He’s the prime suspect in her murder, the man cops still believe is responsible for the 2004 death of 21-year-old Sarah Fox.
But Dimitry Sheinman says they have it all wrong.
Fox loves him and tells him as much from the grave — and from an eerie photo of her he keeps under glass in his home in Cape Town, South Africa.
“She is angry,” Sheinman told The Post in an exclusive and bizarre interview last week, only days before the May 19 anniversary of Fox’s disappearance while jogging in Inwood Hill Park in 2004. The 21-year-old Juilliard student’s strangled, naked body was found six days later, ritualistically posed and surrounded by two dozen yellow tulip petals. At the time, a homicide expert suggested the killer was “psychopathic.”
Investigators turned their attention to the Moscow-born Sheinman after residents told them of the eccentric hothead who patrolled the park with his unleashed Rhodesian ridgeback — sparking angry face-offs with other parkgoers.
He became the “No. 1 suspect” in the case, former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said at the time, after telling investigators that he had a vision of the killer and providing details that were never released publicly — that a stick had been placed between the dead woman’s legs and that she had suffered a broken rib.
But he was never charged with a crime, as no physical evidence linked him to the killing.
I was reborn. I wouldn’t change a thing. The things that happened opened me up to a spiritual existence.
- Dimitry Sheinman
Investigators still believe Sheinman, 49, is the culprit.
“I think it’s him. There’s no real doubt that it’s him, but we haven’t proved it yet,” said a law-enforcement source close to the investigation, now in the hands of the Manhattan DA’s Office and the NYPD’s Cold Case Squad.
A decade later, Fox is not far from Sheinman’s mind — or sight — as he lives in comfort with his architect wife, Jane, and two daughters in a two-story Victorian in an old-money suburb on the slopes above Cape Town.
In his home is a room with a massage table and a cluttered desk covered with candles and animal figurines — where the picture of Fox, with her piercing blue eyes and delicate features — looks up from under the glass tabletop.
“This is Sarah Fox here,” he says, pointing to the sad, faded photograph. “You know when people ask, ‘Does she communicate with you?’ Of course she does! Who else would she communicate with?”
Sheinman then says he’s going to show The Post “the real killer.”
“Let me show you the bastard now — I’m sorry, Sarah — you see, Sarah wants this guy’s blood, but the tension energizes the table. She just f–king wants his blood, man.
“Sometimes I walk by and she winks at me, you know. And she knows: ‘I know exactly what you’re doing, and I love you.’
“Right now she just looked at me and made a bunch of faces. She knows what’s going on. I can’t speak for her, but she knows exactly what’s going on.”
In the opposite corner of the room, beneath a pile of rocks, are three folded photographs of a man Sheinman told cops about in 2012 after he says he had a new vision about the killing.
“He’s very scared. He’s scared of me. I’ve never communicated with him directly but . . . he’s a disgusting, revolting man,” Sheinman says. “Do I like him? Not much. He’s a f–king a–hole. So he goes back under this rock.”
But this latest vision — which coincided with a trip to New York City to promote a still-unfinished book — contained information already in media accounts. Investigators dismissed the suspect he offered, since it was someone they had already interviewed and ruled out.
Since moving from Inwood to his wife’s native South Africa in 2006 — after spending 59 days on Rikers for assault a year earlier after punching a dog-walker — Sheinman has been working as a “psychic healer.”
“I don’t do anything because I’m nice. I’m not nice,” Sheinman says. “I see healing as a selfish activity because it makes me feel good. I have no choice but to heal. It is what’s been chosen for me. I have no choice but to heal; otherwise I’d probably have to hurt people.”
Sheinman says he was transformed after Fox’s death.
“I don’t regret what’s happened to me, these crazy events, all this injustice — it made me happen. I was reborn,” says Sheinman, who sports a beard and graying mop top. “I hate what is evil in you. I hate it! And I hate what is evil in me. Just as I love what is good in you. I love what is good in me. Anger is impotent. But the hatred of evil is potent.
“I wouldn’t change a thing,” he continues. “The things that happened opened me up to a spiritual existence — not sitting cross-legged on some mountain outside the community, but looking around myself honestly and acting according to the situation.
“My life is painful. I feel the pain of other people. But there is no greater joy than helping people. The joy of victory.”
Sheinman, who in New York worked as a construction worker, claims he died shortly after Sarah Fox did. “I was a dude, just a guy living in New York — an artist, getting wasted sometimes, partying too much — and then all these things happened.”
He claims to have experienced clairvoyant visions before but always treated them as a bit of a joke.
Sometimes I walk by and [the picture] winks at me. And she knows: ‘I know exactly what you’re doing, and I love you.’
- Dimitry Sheinman
“We’d catch cabs and he’d start telling the drivers all these details about their lives,” says wife Jane. “That sort of thing.”
While being questioned at the 34th Precinct station house in 2004, Sheinman recalls he “fell into a trance” and saw the entire crime unfold before his eyes.
“At first I couldn’t understand. I was confused. I was trying to help the police with their investigations, and then they began treating me as a suspect. I used to believe in the police, and in the state, but this showed me how useless everything was. The whole investigation was a f–king mess.
“They never even charged me. They needed a scapegoat for the media, to cover up for their failure . . . and so for a time I was angry but mainly just confused.
“Suddenly I was involved in this crazy thing . . . But later came a period of opening up to clairvoyance. I made a choice — at the time it felt like a choice, but now I understand I had no choice — to open up to this spiritual existence.”
Sheinman claims to have built up a prosperous business, treating about 300 people, including a man suffering from a repetitive-strain injury that he says he “cured” by working on “mental blocks” the man had.
“He goes walking in town, or in the park, and he just treats people,” his wife says. “When you’re able to just walk up to someone and tell them something about themselves, they’re usually incredibly receptive. People are blown away.”
He says treatment can be as simple as hovering his palms above an injured body part. Sheinman demonstrates on his youngest daughter, who has a scar above her knee. He crouches down, as if lifting something invisible between his forefinger and thumb, and inserts it into her leg.
“Sometimes I do acupressure,” he says, thumbing a spot on her calf. “I see where to press — it’s like the points just light up. A few years ago a specialist watched me working and said, ‘Man, you’re getting all the right places.’ I don’t know how it works.
“I have more healing abilities every day . . . because I did something that everybody in this world is scared to do: I opened myself up completely to the truth.”
He has started his own religion, too, even claiming a handful of adherents. The movement, which he details on a Web site called Thepowerthepowerthepower.com, rejects any system based on belief as a lie. “I’m called The One in this religion — there are legends about me, my enemies have legends about me — I’m supposed to be The One every minute. I’m supposed to be honest,” he explains.
“The One is basically somebody who has Christ-like energy in this world right now. Christ-like energy is uncompromising human leadership. That’s it. And I have to be like that every second.
“I don’t really care about Dimitry . . . I am here to serve The Power. But if The Power asks me to do something immoral, I’m supposed to say, ‘F–k you.’ That’s the power of The Power. This is it. This is real spirituality.”
Jane Sheinman says it was her family that has been upended by the case.
“They’ve treated us so terribly. The impact on our family has just been . . . and for the girls!” she said, adding that her hope is that her daughters, 8 and 11, lead “normal lives.”
“Despite everything that’s happened to us, all the intrusion, we’re still open,” Jane says.
Squeezing a reporter’s hand, Sheinman adds, “Yes. We have nothing to hide.”
Additional reporting by Jamie Schram