The last time Natasha s parents saw her was in Los Angeles over Father s Day weekend in 2001. She flew there to join them in sightseeing, shopping and visiting relatives.
A month later, Natasha was found one night lying on the floor of her apartment in Manhattan, with a 12-inch butcher knife in her chest, right through her lung. There were signs of pricking she left in her throat and stomach. She died on the way to the hospital.
For her parents, Natasha s death remains a mystery6. A 5′11″, 155-pound beauty with red curls and green eyes, 21-year-old Natasha had been a model for just 13 months and was really having a good start. "There was no sadness in her," Natasha s mother recalls the trip she last saw her daughter, "She was on top of everything in her life." But months later her father would remember signs that his daughter had been struggling emotionally. "She talked about the shallowness of men being attracted to outward beauty, how they didn t explore the person inside," he says. At the time, he d thought it a reminder of her bigger self at high school when she had been seriously overweight and teased by her peers. The father thought that his daughter had forgotten about the past because she was a pretty model now.
In her bedroom, police found Natasha s diaries. There, she had battled for years, which she hadn t even allowed her parents to know: her fight to keep her weight, her disappointment in meeting men who were interested only in her looks, her endless plans to better herself. And she had strong fear that none of those efforts would ever make her feel safe enough. "People say I m hard on myself but I ve always been hard on myself," she wrote, "What seems trivial to others is very important to me." - important enough for her to die for.
Growing Up
Nothing in Natasha s childhood suggested such a violent end. Her father is an aeronautics executive, and her mother a teacher and former model. Natasha was the youngest in the family, with four brothers. She was a girl of talent. She learned to ski at three and started piano lessons at five. When she was in the third grade, the family moved to France. Natasha loved France. But three years later, they moved back to the U.S. The return was difficult to Natasha. She missed her friends in France and fell behind in school. Unhappy and rebellious, she began gaining weight.
Her parents had hoped she could go on a diet, but it didn t work. By the time she went to high school, Natasha weighed 250 pounds. "Sometimes kids would stare and make comments," remembers Natasha s close friend. Even teachers could be hurtful by saying "You d really be beautiful if you lost 50 pounds."
Then, before the start of her senior year at high school, Natasha suddenly announced plans to get in shape. She wanted a new start. She became crazy about losing weight. Natasha began a strict exercise program and ate a very low 900 calories a day. By the time she graduated, she had lost almost 100 pounds. Suddenly, Natasha was popular.
"Everyone wanted to talk to her," the friend recalls. "Friends who had drifted away became friends again." Natasha seemed happy yet guarded. She always said, "Everyone thinks I m pretty [now], but before they didn t." A girl who wanted to be perfect, Natasha didn t want to be liked just for her pretty looks. But it seemed a fact that being pretty was what people really cared.
A slim girl then, Natasha set another goal - to become an actress. At 19, she applied to a famous Studio in New York City and was accepted as a student. She was very excited about it. And only one year later, she got a part-time job in a big modeling agency. It provided a chance to get noticed - and Natasha did. Soon, this big-eyed model was making $2,000 a day.
Pressure and Hit
But as her career took off, Natasha herself seemed to start sinking. She told friends that the modeling world was shallow. Although she was now a beautiful woman instead of an overweight teen, she still felt that it was always looks, not character, that was important to everyone around her. The people she was meeting often discouraged her, and it was great pressure. But as a model she could do nothing except keeping outward beauty, something superficial yet valued by many people. She worked out at the gym. She ran in Central Park twice a day. And she started taking drugs regularly, although she promised friends she was quitting. Having to lose weight seemed the only thing for her to do. "I had the feeling she wasn t having fun," one of her model friends says.
Then came the failure of her love. Natasha was looking for a boyfriend who would not just love her because she was pretty. She was tired of great attention she got when she walked down the street. About five months before she died, she fell in love with her workout teacher. After weeks of working out together and talking on the phone, he told her he just wanted to be friends. Outward beauty, it seemed, couldn t bring her everything.
