The Latvian-born blonde accused of sabotaging her fiancé’s kayak before a trip on the Hudson River confessed to detectives, “I wanted him dead and now he’s gone,” according to newly released video of her interrogation.
Angelika Graswald, 35, was charged with murder after her fiancé Vincent Viafore, 46, of Poughkeepsie, drowned in April when his kayak capsized about 50 miles north of New York City.
“All right, I’ll give you a f–king statement,” Graswald tells a detective in the video obtained by CBS’ “48 Hours.”
“What is it?” the detective asks.
“I wanted him dead and now he’s gone,” Graswald responds, adding, “And I’m OK with it.”
The confession came during an 11-hour interrogation. The video shows Graswald sitting with detectives at a wooden table wearing a long dress and a white tanktop.
“Why did you want him to die? How could you best put it,” one detective asks Graswald, according to “48 Hours.”
“I wanted to be free,” she replies.
“And relieved that it happened? That he’s dead,” the detective said.
“Yes,” she answers.
But an interrogation expert told “48 Hours” that Graswald’s confession is troubling because detectives asked her leading questions and manipulated her into giving the answers they wanted.
For example, Graswald told detectives she removed a plug from Viafore’s kayak months earlier, but they kept pressuring her to say that she took it out the day they went kayaking because she wanted to kill him, according to “48 Hours.”
“When did you take it out on Sunday?” the detective asks.
“I didn’t take it out on Sunday. The plug was already out,” Graswald says.
Graswald’s lawyer says the plug is small and on the top of the kayak and has nothing to do with Viafore’s death.
ABC News reported that the interrogation video shows Graswald doing yoga poses while held overnight in the interrogation room.
She also said Viafore’s kinky demands strained their relationship.
“He pushed for everything, he pushed for sex, for sexual stuff,” she told a detective, ABC said.
“He wanted threesomes, four — everything, and I was not ready.”
Orange County prosecutors said in May that Graswald told cops, “It felt good knowing he would die” and said she intentionally pushed Viafore’s paddle away from him as he struggled to stay afloat.
Graswald’s motive was that she felt trapped and would benefit from a $250,000 insurance payout if Viafore died, prosecutors have said.