but neither Leonid nor Lena were inebriated at the time, Bendovsky added. The charge is aggravated manslaughter. The trial began a few days ago.