Court records in teacher killing show a couple at war

Long before teacher Tetyana Nikitina was shot to death Friday, she said she feared for her life.

In fact, according to divorce records filed in 2005, the 34-year-old Ukranian immigrant also said she was terrified her then-husband would kill their two children.

Nikitina was gunned down Friday afternoon as she left the Salt Lake Head Start school where she worked. Police say she was fatally shot by her former mother-in-law, 70-year-old Mary Nance Hanson.

Unified Police executed a search warrant Monday on the Taylorsville home of Nikitina's ex-husband and Hanson's son, Dale Jankowski. Police said they hoped they could piece together the circumstances that led to Nikitina's death.

For his part, Jankowski said in voluminous divorce records filed in 3rd District Court that Nikitina was trying to set him up with false accusations of domestic abuse, and he was deeply afraid that she would flee the United States with their children — which resulted in a battle over the children's passports.

"There is no label for him (such as person of interest)," Unified Police Lt. Don Hutson said. "He is just a relative of the suspect." Hutson said investigators are interested in the relationship Nikitina had with Hanson, who called 911 after the shooting.

Jankowski, who talked for hours with investigators Friday and Monday, said in an interview with KSL that he had worried about his mother's mental health, but has no idea why she would want to kill his ex-wife.

"I had no idea she was going to do anything like this," Jankowski said of his mother, Mary Hanson, to KSL.

"I could see there's something mentally not quite right," he said later, "but they don't know what that is."

Jankowski told KSL he didn't even know his mother owned a gun and that he didn't know if the divorce was his mother's motive.

The marriage between Jankowski and Nikitina appeared to be tumultuous, if their reams of divorce papers are any indication.

Hundreds of pages of court records show a warring couple fighting over the typical issues of child custody and money.

But rage and fear spill from the pages over relatively small things — plastic playground equipment, possession of gold Christian crosses for the children, wooden plates from Russia — to larger issues including she-said-he-said claims of domestic violence, threats and suggestions of child neglect.

The couple married in February 1999.

By February 2005, Nikitina filed for divorce, but the battle was still continuing through December 2009.

The couple got a bifurcated divorce decree on Jan. 6, 2006, on grounds of irreconcilable differences. A bifurcated divorce means the union has been dissolved, but certain legal issues still have to be resolved. Jankowski got their Taylorsville home, and Nikitina got her maiden name back.