After four years, Panfilov quit in a dispute with the theater's management. While on tour, he and other technicians had to sleep four to a hotel room; he thought he deserved more privacy and threatened to quit if he did not get it. The theater management took him up on his offer. Unemployed, Panfilov tried to get into a Moscow institute for cinematography, but failed. He trained as a bartender, but didn't like it. He was at loose ends when four of Burakov's men broke down the door of his room, catching him with a boy eight months shy of eighteen.
The procurator's office, reviewing the evidence of the raid and subsequent investigation, charged Panfilov with sodomy, sodomy with a minor, and possession of pornography, found when they searched his apartment. The search also turned up a couple of 7.62-mm bullets, so he was charged as well with violating the law against possession of unregistered weapons.
Burakov and a procurator named Igor Ananyev handled the interrogation. To Panfilov, it seemed as if they were playing the good cop-bad cop game with him. Burakov was the calm, rational interrogator. He told the prisoner that his blood test had eliminated him as a murder suspect. Burakov merely wanted his cooperation in identifying other possible suspects. They had his address book, so most of his contacts were already known. If he helped the militsia, Burakov offered, he might get a reduced sentence. Otherwise, he was looking at a long time in jail.
Ananyev, the attorney who handled nearly all the cases against gay men during the lesopolosa investigation, did not bother to be civil. Most of the gay men who encountered him during the investigation deemed him extremely hostile . One of them, a man named Sasha Sivolobov, recalled how Ananyev badgered him to describe the taste of semen. Panfilov noticed Ananyev's round, red face, close-cropped brown hair, and light mustache and thought him piggish. Ananyev cursed him freely and demanded the same information Burakov wanted. He, too, offered a reduced sentence—perhaps only a year or two in jail.
Panfilov tried to resist. He faked a nervous disorder that deprived him of the ability to speak, and sat mute through a couple of interrogations. They sent him to a psychiatric hospital, where a doctor put a mask over his mouth and nose and dropped ether on it until Panfilov cried out. He got injections, which he believed to be psychotropic drugs designed to weaken his will. Then they returned him to jail. His cell mates beat him; they told him they did it at the guards' behest, with a pack of cigarettes as their reward. Finally, Panfilov talked.
By then, his resistance had cost him any leniency Burakov and Ananyev might have tried to arrange. He was sentenced to five years in prison.
He served his time in a special section of the oblast penitentiary in Novocherkassk, a section reserved for men convicted of sexual crimes. One of the people he met there was Yuri Kalenik. Kalenik had finished his auto theft sentence in March 1985. But there were militsionery, led by deputy chief Pavel Chernyshev, still determined to prove that Kalenik had committed at least some of the lesopolosa murders and determined, therefore, to keep him in jail, where he could be watched and worked on. So before Kalenik could get out, these militsionery found a young man, also a former inmate of the intemat in Gukovo, who testified that Kalenik had sodomized him during the time they both lived there. Kalenik bitterly denied the charge, but the judge believed the witness and the militsia. Kalenik got another two and a half years.
Passing the time, Kalenik told Panfilov how the lesopolosa investigation had careened into his life and virtually destroyed it in the rush to find the serial killer. Panfilov, not surprisingly, found the story entirely credible.
Viktor Burakov, by that time, had concluded that the theory that a gay man was committing some or all of the lesopolosa murders was another false trail. He had begun to discuss the case more often with Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, dropping by the psychiatrist's apartment late at night, drinking tea, and listening to Bukhanovsky's theory of a schizophrenic sadist who was most likely heterosexual. Burakov had also spent more time discussing the case with his gay informant, Valery Ivanenko. Ivanenko, though he lacked Bukhanovsky's erudition, pressed a similar theory on Burakov. Finally, there was the experience of questioning the gay suspects. None of them struck Burakov as the type of person who could stalk more than twenty victims, lure them into the woods, bash their skulls in, and dismember their sexual organs.
In a memo to his colleagues at the end of 1985, Burakov wrote down his own best guess about the identity of the killer. He put nothing in the memo about Bukhanovsky's contribution to his thinking about the case. It seemed best, for the time being, to keep quiet about his growing rapport with the psychiatrist and the information he was disclosing to him.
They were probably looking, Burakov wrote, for a man between thirty and fifty, either a sadist or a necrosadist. He could attain sexual satisfaction only by stabbing and mutilating his victims. He might take the excised body parts home for use in a masturbatory sexual ritual. For that reason, Burakov could not conceive of the killer's having a family. He lived alone or in some circumstances that permitted him to leave whenever the urge to kill struck him and to return without being seen.
The killer had the ability to hide his mental disease from coworkers or other people around him, which suggested average or above-average intelligence. He no doubt had a job, one that required him to travel a lot. But he probably did not, Burakov wrote, use a car in the commission of his crimes. If he did, why would he go to the trouble of hiding the clothing of most of his female victims? He had, for instance buried Olga Stalmachenok's clothes in the cornfield near her body. If he had a car, he could have stashed the clothes in the trunk until it was safe to discard them.
Although the killer might have had some sexual experience with males, his basic orientation was heterosexual. "Could this be a homosexual?" Burakov wrote. "From my experience with homosexuals of various ages, I don't think he can be, at least not of the pure sort."
But by that time, the investigation of Rostov's gay community had acquired a momentum of its own. Interrogations begot suspects, who begot more interrogations and more suspects. By the time it was over, the lesopolosa investigation had identified and investigated four hundred forty gay men in Rostov. One hundred five of those were convicted under the Soviet anti-sodomy statute and sent to jail.
The investigation terrorized nearly all of Rostov's gay men, not just those directly swept up in it. The gay meeting place moved from park to park in the gay men's effort to stay away from the militsia. Many of them found ways to leave the city and move elsewhere. Others put their sex lives in abeyance.
Some did not survive. Viktor Chemyayev, a waiter, was called in by the militsia during the lesopolosa investigation and threatened with prosecution under the sodomy statute. He slashed his wrists and died. Yevgeny Voluyev, a bisexual telephone engineer, was harassed by the militsia continually after his name showed up on a list of gay men being treated for syphilis at a city clinic. He poisoned himself Anatoly Otryeznov, a carpenter in a cafe, opened his wrists and died a day after he told friends that the militsia wanted to question him about pedophilia.
7
A BODY IN MOSCOW
The progress of the lesopolosa investigation did not satisfy the authorities in Moscow. Public opinion counted for little in the Soviet system, and the system's rulers had no fear of a popular outcry that might turn them out at the next election. But the system did generate reams of plans and reports and lots of meetings and conferences. Inevitably, some of that talk and some of that paper made its way to the top of the law enforcement system.
Minister of the Interior Vitaly Fedorchuk summoned Mikhail Fetisov and Pavel Chernyshev to Moscow late in 1984 to demand an accounting. Fedorchuk enjoyed a fearsome reputation. He had risen through the ranks of the Ukrainian KGB, suppressing political dissent with a ruthlessness that distinguished him even among his Russian colleagues. When Yuri Andropov became general secretary in 1982, Fedorchuk filled his spot at the head of the Soviet KGB in Moscow. But Andropov died after only fifteen months in power. The new leadership shuffled Fedorch
uk off to the Ministry of the Interior, calculating, perhaps, that it would do the country no harm to have someone of his temperament turned loose on common, rather than political, criminals.
When Fetisov and Chernyshev arrived at the ministry building on Ogaryeva Street in Moscow, they dropped in first on some of Fetisov's fiiends from his days at the ministry academy. When Fetisov told them of Fedorchuk's summons, they responded with harsh sympathy. One of them made the Orthodox sign of the cross over Fetisov's head, like a priest at a funeral.
"You're already dead," the friend said.
Precisely at five o'clock, an aide ushered them into Fedorchuk's office. Fetisov understood at once that Fedorchuk was not going to fire them, at least not that day: he was in civilian clothes, with his jacket draped over the back of his chair. For a formal firing, Fetisov figured, Fedorchuk would have worn his uniform and kept the jacket on.
Fedorchuk was quietiy hospitable. He ordered an aide to bring tea. He listened for an hour to their report. At the end of the hour, he said simply, "We'll get back to you in six months."
Fetisov understood that this was a time limit. If he had not captured the killer by the middle of 1985, he might be looking at the career in the coal mines his family had long ago advised him to seek.
As winter gave way to spring in 1985, Fetisov and Burakov waited nervously for the next summons to view a body. By their calculations, the killer struck most often in warm weather. Bodies left in the woods in late autumn or winter were frequently not found until the snows receded in March and April. But those months passed, and no bodies turned up.
In addition to working on gay suspects, they cleaned up a few of the many loose ends left from the rash of killings the previous summer. In January, an old woman in Donskoi reported that her daughter and granddaughter were missing; she had not seen them for six months. The daughter, Tatyana Petrosyan, was thirty. The granddaughter, Svetlana, was ten. A few months later, the medical examiner reported that the mother and daughter's dental records and physical characteristics matched the pair of bodies found in the woods near the railroad tracks south of Shakhty the previous July.
Tatyana's personal life matched those of the previously identified adult females. She had no husband, no work, no permanent place of residence. She had spent time in a mental hospital. She abused alcohol and she had a disorderly sex life. She was said to occasionally entertain men in her daughter's presence.
Because Tatyana's life was so erratic, her mother had not thought her absence unusual until six months had passed. Tatyana would often disappear for months, staying with other relatives or who knew where. The old woman knew few, if any, of the men in her daughter's life. She recalled one person who came by her apartment for fifteen minutes in April 1984. Tatyana said he was a teacher, but her mother could not remember the man's name.
By July 1985, ten months had gone by since the discovery of the body of Irina Luchinskaya, the last victim bearing the signature of the lesopolosa killer. The deadline imposed by Vitaly Fedorchuk had passed as well.
But political events had given Fetisov a reprieve of sorts. In March of that year Konstantin Chernenko had died, and Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded him as general secretary. One of the first personnel moves of the Gorbachev era was Fedorchuk's retirement. It would probably take a while, Fetisov knew, for the paperwork about the unsolved murders in Rostov to rise to the level of the new minister's agenda.
Burakov and Fetisov had three theories to explain the absence of victims in the first half of 1985. The killer, they thought, might have committed suicide, no longer able to cope with the demons within himself He might have moved out of Rostov oblast. Or he might have been confined in a jail or psychiatric hospital for another crime. They began to check out the lists of suicides and the lists of imprisoned criminals.
If the killer had moved out of Rostov oblast, Burakov reasoned, that did not mean he would stop killing. He sent a circular to all the militsia units in the Soviet Union, briefly describing the signature of the lesopolosa killer. The Soviets lacked a centralized, computerized clearinghouse for crime information. But Burakov hoped to be notified if anyone else encountered a murder like the ones in the lesopolosa series.
Early in August, he received word about a murder in Moscow. The body of a young woman named Natalia Pokhlistova had been found, naked, in a thicket of woods near Domodedovo Airport, about one hundred fifty yards from the nearest paved road. From the school portrait photograph sent with the bulletin, Burakov could see that she had been a pretty girl, with short, black hair and brown eyes. The next photograph in the packet showed her as she had been found. Her face was smudged with dirt and her mouth was frozen open in a silent scream that had become all too familiar to Burakov. Her murderer had left puncture wounds in her neck and between her breasts. Then he had cut off the tips of her nipples.
Her parents had told the Moscow investigators a story that was also familiar to Burakov. Natalia had been mildly retarded and hard to control as she grew older. She smoked and drank, and she tended to wander.
Domodedovo Airport, Burakov knew, normally served flights between Moscow and the southeast Soviet Union. Flights to and from Rostov normally landed at another of Moscow's airports, Vnukovo. But in the summer of 1985, Vnukovo was closed for repairs. Flights on the Moscow-Rostov route were using Domodedovo.
Burakov felt, by this time, only a slight twinge of regret that someone else had died. He was seized with a belief that his quarry had surfaced again, and surfaced in such a way that it might be possible, finally, to close in and catch him. A finite number of people flew between Rostov and Moscow. They could all be checked out. Burakov grabbed a couple of files with pictures from the Rostov killings and caught the first train he could get to Moscow.
Once in the capital, he went directly to a meeting of the syshchiki working on the Pokhlistova case. Burakov placed his own pictures, which happened to show the corpse of Lyudmilla Alekseyeva, on the table, not far from the Moscow investigators' pictures of Natalia Pokhlistova's coqDse. The Moscow detective, as he made his presentation on the Pokhlistova case, accidentally picked up the pictures of Alekseyeva and used them to talk about Pokhlistova's wounds and the site where she had been found. In fact, there was one slight change in the killer's signature on the two victims. Pokhlistova's killer had stuffed her mouth with leaves and dirt; Alekseyeva's mouth was empty. This nuance did not shake Burakov's conviction that the lesopolosa killer had slain both of them. He attributed it to a twitch in the killer's state of mind. Once Burakov pointed out the similarities in the crime scene photographs, no one in the room doubted that Rostov's killer had struck in Moscow.
They began working with the hypothesis that the killer was on a visit to Moscow and had flown back to Rostov shortly after Pokhlistova's death, which the Moscow investigators had calculated occurred either on July 31 or August 1. A mixed group of Rostov and Moscow syshchiki went to Domodedovo Airport, to the offices of Aeroflot, the Soviet Union's state airline. They collected all the ticket records for Moscow-Rostov flights in the first week of August.
Reading them was a daunting task. Aeroflot lacked a computerized reservation system, and its tickets were handwritten. The syshchiki had to work with carbon copies of tickets that had often been written in a hasty, nearly illegible scrawl. Even when the syshchiki deciphered the handwriting, they had only initials and a surname. The ticket might say "I. V. Petrov," but it gave no further indication of who Petrov was or where he lived. Since Soviet consumers paid cash for everything, there were no credit card records to help in identifying passengers. Nevertheless, over a month's time, the investigators had slowly compiled a list of names for the syshchiki in Rostov to check out.
Burakov had other ideas to check out. Pokhlistova's murder had coincided with the World Youth Festival in Moscow, the first big international event of Gorbachev's tenure as general secretary. Two types of people had traveled from Rostov to attend. There were local officials of the Communist Youth League who made a profession
of organizing and attending Party-approved events for young people. And there were militsionery, recruited to help the Moscow militsia with the tight traffic and security arrangements that the Party demanded to make sure that the festival made a proper impression on all the foreigners invited into Russia for the occasion. And there were carpenters, plumbers, and electricians sent to the festival as well.
The Moscow region, although not known for resorts, had dozens of sanitoria and vacation homes maintained by various Soviet trade unions for their workers. Summer was their peak time. Burakov wanted them checked out.
Finally, there was the chance that the killer had nothing to do with either the festival or the sanitoria. He might simply have gone to Moscow on orders from his enterprise. The investigators checked with the Rostov oblast government. There were three hundred forty-two enterprises in the oblast that traded with Moscow enterprises. They all had to be checked to find out whom they had sent to Moscow at the end of July.
This investigative net had some sizable holes, Burakov knew. The killer might have relocated permanently to Moscow. He might have traveled to Moscow by overnight train, for which there were no passenger lists. But Burakov suspected they were finally getting close to their man. He set virtually the entire lesopolosa task force to work checking out the new leads.
The Moscow syshchiki came up with a lead of their own. Beginning in the autumn of 1984, when the lesopolosa killings abrupdy stopped in Rostov, three boys, all ten or eleven years old, had died at the hands of a brutal killer in Moscow. This killer had raped all three boys and decapitated one of them. The Moscow militsia theorized that the same killer had committed the murders in Rostov and had then either moved to Moscow or had begun a job that required regular trips to the capital. And they had a lead on a suspect. One of the Moscow victims had disappeared from a summer camp. Among the victim's camp friends, the Moscow syshchiki found a boy who told them that he had met a man named Fischer with the victim just before he disappeared.
The Killer Department Page 12