A Gothic Romance in Old Virginia

The attractive daughter of a wealthy, distinguished American family graduates magna cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1969 and gets a job in a London art gallery. There she meets and falls in love with a dashing young businessman from Greece. He is a year older than she, and he shares her passion for medieval religious art. In 1975 he follows her to Staunton Hill, her family's ancestral home for more than a century: a replica of a Scottish castle set on thousands of acres of rolling plantation land in southern Virginia.

One summer morning, over the objections of her parents, the young woman puts on a Greek wedding dress and marries her lover at the county courthouse. They soon move into a farmhouse on the estate. Three months later, the bride seems despondent. She is found one afternoon lying on the ground with a fatal gunshot wound in her head. A coroner rules that she has committed suicide, and she is buried in the Staunton Hill graveyard, beneath a headstone that bears the Greek words for Little Flower. Her husband moves to Hoover, Ala., works as a stockbroker, and then returns to Athens in April 1978.

Last week this gothic story turned into a murder case. The victim was Alexandra Bruce Michaelides, 29, daughter of David K.E. Bruce, a career diplomat who served as U.S. Ambassador to Britain, France, West Germany and NATO. Bruce never believed that his daughter, who was known to her family as Sasha, had killed herself. Says an old friend: "David knew there was something odd about it. He was suspicious from the start." Soon after Bruce died last year at the age of 79, his wife Evangeline hired Washington Attorney Downey Rice to investigate Sasha's death. As a result of his labors, a grand jury in Charlotte County, Va., voted to bring an indictment for murder. The defendant: Alexandra's husband Marios, 33. The grand jury also indicted him for bigamy, charging that he had not divorced his first wife before marrying Alexandra, and for the embezzlement of valuable art objects and antiques from the Bruce family.

The indictments, which were handed up more than a month ago, became public only last week, after a reporter came across them in the files of the Charlotte County courthouse. The embezzlement indictment was based on two searches conducted by officials in Jefferson County, Ala. Last May, sheriffs raided the Hoover apartment in which Michaelides had lived, locating thousands of dollars' worth of Bruce family silver. Then in September they went to a Birmingham warehouse and seized valuable paintings, rare books, furniture and antiques that were being crated for shipment to Michaelides in Athens.

Michaelides is expected to be tried in Athens under Greek law. As a Greek national he cannot be extradited to the U.S. Meanwhile, the Virginia dossier on the case is being forwarded from Virginia to Greece. Last week in Athens, Michaelides asked: "What had I to gain by murdering the woman I loved? Inheritance? I refused all rights to it when she died." He did admit, though, that after her death, he accepted presents of $100,000 from each of her two brothers as a "show of sympathy and liking." He maintained that his former wife's death was clearly a suicide and that she had tried to take her life twice before, once as a student when she crashed her car and once before her marriage by swallowing sleeping pills.

After learning of the indictments from the Charlotte County grand jury, Michaelides wrote County Prosecutor Edwin Baker a five-page letter denying any guilt. "When this tragic event took place, I was thoroughly examined," he wrote, "and exonerated of any blame." Michaelides tried to discredit the Bruce family in the letter and blamed them for his own legal problems. He claimed his wife "was a criminally mistreated and unhappy person." He accused her mother of "vicious and dehumanizing" verbal assaults and said her opposition to the marriage demoralized Alexandra. He threatened: "If a more equitable approach to my case is not adopted in the near future, I have no other recourse but to use publicity by furnishing evidence to the newspapers that will destroy the false image of the family or by furnishing evidence and information to the IRS about a multimillion-dollar tax evasion." Michaelides, however, provided no evidence in the letter to support his charges.

Michaelides also maintained in the letter that he is innocent of bigamy. He said that he had obtained a Haitian divorce from his first wife, Mary, a U.S.-born schoolteacher, before marrying Alexandra. (In fact, Michaelides is now living again with Mary and their daughter, who was born after their divorce and named--in a mysterious allusion to both wives--Mary Alexandra.)

Finally, Michaelides insisted in the letter that he embezzled nothing from the Bruces. Said he: "Everything that was found on my hands was either given to me by my wife or her brothers, or it was bought by me from her brothers after her death." (Alexandra's brother David denies this claim in an affidavit, filed in Jefferson County, Ala.)

"I am not planning to live with a stigma I don't deserve," declared Michaelides. "My goal is restoration of my name, and the return of the objects taken from me, and permanent disassociation from the pure maliciousness that prompted the accusations." At Staunton Hill, meanwhile, Sasha's grave is empty. Her body was exhumed late last year for an autopsy, after which her remains were cremated and buried in Maryland near her father's grave. The romantic headstone originally provided by Michaelides has been thrown away.

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