Vladimir Suzdalevich is trying to put aside his anxieties about how he will raise his son alone. “She was the most wonderful mother and had so many plans for him. Life will be so difficult for us without her. I worry whether he will go on to achieve all the ambitions that she had for him now I’m alone.”
Suzdalevich is the former husband of pianist Natalia Strelchenko, a child prodigy who was brutally murdered at the pinnacle of her career.
Her marriage to Suzdalevich, a conductor and organist, came to an end many years ago, but they were still close friends and he regularly visited Strelchenko to see their son.
On 31 August last year his world crumbled. Driving home to a small village near Moscow he received a phone call which took his breath away: the night before, Strelchenko had been battered and strangled to death in her own home by her controlling and jealous husband, John Martin.
“I could not breathe and I had to stop the car. I just broke down and began to cry at the side of the road. I was in total shock for quite a while,” Suzdalevich said.
“I had known for some time that her life was difficult and I had been afraid for her, but this I never expected. I never thought that he would go to these lengths and actually murder her. And for what? Because she did not supposedly tidy the house or because she spoke to other men?
“None of it made any sense to me and I felt awful that I hadn’t been able to stop it from happening. She had told me so much of what he had done to her. There had been physical assaults, controlling behaviour where he would not let her meet friends and becoming so aggressive towards her.
“But something always told me that she would be OK because when these things happened she just took them in her stride. They almost didn’t seem to bother her – when he did these things she would go into her own world, shut down almost, and play the piano. I thought she was strong enough to deal with him. I was wrong.”
The day after learning of her death, 43-year-old Suzdalevich travelled to Manchester to comfort his son, the first of many trips to come over the next few months.
Speaking to the Guardian in a hotel on the outskirts of Manchester, an unshaven Suzdalevich is drained and fraught after spending the week at court watching Martin’s trial for murder.
“The trial has been very difficult. It is still all a bit too much to take in. I had visited them in their house not so long ago and it was OK. I mean they had both confided in me about their problems, but never did I expect this.
“The hardest part was when the pathologist described all her injuries. He did not know Natalia like we did and so he was very matter of fact, listing them. I could barely bear to listen, there were so many. She should not have died like that.”
He pauses, his voice breaking, then begins to reminisce about how he first met Strelchenko, describing her as the most beautiful person he had ever known.
They met while studying at the Russian State Conservatoire in St Petersburg. She was 21, he was five years older and in complete awe of her talent and ambition.
“She fascinated me from the first time that we met. She had such bright ideas and, as well as being devoted to playing the piano, she was interested in philosophy and would write poetry. She could also paint.
“She was very talented in many ways and I wanted to be part of her life. She was just so beautiful.”
In 1990s Russia, the conservative culture dictated that the couple would need to marry before they could live together. In spring 1996, Strelchenko, ever the pragmatist, booked them into a register office and told Suzdalevich they were to marry.
He happily agreed and they had a small, romantic wedding with close family and friends. The night of their wedding they walked hand in hand through the streets of St Petersburg and went on to spend their first years of marriage in a studio apartment in Moscow.
Their early years together were idyllic, he said. They lived and played together and a few years later moved to Norway for work and had a son.
“She was so passionate about music but was also such a wonderful mother and wanted our boy to be like her and become a musician. She would play to him for hours and we were so happy. She had many dreams for him.”
Strelchenko would play Chopin, Enrique Granados and her favourite Hungarian composer Franz Liszt endlessly, but she began to feel restless and stifled in the small Norwegian town where they lived. Eventually their marriage broke down and in 2006 the couple went their separate ways.
“She was a person with such drive and ambition – it was something else when you saw her working. She could practise all day and sometimes she could forget to eat because she did not want to interrupt her playing.
“She liked to play difficult things. It was wonderful to hear her music – to see something so beautiful being made. We were all amazed by her.
“She was the centre of my life for 10 years, she liked very much to play the concerts, to be the centre of the party, she loved the life and engaged many people around her to do something in music, inspire people around her. So, when she said she wanted to leave I gave her my blessing.”
Strelchenko moved to Manchester in 2009 and met Martin a year later. The pair embarked on a romantic relationship but Suzdalevich said his initial happiness that she had met someone else soon turned to concern as he became aware of Martin’s volatile and controlling behaviour.
“Natalia was very strong and I believed she could handle herself with him. But even then sometimes I would worry. There were just too many fights and they both did not seem happy and many times I suggested to her that they should finish this. It was bad for her.
“But Natalia was the type of person who liked to help others and I believe she saw John as someone that she could help. She did not want to give up on him.”
The couple married in August 2013, but it was without the blessing of Suzdalevich and her family; only four people attended the wedding, in a Norwegian camping ground.
After the marriage, Strelchenko regularly confided in her ex-husband about how she was being attacked and controlled.
A year before she was murdered, Martin abandoned Strelchenko on a Norwegian roadside in the middle of winter after trying to strangle her in a moving car. “I had to drive three hours to get to her and she was really afraid. I think this is when she started to realise that maybe things would not work with John.
“It was happening too many times and she was in danger. I asked her to leave him and get on with her life. I told her that I did not think this was good.”
Suzdalevich said Strelchenko had been planning to leave Martin and he thought this may have been the catalyst for her murder.
The night before she died Strelchenko sent Suzdalevich a text message. “The text message, I remember it very well, she wrote: ‘We are having bad times in Manchester, I’m looking forward to starting a new semester in Belfort [France] in September.’”
But before Strelchenko could leave, Martin killed her, inflicting multiple injuries on her face and body and strangling her to death.
“I still cannot quite believe how she died but I just hope that people will remember her for her music. She had beautiful small hands which allowed her to play the piano like nobody else,” said Suzdalevich.
“I am glad that she realised her talent before she died. She was the brightest of stars and I feel life will be empty without her.”
