The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  On this particular excursion, they got off' the train in Rostov-on-Don, the final stop, and spent the day and early evening wandering around the city. As darkness fell, they decided to spend the night in an empty trolleybus, an electric bus powered by a metal arm attached to cables stretched above the street. The next morning, Valery Shaburov woke up feeling playful. He got into the driver's seat, switched on the lights, turned the wheel, and opened the bus doors. This attracted the attention of the bus driver, who had arrived to start her shift. She clambered into the bus and grabbed Shaburov by the arm, yelling for someone to call a militsioner. Kalenik protested that Shaburov hadn't damaged anything. The driver ignored him. Kalenik fled and, later that day, returned to Gukovo on an elektrichka.

  The militsia dragged Shaburov, who was barely coherent, down to the station for the Pervomaisky section of the city and informed him that he could be charged with attempting to steal the trolleybus. Then, because the bodies had been found nearby, they asked him if he knew who had killed Gudkov and Dunenkova.

  "Not me," Shaburov said. "Yuri did it."

  That afternoon, the militsia in Gukovo arrested Kalenik and held him until syshchiki from Rostov could come and fetch him. It was his first experience with jail. The men from Rostov arrived at nine o'clock in the evening, handcuffed him, and put him in the car.

  "Why are you arresting me?" Kalenik asked them.

  "You already know" was all they would reply.

  The next day, Valery Beklemishchev began Kalenik's interrogation. If they had had firmer evidence, a sledovatyel from the procurator's office might have been summoned to handle the interrogation. But this case was still at the stage where a syshchik might work the suspect for a while. Kalenik had no lawyer, and no one read him his rights. According to standard Soviet procedure, the state would provide him with a lawyer after it had completed its investigation and if it decided to charge him. At first, Kalenik denied everything. But after a few days, Beklemishchev secured a confession. Kalenik admitted not only to the seven lesopolosa killings but to four others that had been committed in other sections of Rostov and neighboring oblasts.

  At that point, the militsia began in earnest to collect supporting evidence against Kalenik. This stood what Westerners would think of as normal procedure on its head. The Western idea would be to gather evidence first, then use it either to extract a confession from the suspect or to prove his guilt in spite of his denials.

  But in Russia, both under Communism and before it, the confession was the pivotal stage in any investigation. Russians are accustomed to the idea that a guilty man must confess; some Russians, even now, hold the mistaken belief that a defendant who does not confess cannot be convicted. That was why so much of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment focused on Raskolnikov's irrepressible urge to admit his crime. It was why Stalin insisted that the victims of his purges be forced to confess in show trials to conspiracies that never existed.

  To Viktor Burakov, assigned in late September to work on the corroborating investigation, Yuri Kalenik seemed an eminendy likely suspect. Burakov's suspicions had centered from the start on a criminal with a psychiatric disorder. And in Russia, mental retardation was seen not just as a learning handicap but as a form of derangement. In formal terms, a mentally retarded Russian was described as suffering from a disease called oligophrenia. Burakov had little experience with such people. But what he did know suggested to him that they were particularly dangerous in late adolescence, when their libidos were at their peak and they left their childhood internati to live on their own. He did not believe that they could control their desires. He had no reason to doubt Kalenik's confession. But what he saw when he began to work on the case disturbed him.

  After extracting a confession, a syshchik or a sledovatyel next found out whether the suspect could, in effect, verify his admissions. Could he, for instance, show the militsia to the scene of the crime? When Burakov joined the team working with Kalenik, the suspect had already led the way to the sites where several of the bodies had been found. He was about to demonstrate that he knew where Igor Gudkov had been killed.

  About a dozen syshchiki, uniformed militsionery, and others gathered near the village of Ordzhonokidze to see if Kalenik could do it. Burakov stayed on the fringes of the operation. According to Kalenik's confession, he had met Gudkov in the center of Rostov, then persuaded him to ride a trolleybus out of the city to Ordzhonokidze. Burakov felt that the investigators should have started their test in the city and required Kalenik to show exactly what he had done from the moment he met Gudkov. Instead, the test started within a quarter mile of the murder site. But it was not Burakov's show; it was Beklemishchev's. Burakov kept quiet.

  Even in Ordzhonokidze, Kalenik did not seem to Burakov to be well oriented. In Burakov's experience, an admitted murderer usually walked directly to the scene. Kalenik wandered around the village and the beer kiosk for several hours, conversing all the while with Beklemishchev, before finally arriving within a few yards of the site.

  A short while later, the troupe moved to Novoshakhtinsk to see whether Kalenik could find the place in the cornfield where the killer had left the body of Olga Stalmachenok. Kalenik pointed out the music conservatory in the middle of the city. Then he led them to the Sixth Collective Farm. But there he wandered aimlessly through its fields for several hours. Finally, the group reached the top of a hillside. Burakov looked down toward the place, under the electrical cables, where the tractor driver had uncovered the body. To his dismay, he saw that the local militsionery, curious about the test, had parked a militsia car a few yards from the scene. He rushed down the hill to tell them to move it. But by that time, Kalenik and the rest of the group were already heading in that direction. Kalenik pointed to a spot near where the car had been parked. It was close enough for Beklemishchev. Triumphant, Beklemishchev moved on to another assignment. Fetisov gave Burakov the mop-up duty of completing the lesopolosa investigation and the case against Yuri Kalenik.

  The more Burakov investigated, the more doubts he had. He began by learning more about Kalenik's past.

  He had been born, out of wedlock, to a woman who worked in a mine in Shakhty. When he was two, she had left him atop a warm stove while she went to look for coal. His clothing caught fire, and he suffered severe bums on his back.

  His mother thereupon gave him up for adoption, and he lived the next ten years in a foster home. But he did badly in school, when he went at all, and he quarreled frequently with his foster parents. Sometimes, the quarrels turned violent. When he was twelve, Kalenik's foster mother turned him over to the intemat for retarded children in Gukovo.

  Gukovo is a tired, worn little town, growing poorer as the surrounding coalfields play out. The intemat stands at the end of a dirt lane behind a steel fence, painted blue. Inside the fence, in the summer, the smell of feces and urine wafts through the air. Children roam naked from the waist down or squat on the verandas of their buildings, moaning and rocking in their own private worlds. Seeing a stranger, they may wave and try to say "Daddy."

  Inside, they sleep in dim rooms filled with ten, twelve, or more beds, pushed close together. Sometimes two children occupy the same bed, with the bigger one petting the smaller. Their toilets are slits in the floor, and their bathtubs may be filled with yellow water, dead flies floating on the surface. In the rooms for the most severely retarded, the children lie all day in cribs, on dirty sheets, their matchstick arms and legs splayed at odd angles. Hies crawl over their open, vacant eyes and shaven heads. They moan or whimper, but most cannot talk.

  Occasionally, one of the attendants, hefty women in dirty white smocks and kerchiefs, rises from a chair and makes an effort to clean or comfort a child. But for hours each day, the intemat children fend for themselves. One intemat director has been prosecuted for embezzling money and food meant for the children.

  Some of the Gukovo intemat children would live in institutions in any society, but many others were discarded there by parents or a system t
hat could not cope with them. One of Kalenik's friends was an alert, inquisitive boy named Sasha who hobbled around on crutches. When Sasha was a child, his father, in a drunken rage, threw him off an apartment balcony, crippling his legs. The father wound up in jail, and Sasha wound up at the intemat. Kalenik himself would probably, in a wealthier society, have been diagnosed with a specific learning disability or behavioral problem, not as retarded. He speaks like any other Russian blue-collar worker, in complete, reasonably grammatical sentences. He reads. He responds to questions. He plays chess.

  Burakov, when he visited the intemat, felt sympathy for Kalenik. But it was no secret that the older intemat kids engaged in sex in a multitude of ways and with a multitude of partners. Burakov saw the intemat as a place that, through its neglect, fostered perversions of all kinds: sodomy, statutory rape, even bestiality. He could believe that intemat graduates might stab and kill girls, slashing at their genitals. They might, he believed, kill both girls and boys.

  But he could not believe the written records of Kalenik's confessions to Beklemishchev. They were, he thought, filled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies. When, in October, Fetisov handed him responsibility for the investigation, Burakov pressed Kalenik hard. What color dress had Lyubov Biryuk been wearing? What had Olga Stalmachenok been carrying? What bus had he taken with Igor Gudkov? Kalenik could not answer.

  Gradually, Burakov's initial doubts grew into a belief that Kalenik had not been involved in the seven lesopolosa killings. He reaUzed that Kalenik, though he bore the label "retarded," was in many respects a young man of normal inteUigence. Yet Beklemishchev and the others had treated him as if he could understand little or nothing. It would not have been difficult for someone like Kalenik to learn a lot about the case from the questions Beklemishchev had asked him. He could have learned the names of the victims, what they looked like, and the way they had been killed. Then, if he had decided to confess, he could have made it sound plausible.

  But why would he confess?

  Burakov, as it happened, knew firsthand how the experience of arrest and jail could affect someone of Yuri Kalenik's age. He had gone through it himself

  In 1965, Burakov returned from his job plowing up the Virgin Lands for a brief home leave before the army drafted him. On November 7, the forty-eighth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, he took the family dog and gun and spent the holiday alone, hunting rabbits.

  Walking home, he passed the cottage of an old schoolmate, Nikolai Kuzmin. The Kuzmins were slaughtering a sow for their holiday meal, and Burakov stopped and ate with them, contributing one of the rabbits he had killed to his hosts' larder. The Kuzmin boys hung a washbasin from the bough of an apple tree and blasted away at it with Burakov's remaining bullets. Nikolai Kuzmin invited Burakov to go to a dance that night.

  Burakov declined. He had another social engagement in mind for that evening, a visit to a girl named Tatyana, who lived in the same village. Burakov spent the hours from nine to two with Tatyana. Then he went home.

  He awakened the next morning to see a militsia car outside his family's cottage. Two militsionery came into the house and arrested him. One of them took the hunting rifle down from the wall, opened it, sniffed it, and asked Vasily Burakov for the registration documents. Burakov began to suspect that one of the Kuzmins, during target practice, had shot a neighbor's cow.

  But the militsionery would not tell him why he was under arrest. They took him to Sevsk and put him in a holding cell with three older men. The men told Burakov he had to sleep on the floor, even though there was a vacant bunk. Burakov refused and, predictably, a fight ensued. The guards broke it up. Burakov did not sleep that night, for fear of what his cell mates might do to him. The next morning, a syshchik questioned him about his whereabouts on the night of November 7. Burakov told him he had been with a girl, but, not wanting to embarrass her, he refused to give her name. He went back to the cell.

  This went on for three days. Burakov, afraid to sleep, was becoming frightened and disoriented. Finally, the chief of the department in Sevsk, a colonel, told him why he was in jail. His pal, Nikolai Kuzmin, had been found dead after the dance on November 7, stuffed in the bottom of a well. Witnesses had placed Burakov with him before the dance. Burakov had a reputation for fighting. So the police had picked him up, along with other suspects, to see what he might confess. Burakov realized the colonel was trying to do him a favor. He told the militsioner what he wanted to know—Tatyana's name. A couple of days later, the Sevsk militsia released him, and he entered the army.

  He had not confessed to any crimes he had not committed. But he had an idea of how someone might. Eighteen years later, he pressed Kalenik to tell him.

  But Kalenik, in October 1983, refused to say. He was, by then, thoroughly intimidated and thoroughly distrustful of any militsioner.

  This was due in part to the fact that in the midst of the early investigation, the militsia had decided to make sure Kalenik stayed in their grasp, in jail. According to Soviet law, a suspect could be held without charges for three days while the militsia gathered evidence against him. After three days, the militsia can, if they believe there is sufficient evidence, hold the suspect for another seven days while they prepare the case further. But after this ten-day period, in most cases, the procurator must either formally charge the suspect or let him go.

  The militsia and the sledovatyeli hated to let a suspect go. On the street, they feared, a suspect could learn more about the case against him. He could talk to witnesses, persuade them not to testify, and construct an alibi. The militsia much preferred to have him in jail, isolated and afraid. Often, they would plant a stukach in the cell with him. Some of the stukachi were convicted con men who knew how to lead people on. Sometimes the stukach, in the supposed privacy and comradery of the cell, could get the suspect to talk about things he refused to discuss in the interrogation room.

  In the case of Kalenik, the Rostov militsia charged him with auto theft. According to the charge, he and Shaburov stole an old Moskvich automobile for a joy ride, which ended when they ran the car into a telephone pole. Kalenik vigorously denied the charge. But late in 1983, a court convicted him of auto theft and sentenced him to two and a half years in prison, during which, of course, he would be at the disposal of the investigation.

  His growing doubts about Kalenik's guilt placed Burakov in an awkward position. He did not believe that Beklemishchev and the others had purposely fabricated a murder case against Kalenik. In the Soviet judicial system, bringing a case to trial was supposed to be tantamount to obtaining a conviction, and, for the most part, it was. The careers of sledovatyeli and syshchiki who brought cases that ended in acquittals suffered for it. It would be, Burakov believed, too risky to rig a case against an innocent man for a series of killings. What if the killings continued? Burakov believed that Beklemishchev and the others had seriously misread Kalenik's mental capabilities. They thought that he was severely retarded, and they therefore prompted him as they might have prompted a six-year-old. They would see this not as coercion but as an effort to help a weak mind remember.

  But by the autumn of 1983, the entire oblast militsia had a great deal at stake in the case against Kalenik. None of them had ever dealt with a series of so many killings. Their year-long inability to solve the case had begun to attract unfavorable attention from both the local Party leadership and the Ministrv' of the Interior in Moscow. Up the chain of command from Burakov, everyone wanted desperately to close the case and virtually everyone believed Kalenik was the killer. Before someone of Burakov's middling stature objected and said Kalenik was not the killer, he would have to have his facts lined up. He would have to, in effect, prove that Kalenik was innocent. Otherwise, he could wind up back in the criminology lab or, worse, back breaking up fights in cafes.

  The most obvious way to check out Kalenik's confessions was to establish his whereabouts on the days when the killings had occurred. During much of that time, in 1982 and 1983, Kalenik had been a studen
t at the vocational school in Gukovo, learning to be a floor layer. Burakov checked the attendance records. They showed that Kalenik had indeed been in school. But when Burakov checked further, he found a classic Soviet situation. The teachers at Vocational-Technical School No. 45 were in the habit of marking all their students present for every class, regardless of whether they actually showed up. Marking a student absent required that the teacher explain to the school's director why his pupils were not conscientious. It was much easier for all concerned to falsify the attendance records. The same syndrome explained how, every year, the Party announced triumphantly that the country had exceeded its production quotas while, at the same time, the lines in the stores got longer and slower.

  When he pressed Kalenik's teachers, Burakov found that they remembered that the boy had missed many classes. Since the records were largely fantasies, it was impossible to know which ones. It might have been easier if Kalenik had led a more settled life. Burakov could have established that he spent certain periods of time in certain places. But as the episode with Shaburov suggested, Kalenik and his friends wandered, spending the night with friends or someone's relatives or in the backs of trolleybuses. Establishing Kalenik's whereabouts on particular days, Burakov realized, was going to require months, if not years, of tedious travel, interviewing witnesses with poor memories.

  He might have done all that and still seen Kalenik tried for murder. But more corpses turned up.

  The first was found, officially, on October 8, in a wooded area near Novoshakhtinsk. In fact, someone had called the local militsia in September and told them there was a body in the woods. The militsia had searched and found nothing. They got another report in October, and on their second try, they located the remains.