The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  He could envision some particulars of the crime. Maybe one of the victims—the younger one?—had surprised the killer and the older one. He might have smashed the older one's skull, then turned and chased the younger one through the woods. Burakov could almost feel the terror the girl must have felt as she ran, futilely, for her life. It seemed to hang from the leaves in the woods.

  Or could the killer have lured both victims into the woods at the same time? Had he wanted the girl to watch what he did with the woman? And if he had, what power did he possess that caused people to take leave of their senses and follow him?

  The summer of 1984 was a time of disorientation in Russia. In Moscow, it seemed as if no one was in charge. One aging and infirm leader, Yuri Andropov, had died after a long illness, only to be succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, a wheezing Party hack who was incapable of reading a speech without losing his place. The Politburo had announced that Soviet athletes and their socialist allies would boycott the Los Angeles Olympics. NATO was deploying new classes of nuclear missiles in West Germany, missiles that everyone in the Soviet Union had been told would cut the warning time against a nuclear attack in half, to a matter of ten minutes or less. Sober Soviet scientists published articles about the possibility of a war being started by computers, kept primed to return a nuclear salvo without requiring the intervention of a human mind. It seemed that the world might soon spin apart into chaos.

  And in Rostov that summer, the lesopolosa killer kept pace with the feverish events. Bodies accumulated faster than the militsia could even identify them. On July 25, railroad workers near Shakhty found the naked corpse of a woman, lying in the woods on her stomach about half a mile from the station. She had been dead for about a week, and her body bore the mutilating signature of the lesopolosa killer. He had cut away her nipples, her vaginal area, and her uterus. He had slashed at her eyes. She was identified as Anna Lemesheva, twenty, a student who had disappeared six days previously, on her way to visit a dentist.

  On August 3, the police found the body of a sixteen-year-old girl, Natalia Golosovskaya, in a grove of trees in Aviators' Park in Rostov, not far from where Marta Ryabenko and several other bodies had been discovered. Her killer had mutilated her as terribly as he had Anna Lemesheva, but she was lying on her back, with leaves stuffed into her mouth.

  A week later, on August 10, they found the body of Lyudmilla Alekseyeva, seventeen, in a grove of trees on the left bank of the Don, near Rostov's city beach. Unlike many of the others, she was a studious young woman with no known bad habits. She had been returning from a visit to her brother, who worked on a barge upstream from Rostov.

  Two days passed, and workers in a cornfield on a state farm called Niva, outside Rostov-on-Don, found the body of a boy, Dmitri Illaryonov, thirteen. He had disappeared on July 10, apparently while on his way to school to get a health certificate he needed for summer camp. His killer had broken the boy's skull, probably with the butt end of a knife, perhaps with a hammer. Then he had castrated him.

  On August 26, a woman gathering mushrooms near a camping area thirty miles east of Rostov found the decomposed remains of a young woman, partially covered by leaves and branches. She had been dead for about two months, and the militsia could not identify the remains. But the wounds in the breast area suggested that her killer had stabbed her to death.

  On August 28, a boy named Aleksandr Chepel, eleven years old, disappeared from the middle of Rostov. A man getting set to mow a meadow on the left bank of the Don, not far from where Lyudmilla Alekseyeva had been found, discovered his mutilated body on September 2.

  Five days later, on September 7, the militsia discovered yet another body in Aviators' Park, near the Rostov airport. This victim, a woman, had been dead for only a day, and the body showed the signature mutilations. It was identified as that of Irina Luchinskaya, twenty-four years old, who had worked at a daycare center. But she had a history of mental illness and alcohol abuse, and her personal activities qualified for the designation "disorderly sex life." She was, by Burakov's count, the twenty-fourth victim in the lesopolosa series.

  The killer, or killers, left little evidence. On five of the bodies— those of Lemesheva, Golosovskaya, .-Mekseyeva, Chepel, and Luchinskaya—the medical examiners found traces of semen, and in all five cases they identified it as type AB. On Chepel's body, the investigators had found a single graving hair, which the examiners said probably came from a man. Chepel's body also bore a bum mark, as if someone had tortured him with a cigarette. And near the body, the investigators found some scraps of cloth that did not match the boy's clothing.

  But the investigators found no witnesses, and they still had only the vaguest idea of who the killer might be. One frightening fact stood out. In 1982, the lesopolosa murderer had taken five lives. In 1983, he had taken six. But in 1984, there were thirteen bodies on Burakov's list. In the five months since Dima Ptashnikov's death, the killer, or killers, had been striking at a rate of once every two weeks. Whatever impelled the man, or men, to seek out victims and mutilate them was getting harder to control.

  By the summer of 1984, the work load involved in the case was overwhelming the resources of Rostov's militsia and procurators. Eleven of the twenty-four victims remained unidentified. Checking out and eliminating suspects required hundreds of hours of work, and the backlog only grew. For instance, by the time the syshchiki had finally crossed Vladimir Babakov, the old man in Novoshakhtinsk, off their list, they still had to complete the investigations of Yuri Kalenik, Mikhail Tyapkin, Nikolai Byeskorsy, and Artur Korshenko.

  The dissension among the various players in the investigation grew as rapidly as the number of victims. The chief of the Rostov procurator's office, Aleksandr Ryabko, had begun in the spring to move toward Burakov's view that the retarded suspects from the intemat in Shakhty had nothing to do with the killings. In April, he had decided to drop the charge filed against Mikhail Tyapkin for the murder of Sergei Markov.

  This infuriated the faction within the militsia, led by deputy chief Pavel Chernyshev, that still believed that Tyapkin and Kalenik were involved, at least in the early murders. Even though more than a dozen victims had been found since Kalenik's arrest, the members of this faction theorized that a gang of boys from the intemat was responsible and that the other, unknown members had gone on killing after Kalenik and Tyapkin were in custody.

  The faction insisted that if only the procurator's office would provide enough competent sledovatyeli, the case could be solved by aggressively investigating all the friends and contacts of Kalenik and Tyapkin. Although in practice the procurators often delegated the task of planning investigations and questioning suspects to the militsia, the growing pressure to solve the lesopolosa case made the procurators loath to expose themselves to any criticism that they had been leix in their work. So they had begun to insist more often on questioning suspects themselves, and there were often not enough of them to handle the interrogations the syshchiki thought necessary.

  Complicating matters even more, Vladimir I. Kazakov, a veteran sledovatyel from the central Russian procuracy in Moscow, arrived in Rostov in June 1984 to review the investigation. Kazakov's arrival reopened all the questions in the case, including the involvement of the suspects from Gukovo. Everything had to be rehashed and decided anew.

  The disagreement became an open rift, with both sides accusing each other of fouling up the investigation. Meetings called to coordinate the investigation became tense and hostile. Despite Burakov's opinion, the militsia leadership sent a letter to Vitaly Fedorchuk, the Minister of the Interior, asking his help in organizing a team of experienced procurators to be sent into Rostov from jurisdictions all over the country. Within a few months, the team, numbering about a dozen men, arrived and began to work.

  Fetisov and Chernyshev allotted more than two hundred men and women to the case. Within Fetisov's department of criminal apprehension, they created a special sub-unit assigned to deal with serious crimes of a sexual nature. It was a k
iller department aimed exclusively at catching the man, or men, responsible for the lesopolosa murders. Fetisov prevailed on Chernyshev to allow him to appoint Viktor Burakov to head the new team. From then on, Burakov, though still subject to orders from officers farther up the ladder, would have the direct responsibility for the militsia end of the investigation. He would be the one to make the first evaluation of new leads, to analyze the conflicting streams of information. He would be the one required to come up with a plan to bring the killer to justice.

  Fetisov and Burakov deployed some of the new forces to work under cover at bus and train stations, looking for men who approached boys, girls, and young women. A dozen men were assigned to wear sports clothes and ride bicycles through Aviators' Park in Rostov in the hope that they would spot the killer. They assigned the largest contingent to an operation called Poisk, or Search, designed to round up and check out anyone in Rostov oblast who fit their general idea of what the killer might be like.

  But they had only a general idea. Burakov and one of the new procurators, Yuri Moiseyev, jointly wrote a paper giving their best estimate of the killer's characteristics. He was, they wrote, a man between the ages of twenty-five and thirty; that seemed the most likely age for a man capable of luring young women in their teens and twenties into the woods. He had type AB blood. He was tall and well built, probably an athlete. Far from being retarded, he was probably of at least average intelligence, observant, and careful. He could argue persuasively. He might work as a driver or in some capacity that required him to travel. He probably lived in Novocherkassk, thirty miles north of Rostov-on-Don; it seemed to be the geographic epicenter of the murders. He might or might not be married. If single, he might live with his mother, as the housing shortage required most bachelors to do.

  That only narrowed the list, Burakov knew, to five or ten thousand people. He had to try to narrow the circle further. He directed the men in Poisk to start by compiling and checking out lists of all former psychiatric patients, all men previously convicted of sex crimes, and drug addicts. Perhaps, he thought, drugs were at the root of the killer's murderous rage. He directed the force to check out former and present militsionery, on the theory that the killer might be using a badge or a uniform to win the trust of the victims, and workers in the medical profession, on the theory that the killer's skill with a knife and apparent knowledge of anatomy suggested professional training. Once these lists were compiled, he directed, the first thing to do was to check the suspects' blood types.

  By September 1984, the militsia could no longer ignore public opinion. The newspapers and television remained compliant instruments of the state, and there were no headlines proclaiming that the killer was still at large. The papers had printed only what the investigators had told them to print, and this had amounted to short, obscure notices announcing that the syshchiki were seeking witnesses who had seen a particular victim on the day he or she disappeared. These notices circulated only in local newspapers.

  But with so many bodies, and so many people being questioned, the news of the killings leached into the public domain. Rumors filled the vacuum created by the official silence. One rumor had it that a gang of cannibals had descended on the oblast, making Aviators' Park its headquarters for killing, dismembering, and eating its victims. Another had it that a gang of Rostov criminals had lost a card game to a gang from another city, and that the stakes were fifty children's lives. Another rumor said that a group disguised as photographers had arrived at a Rostov school, shown some kind of credentials, and taken all the children away to a studio to be photographed. None had returned. Some of the rumors had it that the gang had medical training and killed its victims with surgical precision. Yet another said the gang came from the trans-Caucasus republics of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Many Russians, already disposed to regard the peoples of these republics as congenital criminals, found that rumor particularly attractive. But the rumor most disturbing to the authorities had it that the killer rode around in a black Volga sedan, the type supplied to Party officials, with a special license plate that began with the letters DSC—for Death to Soviet Children.

  A silent and partial panic gripped Rostov. Some mothers began to keep their children at home or escort them around the city. But not everyone knew, and not everyone took precautions. Many people discounted the rumors, and many simply had not heard them. Prostitutes continued to work the stations, and children continued to ride the trains and buses.

  The murder of Aleksandr "Sasha" Chepel, in particular, exacerbated the situation. Unlike so many of the other victims, he came from the kind of family that Soviet propagandists liked to show as typical of socialist society. His father, Nikolai, was an engineer, and one of the small number of people in Soviet society entrusted by the state to work abroad. When Sasha disappeared.

  Nikolai was in Tehran working on a coal-enrichment plant that was part of Soviet efforts to woo the revolutionary government of Iran irrevocably out of the American sphere of influence. His mother, also an engineer, worked in an institute that drafted plans for coal mines. Sasha, a soccer player and a good student, normally stayed at home under the care of his grandmother. But on that day, he had gone downtown to see his mother. He had general permission to travel by himself He had to, to get to soccer practice.

  Chepel's parents had many friends, and the news of his disappearance, then of his death and the wounds on his body, spread rapidly. The authorities reacted cruelly and clumsily. General A. N. Konovalov, then the head of the oblast militsia, invited Nikolai Chepel to meet with him. Then he all but blamed the grieving father for his son's death. Why, Konovalov asked, was the boy riding alone on public transportation? Local politicians tried the same line when they addressed a meeting of concerned parents who lived in the Chepels' neighborhood. The boy was not properly supervised, one of them said.

  It was, Nikolai Chepel thought, a damnable slander. He had not set up a system where the schools were overburdened and children had to attend in shifts, meaning that they were at liberty for half the day. He had not set up a system that demanded that both parents work. He had not set up a system that required a boy like Sasha, who wanted to play soccer, to get on a bus and ride halfway across town. The Chepels' friends agreed with him.

  The oblast Party leadership decided that something had to be done to soothe the population. General Konovalov was ordered to prepare a speech, to be given on local television, and an "interview," to be printed in the local newspapers. He delegated the writing to Viktor Burakov, who prepared a brief and straightforward account of the crimes. But that was not what Konovalov delivered.

  "Please comment on the fact that there is a lot of talk in the city about extraordinary occurrences," the Party paper. Mo lot, asked delicately.

  "There is absolutely no basis for such rumors, to say nothing of panic," Konovalov replied. "These rumors are unhealthy, even provocative.

  "Objectively, the situation is that many people have been excited by the death of an eleven-year-old boy, Sasha C. [Konovalov, following Soviet practice, kept the boy's surname out of the news.] But this is a lone occurrence," he lied.

  "We have all good reason now to state firmly that the criminal who committed this murder will be taken into custody," Konovalov said.

  That was also a lie, but it was the least of Viktor Burakov's concerns. The word "glasnost" had yet to pass the lips of a Soviet leader, and the concept of the public's right to know had never occurred to Burakov. He had a strictly utilitarian view of the news. If giving information to the public would help him solve the case, fine. If it would not, then information should be withheld. That was a decision for his superiors to make.

  Militsia workers had begun to visit schools and factories, delivering lectures about safety, about keeping an eye on children, about not going off with strangers. That, he thought, should be sufficient to warn conscientious parents.

  Meanwhile, he had an overflow of work. In addition to handling the new cases, he was still trying to
pin down all the details that would put a close to the Kalenik case. He had more work to do with Korshenko and Byeskorsy. And almost every week, the militsia assigned to Operation Piosk were turning up new suspects.

  Toward the end of August 1984, Major Aleksandr Zanasovsky, one of the men assigned to Operation Poisk, was on duty in plain clothes at the Rostov bus station. Zanasovsky, a stout, pug-nosed militsioner with curly black hair, led a detachment of four men who worked the bus station from eight in the morning to eleven at night, the hours during which lesopolosa victims had disappeared. Generally, the detachment hung around the main waiting room, a big, dingy hall with rows of plastic benches.

  At around eight in the evening, standing in the waiting room, Zanasovsky noticed a man talking to a young woman, about seventeen or eighteen years old. The man could have been her father. He had gray hair, wore a tie and eyeglasses, and carried a briefcase; he looked, Zanasovsky thought, like a cultured man. But then the girl smiled, got up, and went to catch a bus. The man did not go with her. Instead, he stood up, circled the room slowly for a while, and then sat down near another young woman and started to talk to her.

  Who is this guy, Zanasovsky thought.

  He walked up to the man and broke his cover, producing an identification badge. He asked the man to come with him, and led him to the little militsia office off the waiting room.

  The man's documents were in order. His name was Andrei Chikatilo, and he worked as the manager of the supply department at a Rostov-based machinery enterprise called Spetzenergoavtomatika. His passport said he was the father of two children. He had a document attesting to the fact that he was in Rostov on a business trip. He was about to return to Shakhty, where he lived. He had once been a teacher, Chikatilo explained. He liked talking to kids, he was bored, and so he had struck up conversations with a couple of young people.