The Khachaturyans' case quickly became a cause celebre for rights groups fighting to pass a law to protect victims of domestic abuse which was shelved by parliament in 2016.
After a long and tangled pre-trial investigation, their trial opens Friday in a Moscow courtroom. The two elder sisters, Krestina and Angelina, will stand trial together. Maria, who was a minor at the time of the killing but indicted after she turned 18, has also been deemed mentally unfit to commit a murder and will be tried separately on a murder charge, according to one of the sisters' lawyers, Aleksey Liptser.
In text conversations obtained from their father's phone and published on Facebook by Liptser, Mikhail Khachaturyan appeared to have threatened to kill them and sexually abuse them and their mother.
"I will beat you up for everything, I will kill you," says one text from April 2018, accusing them of having sexual relations with a male friend. "You are prostitutes and you will die as prostitutes."
The interrogation transcripts also painted a chilling picture of mental, physical and sexual abuse dating at least four years prior to the killing.
"We think that they had no other choice. The father drove the girls to despair, their whole life was a continuous hell. They cannot be compared to healthy, calm and balanced people ... [the] girls developed serious mental illnesses, including abuse syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder. This was confirmed by all examinations in the case," said one of the sisters' lawyers, Aleksey Parshin.
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