Olga Stalmachenok was found, ultimately, not by militsionery or their dogs, nor in the Daryevsky woods, but by a tractor driver at the Sixth Collective Farm, on the northeastern outskirts of Novoshakhtinsk, three miles from the music conservatory. It was April 14, and the driver was plowing a rolling cornfield for spring planting when he noticed that his blades had turned up something small and pale in the wet, black earth.
Viktor Burakov had returned to Rostov that week, and was working at his desk in the Greek Temple. The Novoshakhtinsk militsia called him as soon as they got the call from the Sixth Collective Farm, and he rushed north.
In Novoshakhtinsk, riding past the conservatory toward the Sixth Collective Farm, Burakov was struck by the distance the killer had traveled with his victim. If the killer had taken the most direct route from the conservatory to the cornfield, he had covered a couple of miles on Lenin Street, until the countryside began to impinge on the city and weedy fields supplanted the bare, muddy plots of land around the apartment blocks. Then he had turned right, off Lenin Street, and gone through a couple of vacant lots that were bisected by tractor paths. From the vacant lots, he had moved onto a dirt road that ran alongside the cornfield where the body had been found. He had traveled about a quarter mile up this lonely, rutted road on a chilly, damp night. Then, near some pylons that supported heavy electrical lines, he had gone left, through a few yards of woodland that screened the road from the field. Then he had walked perhaps one hundred and fifty yards through the mud to a spot near the crest of a hill, with a view to the east of the farm buildings and to the north of a coal elevator, each perhaps half a mile away. And there he had left the body. By the time Burakov had reached the scene, his shoes were thick with mud.
Burakov had seen hundreds of corpses during his eleven years as a militsioner, but he had rarely seen the corpse of a young girl, and he had never seen one with wounds like those visible on the remains of Olga Stalmachenok. The winter snows had preserved much of what had decomposed on the other bodies.
She was, Hke the others, naked. Her skin was a bluish white, tinged with the blackened remains of blood and spotted and streaked by the dark, damp earth. Her skull, chest, and abdomen had been punctured and shredded dozens of times by a sharp, single-bladed knife. The killer had, at some point in his evident frenzy, ripped open her chest and slashed away at her heart and lungs. The remains of her heart lay in the right side of her chest cavity, and the remains of a lung had been pushed to where her heart should have been. The killer had struck repeatedly around her sexual organs, chopping away at the girl's perineum. More startling, he had completely excised her lower bowel and her uterus. Burakov forced himself to examine the skull. The eyeballs themselves were gone, lost to decomposition. But he could see striations in the eye sockets.
And with that he knew, beyond doubt, that he was looking at the work of a serial killer.
Burakov generally had one of two private reactions to the corpses he encountered in his work. He saw most of them as professional chaUenges, and he craved challenges. Though he would not admit this to most people, working on a murder case often exhilarated him in a quiet, controlled way. It improved his moods, heightened his awareness, put a purpose in his step when he walked to the office in the morning. Sometimes, though, the sight of a corpse reminded him of someone he knew, perhaps a member of his family, and it would sadden and depress him. This time he felt both reactions welling within himself. The girl could have been a classmate of his younger son, Maksim.
The plowman who had uncovered the body had also uncovered evidence that removed any doubt about its identity. Some fifty yards away, he had turned over some slippers, the kind Russian children wore in school during the winter, a dress, and a music notebook with Olga Stalmachenok's name in it. The murderer had, apparendy, stopped and buried them on his way out of the cornfield.
Russian law enforcement had little experience with serial killers. The knowledge that did exist tended to be a tightly held secret, inaccessible even to other militsionery. Burakov knew of one other series of bestial murders, near Zaporozhe in Ukraine. They resembled these killings in one respect—the Ukrainian killer had also cut open his victims and slashed at their sexual organs. But that killer had claimed a total of four victims in thirteen years, between 1964 and 1977. Then his activity inexplicably ended. This new killer, if in fact it was not the Ukrainian killer, had taken five within six months.
He had left little or no useful evidence at the scenes of any of his murders. He had lured two normal young girls from places filled with people to isolated spots where he had killed them. More curious still, he had done so without attracting any attention from passersby. Presumably, he had managed something similar with the three unidentified victims. How had he done it? Burakov could only speculate. He might be a man of great charm. He might be a man with an appearance of authority, perhaps with a uniform. Perhaps a militsioner.
Most likely, Burakov thought, the killer had a car, either his own or a car belonging to a state agency. A car would enable him to take Olga Stalmachenok all or part of the three miles from the music conservatory to the cornfield at the Sixth Collective Farm. It could have taken him to Donskoi, to Shakhty, and to Kazachi Lagerya.
And, clearly, his superficial charm or authority hid a deranged personality. Burakov had no psychiatric training, and he did not know the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath. But common sense, combined with the wounds inflicted on Olga Stalmachenok, told him that the killer had a serious psychiatric disorder.
The investigators needed to check, then, the whereabouts on December 11 of all the men in the area ever charged with or convicted of rape or molestation, ever confined in a psychiatric hospital, or even treated by a psychiatrist. They needed to recheck all the men who lived or worked around the conservatory. They needed to pay special attention to anyone in those categories who owned a car. It would be, Burakov knew, a long and tedious process, a process that could take much longer than the intervals between the first five murders—unless they got lucky.
Sifting through the first Novoshakhtinsk field reports a short time later, Burakov saw one that intrigued him. In the neighborhood near the music conservatory, the investigators had turned up some interesting gossip about a man named Vladimir Babakov, a man who owned a white sedan.
Babakov was seventy-two years old, though he looked younger. The syshchiki had talked with his relatives. His sister told them that throughout his life, her brother had suffered from what she called "a sexual problem." He could never get enough women. Though officially single, he lived with a woman thirty-five years old. He had affairs with numerous other younger women. Most intriguing, the neighborhood gossip suggested that his interests extended to young girls. He had a garage for his car. The gossip had it that Babakov liked to invite girls eight, nine, and ten years old into the garage and there induce them to strip and let him touch their genitals. None of the gossip, though, suggested an inclination to violence.
Burakov and the syshchiki in Novoshakhtinsk agreed that Babakov merited further investigation. But the more they investigated, the more contradictory the evidence became. The gossip, in most cases, checked out. He had had sexual relations with dozens of women in Novoshakhtinsk in addition to the one he was living with. But the worst any of them could say about him was that he was excessively tender. The old man loved women's bodies, loved to kiss them, loved to caress them—to a degree that some, though by no means all, of his lovers, used to more perfunctory, pragmatic masculine attention, found hard to take. Most of his women remembered him fondly. There were, apparently, a few instances of untoward attention to girls in his garage. But again, as the gossip had suggested, there had been no violence. And no one could find any evidence that he knew Olga Stalmachenok.
Moreover, Babakov had an alibi for the night of December 11. He had been at home, he insisted, and his car had stayed in the garage all night. His lover and his neighbors all confirmed his story. The syshchiki removed the seat covers
from the car and sent them off to the laboratory in Rostov to be examined for any fibers, hairs, or other traces of the dead girl.
In the meantime, they decided, they had no choice but to intensify their search for the writer of the Black Cat postcard. In theory, it was possible to obtain a handwriting specimen from each of the more than three million residents of Rostov oblast. Each Soviet citizen had a legal obligation to work; each would therefore have to have filled out documents kept in the personnel files of a Rostov workplace. But there were millions of files and thousands of workplaces. Fetisov called in handwriting specialists from all the surrounding militsia departments and set them to work; others were assigned by the KGB. But he and Burakov knew that this job, like the job of checking out all the region's psychiatric patients, could take years before it would yield a clue.
The killer gave them four months. On August 8, a group of boys was walking through a lesopolosa near the airport at Rostov-on-Don, on their way to a soccer field. Like the woodland in Donskoi where Lyubov Biryuk died, this one was crossed by several footpaths and was within earshot of a road. In fact, it was near a major highway intersection and the railroad line that ran from Rostov north through Shakhty and eventually to Moscow. A few hundred yards to the north was a village where about a dozen families lived. It had rained heavily in the preceding days, and the boys' path carried them near a small gully that had just dried out. At the bottom, half covered with dirt and leaves, they saw some bones.
Viktor Burakov joined the team that went to investigate, by this time knowing all too well what to expect. A Soviet crime scene investigation involved more than half a dozen people. The local militsionery who responded to the first call stayed on the scene. One or two forensic experts, depending on the gravity of the crime, would join them. In cases involving a body, a medical examiner from the forensic lab at the Rostov Institute of Medicine might go to the scene. So would one or more syshchiki, like Burakov.
Finally, the procurator's office, the rough equivalent of an American district attorney's office, would send a lawyer-investigator, known as a sledovatyel, to supervise the examination and write the protocol of what the team found. Like many other branches of the Soviet system, law enforcement had overlapping bureaucracies. The militsia patrolled the streets and had the responsibility for apprehending criminals. The procurators had the responsibility for supervising cases and questioning suspects after they were brought in by the militsia. On paper, the division of labor looked neat enough. In practice, it was blurred. The militsia had to plan investigations and question suspects in order to apprehend criminals. On a routine basis, it did. But on a case that was not routine, there were lots of opportunities for the two agencies to get in each other's way. The system worked only when the procurator's office and the militsia cooperated.
If it went by the book, a crime scene examination started a fair distance away from the corpse, and the investigators worked inward in ever tighter circles, looking for pieces of evidence, such as the victim's or the killer's clothing. In woods like the strip this body was in, they picked up lots of unrelated garbage—scraps of cloth, pieces of paper, bottles—that people had tossed away as they traveled through. Frequently, the investigators found it difficult or impossible to tell what was related to a crime and what was not. In this case, they found a great deal of trash, but nothing they could determine for certain had belonged to either the victim or the killer.
The corpse itself was little more than a skeleton. The summer heat and heavy rains had, Burakov knew, accelerated the decomposition process. The body could have been in the woods for two weeks or a month. It appeared to be a girl, but the Rostov militsia had no missing-persons reports that matched its size. The medical examiner took it in for further analysis.
A few days later the report came back, and it linked the body to the lesopolosa killings. Like those of the others, this victim's eye sockets showed signs of knife wounds. The medical examiner noticed something else. The victim’s face and teeth showed the assymetries of Down's syndrome. Whoever he or she was, the victim had apparently been severely retarded.
Most Down's syndrome children, Burakov knew, attended special boarding schools, called intemati. In Soviet society, even more so than in the West, few parents felt capable of coping with the special needs of a Down's syndrome child, and the public schools had no facilities to educate them alongside normal children. Burakov directed the local militsia to check out all the intemati in the region.
Early in September, he got the response he was looking for. A thirteen-year-old girl named Irina Dunenkova had failed to return to an intemat in Shakhty when classes had resumed on September 1. He sent pictures and dental records of the missing girl, along with pictures of the skull and the teeth, to the Ministry of Interior's laboratory in Moscow. The reply came back very quickly. The body in the woods had been Irina Dunenkova.
She had lived, ostensibly, with a sister in Shakhty. But the family hardly functioned. Irina's sister, Burakov learned, suffered from a milder form of mental retardation and lived on state welfare assistance. She slept, or had sex with, numerous men, who picked her up in stations, in stores, or on the street. A third sister was serving time in jail for violating the statute against spreading venereal disease. Irina, helpless and unsupervised, wandered around the oblast during her vacations from the intemat, riding the trains and buses. The sister she was living with had not bothered to report her missing.
Only her killer, it seemed, had paid any attention to her. She was the sixth victim in the series.
But at the time her body was identified, Burakov and the other investigators already had a seventh corpse to wonder about. A man disposing of rubbish in a village called Ordzhonikidze, not far from Rostov's airport, found this one on August 28. He had walked from the village, past a wooden kiosk that dispensed beer in the summer, down a clay road toward a thicket. There, in a shallow pit near some brambles, he found the corpse, face up in the dirt. Most of its flesh had decomposed, except for a few patches on the back and legs. After examining the bones, the medical examiner found evidence of nine knife wounds in the chest and two cuts in the left eye socket. The site was about two miles from the wooded strip where the killer had left Irina Dunenkova's body.
But this skeleton was that of a boy. Its size matched the missing-persons report filed August 9 for Igor Gudkov, an eight-year-old from the suburb of Bataisk, across the Don from Rostov.
Burakov, in Novoshakhtinsk when the corpse was found, got involved in the investigation only after the same kind of skull analysis practiced on Dunenkova had confirmed the identity of the remains. The Gudkov family's story reminded him of what he had heard from Natalia Stalmachenok. Igor, off' from school for summer vacation, spent his days under the supervision of his grandmother. Occasionally, at lunchtime, he liked to visit his mother, who worked in a store on Engels Street in Rostov. On August 9, the boy had gotten on an express bus from Bataisk to the center of Rostov, a block from the store where Igor's mother worked. He never arrived at the store.
The discovery of Gudkov's body, the second child's body found in the Rostov area in August, prompted the procurator's office and the militsia to appoint a new and larger special investigation group—^with sixteen members, headquartered in Rostov, under the command of a sledovatyel named Aleksandr Ryabko and a syshchik named Valery Beklemishchev. And it forced the investigators to reexamine all their theories. In several respects, the facts of the Gudkov case matched those of the previous killings. The victim had used or been near mass transportation. He had suffered multiple knife wounds, including wounds to the eyes. The killer had left the corpse in a woodland.
On the other hand, could the same killer take both boys and girls as his victims? To Burakov's knowledge, scant though it was, serial killers always killed males or females, never both. Could there be two killers, both using knives, both sadists, at large in the oblast?
Before Burakov could answer the question, it became moot. In mid-September, while working aga
in in Novoshakhtinsk, he was called back to Rostov. Valery Beklemishchev, the co-commander of the new special investigation group, had cracked the case. A young man named Yuri Kalenik had confessed to all the killings.
3
THE CONFESSIONS OF YURI KALENIK
The suspect that Valery Beklemishchev had cracked was a slightly built young man with frizzy brown hair, a missing front tooth, and a wispy mustache. Yuri Kalenik looked, in fact, almost elfin. From the age of twelve, he had lived in an intemat for retarded children in the town of Gukovo, about eighty miles north of Rostov. In 1981, when he was seventeen and nearing the age limit for intemat residents, he sent a letter to Molot, the Party newspaper in Rostov, declaring that he wanted more education than the rudimentary crafts taught at the intemat. The state accepted his petition to be deemed trainable and sent him to Vocational-Technical School No. 45 in Gukovo, where he became a floor layer; in the summer of 1983 he began to practice that trade. But Kalenik still spent much of his spare time with his friends among the older boys at the intemat. They were the only friends he had.
Early in September 1983, one of those friends, Valery Shaburov, suggested to Kalenik that they take a trip on the elektrichka. The elektrichka rumbles slowly between Gukovo and Rostov four or five times a day. It is the lowest class of Russian rail service, a train that stops at every village along the tracks and takes, if there are no delays, four or five hours to make its one-hundred-twenty-mile run. It has hard wooden benches for seats, and the cars are cold in the winter and stuffy in the summer. Peasants use the elektrichka to go to the city markets, and on the weekend, city people use it to seek out a place along the Don with a little fresh air and some room for fishing. For boys like Shaburov and Kalenik, the elektrichka had one huge advantage: conductors rarely bothered to check the passengers' tickets. With any luck, they rode for free, killing time and seeing the countryside.
The Killer Department Page 4