Viktoria baked her beautician a 'thank you' cheesecake. 20 minutes later, the horror began.

It seemed like a routine beauty appointment between friends, albeit an "emergency" one.

Brooklyn woman Viktoria Nasyrova had a trip to Mexico booked, and she urgently needed her friend and beautician, Olga Tsvyk to fix her eyelashes before she went.

There was one problem: it was Tsvyk's day off.

Surely Nasyrova could find someone else for the appointment?

No, it simply had to be Tsvyk. Nasyrova desperately pleaded with the beautician and eventually turned up at her house with three pieces of cheesecake as a "thank you" gesture for fitting her in.

Tsvyk enjoyed some of the cake. But a mere 20 minutes later, an ill feeling came over her.

She vomited and passed out before Russian-born Nasyrova proceeded to ransack her room, stealing her passport, money and other belongings.

Watch: Viktoria Nasyrova tells CBS News "I'm not a killer". Post continues below.

Tsvyk would soon find out the cheesecake had been laced with Phenazepam, a powerful tranquilliser primarily found in Russia that 47-year-old Nasyrova had acquired in an attempt to kill her lookalike friend, and possibly steal her identity.

Police get involved.

The frightening ordeal in August 2016 left Tsvyk hospitalised for three days.

Her neighbour alerted emergency services to the worrying scene at her Forest Hills home, where Tsvyk was found passed out in bed, wearing only lingerie, with pills strewn all across the room.

For all intents and purposes, it looked like an attempted suicide scene.

Bizarrely, the heater in the room was set to high, in the midst of a New York summer.

The worried neighbour later told police what he'd seen earlier that day: a woman bringing Tsvyk some chicken soup, before cleaning the bowl and rushing off.

NYPD Detective Kevin Rodgers answered the call for help and was immediately suspicious. He managed to recover the cheesecake container, complete with some crumbs, and sent it off for testing.

It was Detective Rodgers who pieced together just how dangerous Nasyrova was.

Viktoria Nasyrova (left) and Olga Tsvyk (right) looked similar and both spoke Russian. Image: Facebook.

After her DNA was found on the container and he discovered Phenazepam had been used, Rodgers also learnt that the drug's effects could be heightened in a hotter environment — hence the strange heating situation at Tsvyk's home that day.

Police eventually tracked down Nasyrova and arrested her on March 20, 2017.

A search of her apartment uncovered Tsvyk's ring, handbags and pieces of identification. While poring over the evidence photos, Rodgers noticed that with their dark hair and similar skin tones, Tsvyk and Nasyrova shared a resemblance, and this could have been a murder attempt to steal an identity.

A dark past.

When Tsvyk returned to work, a client told her a similarly eerie story of another person who had been poisoned just months earlier.

Ruben Borukhov testified in court that Nasyrova, a former dominatrix, drugged him during a date, and he woke to find his watch missing and $2,600 charged on his American Express.

The Queens business owner had matched with her on a Russian dating site, and when they met for dinner, she cooked him a piece of fish. He passed out soon after taking a bite and reported being still out of it two days later.

Nasyrova's dark past in her homeland soon came to light.

She was accused of killing and burning the body of her Russian neighbour, Alla Alekseenko, in 2014, before she fled to the Big Apple.

Alekseenko's daughter, Nadia Ford, also lives in New York and has been relentlessly on the hunt for her mother's killer, whom she strongly believes was Nasyrova.

Nadia Ford and her mother, Alla Alekseenko. Image: Nadia Ford.

Interpol issued a "Red Notice" internationally to track Nasyrova down, but she couldn't be found.

"Viktoria took everything from me. My family, my life, my mom, my everything," Ford told CBS News in 2017.

That year, Ford took matters into her own hands and hired top private investigator Herman Weisberg to find Nasyrova.

A month later, he found her. Amazingly, he'd used her Facebook selfies as clues, looking at the reflections in her mirrored sunglasses to ascertain her car model and even apartment building in Sheepshead Bay, a Russian neighbourhood in Brooklyn. Weisberg's exceptional investigative work led police to Nasyrova.

'She's a dangerous, scary person.'

It took almost six years for Nasyrova to face the Queens Supreme Court.

In February 2023, jurors took a week and a half to find her guilty of what Justice Kenneth Holder called a "diabolical" scheme.

Doctors revealed that Tsvyk had been close to suffering a heart attack after the sinister poisoning attempt. The beautician also spoke of her ongoing trauma, which left her distrustful of people, unable to sleep and terrified that Nasyrova "would come back and finish what she started".

“For her, it was an easy thing to try and take the life of another person," Tsvyk told the court.

Nasyrova's attorney, Jose Nieves, pleaded for leniency. He told the court his client has a young son with a "debilitating disease" who needs a bone marrow transplant.

But at her sentencing in April 2024, Nasyrova did herself no favours, the unrepentant woman yelling "F**k you!" in the judge's direction when her 21-year punishment was handed down.

Queens district attorney Melinda Katz said: "A ruthless and calculating con artist is going to prison for a long time for trying to murder her way to personal profit and gain."

Nasyrova's selfies gave her away. Image: Facebook.

To this day, Tsvyk still lives in fear of her former friend.

"She's a very dangerous person, a scary person," Tsvyk told The New York Post. "She is a manipulator and a liar... she is capable of anything."

"I hope they don't let her out early, lest she come after me."

Speaking from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in 2023, Nasyrova downplayed her "gangster" reputation and maintained she didn't commit the dark crimes she's been accused of.

"I didn't do anything," she told The Post. "I never robbed anyone. I never killed anyone. I never tried to kill anyone. They sentenced me to 21 years for a crime I did not commit."

Nasyrova spoke about her newfound passion for art and t-shirt making, items that she sells from jail.

"I get an enormous amount of pleasure from seeing people's faces when I give them what they ordered from me," she said.

"I had no idea I can draw, but I am good."

But in the same breath, Nasyrova displayed some harsher traits, admitting to her "anger issues" and recounting a time she pummelled another inmate.

"Once I got into a fight, and I was so angry that I kept beating her, and she was covered in blood," Nasyrova said.

"Then I realised that if I don't stop, I am going to seriously maim her. So I stopped."

Still, she denies being what authorities say she is.

"I'm not gangster, I'm not a criminal," she says, adding that she simply demands respect.

In 2024, she appealed the attempted murder conviction. However, the New York Supreme Court found the sentence imposed was not excessive.

When Nasyrova has served her time in New York, she will face deportation and a potential trial in Russia for the murder of Alekseenko.

This article was published in 2023 and has been updated.

Feature image: Facebook.