Cold War Secrets
A Vanished Professor, A Suspected Killer, and Hoover’s FBI
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Thomas Riha vanished on March 15, 1969, sparking a mystery that lives on 50 years later. A native of Prague, Czechoslovakia, Riha was a popular teacher at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a handsome man, with thick, graying hair and a wry smile.
After his disappearance, the FBI and the CIA told local law enforcement and university officials that Riha was alive and well and had left Boulder to get away from his wife. But, as Eileen Welsome convincingly argues, Riha was not alive and well at all. A woman named Galya Tannenbaum, she concludes, had murdered him.
Galya—a mother of four, a talented artist, and an FBI informant—allegedly went on to murder two more people in Denver as the trail to find Riha ran cold. Her weapon of choice? Cyanide. Galya was a chameleon, able to deceive businessmen and experienced investigators alike. But she had an Achilles’ heel: she couldn’t spell. She consistently misspelled words, such as “concider” and “extreemly.”
For the first time, Galya’s signature misspellings are linked to documents once thought to be written by Riha and two other murder victims, as Welsome reexamines the facts and evidence of the case. She argues that these misspellings prove that Galya forged the documents and committed other murders. Her conclusion is buttressed by a wealth of additional information from police reports, depositions, and court testimony.
Presenting a compelling cast of characters in an era of intrigue and with astounding attention to detail, Eileen Welsome demonstrates why Galya Tannenbaum’s alleged crimes continue to fascinate—even as her motivations remain mysterious.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Welsome (The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War) sheds light on a forgotten mystery in this uneven true crime narrative. Russian history professor Thomas Riha, a Czech native living in Colorado, may be best known today for having edited a seminal scholarly text, the three-volume Readings in Russian Civilization. In 1968, Riha married Hana Hruskova, a Czech woman, but the relationship was short-lived. In 1969, an oddball character, Galya Tannenbaum, who hoped Riha would marry her, apparently attempted to kill Hana on the night of a faculty party. Hana escaped, but Riha vanished that same night "from his home, his table set for breakfast, and the contents of his briefcase scattered across his desk." The Boulder police took the lead, but behind the scenes both the CIA and FBI investigated, out of concern that Riha was an enemy agent, or possibly the target of a Russian hit squad. Welsome makes a convincing case that Tannenbaum, who was suspected in two other killings, murdered Riha, though conclusive proof is lacking. There's some sloppiness about facts (Malcolm X's murder was not part of the House Select Committee on Assassinations), and some fictionalization that's not identified as such. Those flaws aside, Welsome more than makes the case that the story merits a book-length study.
