The prime suspect in the brutal unsolved 2004 murder of Julliard student Sarah Fox has returned to Manhattan, claiming to have new “information” – including a name – that could solve the case, and he’s carrying it around in a sealed envelope for sakekeeping.
Dimitry Sheinman, 47, a former Inwood construction worker and artist who says he’s clairvoyant, said the name came to him in a vision, “in white leters on black background,’’ about two years ago in South Africa, where he has been living for the past several years with his wife and two kids. .
“The name came to me, and the face. This is new information the police don’t know,” Sheinman said yesterday. “It points to an individual.”
He said he keeps a photo of Fox and the mystery man – whom he said he located through a Google internet search.
He said he speaks to Fox, who “wants the killer caught.”
“Obviously, we have communicated and she wants me to catch her killer and do what I’m doing now,” said Sheinman, who was at the Javits Center for Book Expo America yesterday, hawking his new tome about the crime and his life.
“She wants the truth to be revealed.”
Fox, a petite, outgoing 21-year-old New Jersey native, disappeared from her New York apartment during a May 19, 2004 run. Her badly decomposed, nude body was found six days later in a secluded area of Inwood Hill Park. Her body was surrounded with two dozen yellow petals from a nearby tulip tree.
At the time, cops said the killer may have left the flower petals as a message.
Sheinman, a notorious neighborhood hothead, was initially questioned in the case after residents told police he often wandered the park with his dog, a massive Rhodesian Ridgeback, unleashed, sparking many angry confrontations with other dog walkers and runners.
At the time, Sheiman told investigators he had “a vision” of the killer, and also gave details about the crime and crime scene that hadn’t been released publicly – including details that Fox had suffered a broken rib and that a stick had been placed between the victim’s legs.
He was never charged.
Now going by the first name “Victor,” Sheinman – who did time in Rikers in 2007 after being convicted of punching out a local dog walker – said he came back to New York because “it was time.”
“In the envelope here, we have information,” Sheinman said, indicating the sealed noted. “It’s a man’s name, some contact iformation about him, and the contact numbers of other clairvoyants who also had visions of his names. I want to make it public and give the information to the police. I don’t want to accuse anybody…I don’t want to point fingers. Also, I do not want to scare him off. He might throw evidence away.”
Sheinman said he keeps a photograph of Fox under glass on his desk. Recently, he printed out of picture of the name he saw in his vision, and keeps that photo on his desk, as well.
Fox’s mother, Lorraine, and other family members couldn’t be immediately reached about Sheinman’s claims.
Sheinman said he will reach out to cops “in a week or two” if they don’t call him first.
“I would like to meet them in a nice café,” he said. “I don’t want to go to a precinct – it’s horrible.”
Sheinman said he realized he was psychic when he was first questioned by detectives in 2004, for more than 10 hours.
“I consciously didn’t know anything about the murder,” he said. “I started having visions. I had to figure out what was happening to me. I gave two pieces of information. I was in a trance, I was coming in and out of that trance.
“The police asked me back then if the killer would kill again, and an image of a white number two on a black background came to me and I communicated that with them. I said, “maybe he will kill again in two years.’ I don”t know if he did it again or not but logically, I’m afraid.”
He said he was “horrified” when he was accused of Fox’s murder.
I’d been treated like I was the number one suspect and that I was guilty without any proofs or negative contact with woman.
His wife, Jane, claims she, too, is clairvoyant and that she and her husband “went through a lot of stuff being falsely accused.”
Sheinman’s book, three chapters of which he has posted online, recount how – in his vision – he saw Fox’s killer spring from behind the bushes, grab er and “hit her in the ribs to quickly silence her.”
He wrote that she was choked, and that her running clothes were neatly stacked next to her body.
The NYPD had no immediate comment on Sheinman’s claims.