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What To Know About The Charles Butler Case Before The ‘Final Moments’ Premiere
Why was a Florida salesman brutally murdered while visiting his girlfriend in Brooklyn?
In the aftermath of a gruesome homicide, troubling questions loom large: What preceded the slaying? Did tensions escalate? Did somebody snap? Was it something more inexplicable?
On the new Oxygen series, “Final Moments,” these final moments, whether they were captured on social media, text, or video, are examined to discover if any vital clues reveal answers to these questions. One of the cases featured in the new season, premiering Sunday, April 3 at 7/6c on Oxygen, is the case of Charles Butler.
Butler, 56, was a successful Florida businessman who visited New York on a regular basis to see his daughter, an Upper East Side resident, according to a 2016 release from the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office.
During one of these trips in 2012, Butler met Anna Lioznov and started dating her, with dreams of marriage on the horizon, according to the press release. On September 18, 2012, Butler visited his girlfriend’s apartment in Brooklyn. Lioznov was seen leaving her home at about 7:40 the next morning on surveillance camera footage. A vehicle belonging to her ex-common law husband, Mikhail Chernyaev, who she shared a son with, was caught on tape pulling into the garage four minutes later.
Butler was never seen alive after that, according to wftv.com. On September 19, Butler’s daughter received a text purportedly from him that was in broken English. The same day, Lioznov received a text supposedly from her new boyfriend, telling her that he was returning to Florida and that she should forget about him.
The NYPD categorized Butler’s disappearance as a missing persons case because there was no evidence of foul play, reported Fox News. But then, Butler’s decomposing body was found on October 15, 2012 by a fisherman, court documents show. Investigators eventually learned that Butler, a man looking forward to a new chapter in his life, was stabbed, suffocated ,and strangled.
What was the motive for the murder? Who committed it? What happened at the trial that prompted the victim’s daughter to tell the media, “It gets harder and harder every day to sit through the evidence, listening to it"?
To learn the answers to these questions, watch “Final Moments,” premiering on Sunday, April 3 at 7/6c on Oxygen.
