Prosecutors have established that Christopher and Svetlana Garner came to Khabarovsk to attend the funeral of Svetlana's aunt.
Prosecutors said that on September 6, 2006, a conflict flared up between the defendant's wife and her uncle over who would inherit the late aunt's one-room apartment, and that Christopher Garner killed Alexander Kaminsky, 53.
A representative of the local prosecutor's office said Garner's case is being heard with an interpreter, as well as U.S. Embassy and Armed Forces representatives, as he served at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Investigators said the couple called a taxi to take the corpse out of the city to village of Solnechny.
The Garners were detained September 9 in Moscow. Svetlana is a witness in the case.
In December 2006, a popular Russian daily, Izvestia, wrote that it is the first case in modern Russia of a foreign secret service agent being charged with first-degree murder.
The paper said Garner, 29, who served in a counterintelligence unit at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, met his Russian wife Svetlana in South Korea, where he did his military service and where she worked as a "hostess." They eventually married.
Izvestia said the most important thing to the couple was a one-room apartment left to them in the will, worth $30,000.
Gardner faces six to 15 years in prison.
"He is behaving calmly, reading the Bible," Izvestia quoted investigator Sergei Zhigalin as saying then. "Svetlana Gardner has not been charged."
