The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  But, like many inspectors sent out from Moscow to check on factories and farms, Kostoyev had a much easier time telling the locals what they were doing wrong than how to do it right. He presented no novel ideas for the investigation. His main contribution was to approve a plan first proposed by Moscow's 1984 emissary, Vladimir I. Kazakov. It was a scheme based on the theory that the killer was using a car. The militsia, Kostoyev said, needed to check the blood type of every automobile driver in the area of the killings—some one hundred sixty thousand people. From that group, they were to investigate thoroughly all those with blood type AB. Statistically, that could be expected to amount to seven thousand people.

  All Soviet drivers were, according to a seldom-enforced law, supposed to have a document indicating their blood type, in case they were involved in an accident and needed a transfusion. The operation Kostoyev ordered involved a campaign to enforce this law. Drivers who were stopped and did not have their blood type in their documents would have to be tested. It promised to be a long and costly process, but it got under way.

  Kostoyev deemphasized, but did not terminate, the investigation of Yuri Kalenik and the other boys from Gukovo. It dragged on, but with fewer men.

  The Serbsky Institute's opinion that a homosexual could have committed at least some of the lesopolosa killings appealed to Kostoyev. He ordered the campaign in Rostov's gay community to continue, and he tried to expand it. He dropped in one morning on Irina Nikolayevna Stadnichenko at the Rostov venereal disease clinic.

  Irina Nikolayevna was then in her late forties, with a chunky, short body, hennaed hair cropped close to her head, and flat shoes. She looked like a villainess in an early James Bond movie, but she was in fact an attorney and a former procurator. She worked in a cluttered office off the clinic's main entrance, a room made even more cluttered by the presence of a huge Afghan hound, whom she periodically fed raw meat and nuzzled between the legs. Her job was to advise clinic patients that they would be violating the law if they knowingly transmitted venereal disease and to persuade them to help bring their sexual partners in for treatment. As a result of her work, she knew as much about the gay community of Rostov as anyone in the city, with the possible exception of Drs. Bukhanovsky and Andreev. But unlike Dr. Andreev, who did not conceal a personal distaste for gays, she liked and tried to protect them. She called herself Mama Golubykh, "Mother of the Gays."

  Kostoyev gave Irina Nikolayevna some material from the case files and asked her if she would be interested in joining the team of procurators and helping them unmask gay suspects. She replied that a gay man could not be the killer. The pursuit of gay suspects, she said, would waste time and ruin a lot of lives. It would be the kind of Soviet make-work that looked impressive in a report bumped up the bureaucratic chain of command but that produced no real results. She refused to help him.

  Viktor Burakov did not have that option. He could, when Kostoyev was back in Moscow, try to shift the emphasis of the team's work, pursuing leads that he thought more productive. But he could not avoid entirely giving gay suspects to the procurator.

  Shortly after Kostoyev's appointment, one of the many tangents off the Yuri Kalenik investigation produced a suspect named Nikolai Arkadyev. Syshchiki were constandy interrogating Kalenik in his cell, pressing him for the names of his friends. They were still trying to prove the existence of a "Kalenik-Tyapkin gang," with some members still at large, to explain how the murders continued after Kalenik's incarceration.

  One day, Kalenik mentioned Arkadyev. He turned out to be a dental technician from Gukovo, twenty-seven years old, living then in Ukraine. As soon as Burakov met him, he could tell that Arkadyev was psychologically unstable. The man quickly apprised his interrogators that he was gay.

  It was pitifully easy for the syshchiki to get Arkadyev to confess to murder. As soon as they did, and Kostoyev heard about it, the procurator from Moscow took over the investigation. He questioned Arkadyev without a break for an entire day.

  Reading the written record of the interrogation, Burakov grimaced. Arkadyev had confessed to murdering Lyudmilla Alekseyeva, Yelena Bakulina, and Natalia Golosovskaya, three of the victims from the summer of 1984. But it was obvious that he knew nothing about the crimes. He described cutting off the ears of the victims—when the victims' ears were in fact intact. He described how the "gang" took blood from the victims and used it to make a drug that they then injected into their veins.

  At the end of the day, Kostoyev gave up in disgust. He turned Arkadyev back to the syshchiki for more checking. To keep him handy, they arranged for him to be convicted of a charge that could be applied to virtually any Soviet health worker—that of appropriating state materials for work with private patients.

  It was, by Burakov's count, the fifth time the lesopolosa investigation had obtained a false confession. Meanwhile, the work he considered more vital, like identifying and checking out the people who had been in Moscow when Natalia Pokhlistova was murdered, was not getting done.

  8

  DEAD END

  Increasingly frustrated by the failure to solve the case, Viktor Burakov began turning more frequently to Dr. Aleksandr Bukhanovsky for advice. They made an unlikely pair of collaborators. Apart from the vast differences in their education, they looked at Soviet society from opposite ends of the social spectrum.

  Bukhanovsky could never forget that he was not a Russian, but had a mixture of Armenian and Jewish blood. Worse, from the authorities' point of view, he had a father living in America. He saw men whom he considered lesser psychiatrists, but men with more acceptable ethnic and political affiliations, getting promotions that were denied him. He chafed constantly under the pressure to abide by Party dicta about psychiatry, rather than by his own ideas and the ideas of other psychiatrists, both Russian and foreign, whom he respected. He sensed, all too acutely, that in a free society he would be leading a more creative, prosperous life.

  Burakov, on the other hand, rarely, if ever, entertained doubts about the system. He had seen enormous hardships during his lifetime. But his ancestors had all been peasants—too poor, even, to merit repression during Stalin's collectivization drive. Life had been still harder for them.

  Burakov had gone along with what the system asked of him, had joined the Party, and gradually had begun to see some rewards for it. In 1983, he and Svetlana had finally gotten their apartment, in a new brick building on Cosmonauts' Street in the north end of Rostov. The builders had done shabby work, and it had taken the Burakovs two years of part-time work to get the doors hung right, the joints all sealed, and the plumbing corrected. But they finally had a decent home. Their older son, Andrei, was about to graduate from high school and had expressed an interest in joining the army for officer training, an idea that made his father proud. Burakov was moving close to the top of the militsia waiting list for a chance to buy a car. And there was talk that the militsia might take title to a piece of collective farmland just outside Rostov and divide it up for dacha plots. He could count on a quarter acre.

  Burakov would normally have had little or nothing to do with someone like Bukhanovsky—an intellectual, a maverick. But as the hunt for the lesopolosa killer entered its fifth year, he was desperate to find a way to narrow the list of suspects. Bukhanovsky might help him do that. As their late-night meetings continued, Burakov began increasingly to respect the psychiatrist's insights. He began to add words like necrosadism to his own vocabulary.

  Bukhanovsky perceived in Burakov something he had not seen in many representatives of the Soviet law enforcement establishment. He sensed a man eager to learn and willing to expose his own ignorance to do it. And he sensed as well that he might never have a more fascinating "patient" than the unknown killer who was leaving evidence of his afflictions on the bodies of so many victims.

  The two men reached an understanding. Burakov would open virtually all the files to Bukhanovsky, letting him examine crime scene reports, medical examiners' reports, and any other pertinent data. Bukhan
ovsky would, in return, write for Burakov a much more detailed profile of the killer.

  It was, as far as they knew, a unique enterprise in the annals of Soviet crime. In the United States, police departments and the Federal Bureau of Imestigation had a long history of working with psychiatrists. The FBI school in Quantico had an office of experts on serial killers and their mental quirks. Bukhanovsky and Burakov would be working virtually alone.

  For months, without pay, Bukhanovsky labored over his profile of the killer, which had grown to sixty-five pages by the time he finished it. He called the killer X.

  X was not a madman in the conventional sense of one with no control over his actions, Bukhanovsk wrote. "X controls the situation and its development in the direction he needs. He exercises care and farsightedness in the selection of his victims partners. His desires are accompanied by a strong sense of self-preservation. He probably feels a sense of superiority to the investigators, a sense of his own giftedness, a conviction that he is supremely farsighted."

  In fact, the psychiatrist deemed X a man of average, not excessive, intelligence. He had devised a fundamentally sound plan for murdering people and getting away with it, but he had not displayed the kind of improvisations and variations on the plan that Bukhanovsky would have expected from a man of superior intelligence.

  X was not a homosexual. "Women predominate among the victims, suggesting that the real object of desire for X is a woman, and the attacks on boys are connected not to his desire but to modifying factors of a practical nature. Boys are probably a vicarious surrogate. On the days that he killed them, he probably had contact with a woman that was broken off for some reason."

  As in 1984, when Burakov first sought his advice, Bukhanovsky excluded the possibility that a group of people was responsible for the murders. The killings were the work of a uniquely twisted individual, not the type to coordinate his activities and proclivities with others.

  X was not simply a sadist, but a necrosadist. He needed to see his victims die to achieve sexual satisfaction, and his killings were an analogue to sexual intercourse. After he lured his victims into the woods, he began his ritual by rendering them helpless with blows to the skull, either with his hands or the handle of his knife. Then he stripped them naked and either squatted beside or sat astride them. His knife became a surrogate for a penis that failed to function normally. He would begin with light, shallow knife thrusts that created the superficial wounds found in the victims' necks and breasts; they corresponded to foreplay. He would go on to deep, penetrating thrusts in the abdomen; they corresponded to the final thrusts of a man reaching orgasm.

  But X's actual penis remained in his other hand, or, perhaps, hidden in his clothes. He might on some occasions get enough stimulation from the sight of the victim's blood and death throes to climax without masturbation. He might on other occasions need to open his pants and masturbate with his free hand. That explained why the militsia found semen on some victims and not on others.

  Bukhanovsky offered four possible explanations for the blinding of some of the victims. X might find the eyes a sexually exciting fetish. Eyes might appeal to him as a symbol of his power and control. Or he might be unable to bear the gaze of his victims, even if those victims were helpless or unconscious. Finally, he might believe the old Russian superstition that the image of the murderer is left on the eyes of the victim.

  X cut out the sexual organs of his female victims to symbolize to himself his power over them. He might then smear his own body with the bloody organs, achieving further excitement. He might take them away and later eat them; Bukhanovsky had read of a nineteenth-century case in which a man made soup from his victims' organs and had an immediate erection and orgasm as he consumed the soup. And he knew of primitive tribes in which warriors believed that eating certain organs from the bodies of slain enemies endowed them with the characteristics of those organs. Hearts gave courage, testicles gave potency, and so on.

  In the case of boys, X probably cut off their sexual organs because the sight of them blocked his sexual arousal.

  Bukhanovsky gathered weather data for the days when killings had occurred. He noted that on most of those days, barometric pressure was falling; in eleven cases, it rained on the days of killings. The barometer also tended to drop one to two days before a killing and five to seven days before. To Bukhanovsky, this suggested that X's rage was triggered not by a feverish rush of hormones, as the Institute of Sexual Pathology in Moscow had contended, but by "changes in the physical condition of the surrounding environment . . . [and] changes in the psychological climate in his family or at work." In other words, if X was having a hard time with the people around him, and the atmospheric pressure dropped, something happened inside his brain to set him off. The weather, Bukhanovsky pointed out, had been particularly unstable in the summer of 1984.

  Bukhanovsky made a pie graph showing the days of the week when the killer struck. Most of the crimes had occurred on a Tuesday or a Thursday. There were no killings on Wednesdays or Fridays and only one on a Sunday; he apparently had other things to occupy his time on those days. Saturdays and Mondays were somewhere in between. Most likely this suggested that X was tied to a production schedule. He might work in a factory supply department or in a job where he was required regularly to check goods into or out of a warehouse.

  Unfortunately, some of Bukhanovsky's opinions were quite vague. X, he predicted, was perhaps six inches taller than the average victim, making him about five feet seven. That contradicted the evidence of the large footprints and the tall man seen walking with Dmitri Ptashnikov. But Bukhanovsky hedged his estimate by saying the man's true height could vary by as much as six inches.

  He hedged his opinion on X's occupation as well. He wrote that X might have sought a career that didn't require him to mix with people, such as being a mathematician or a physicist. Then again, he might be in an area that allowed him to vent his need to dominate people, such as being a teacher or a prison guard.

  X was probably between forty-five and fifty years old, because the psychiatric literature suggested that sexual perversions were sharpest at that age. He had suffered through a painful and isolated childhood, characterized by cruel discipline. He might have had to watch his parents have sex because the family lived in one room.

  The conflicts within him probably made X a taciturn and careful individual, Bukhanovsky wrote. Socially, he could be well adapted in a superficial way, and he might be competent at his job. But his defense against life's difficulties would be a retreat into an internal world filled with fantasies. He had probably never been adept at making friends, and he would probably have had to put up with a certain amount of ridicule from his co-workers because of his personal peculiarities. But he would flare up only if someone infringed on that inner fantasy world where he spent much of his time.

  X was incapable of a normal sexual relationship, flirting, or courtship. His sexual activity consisted of masturbation, and he probably could not achieve, or sustain, an erection during normal sexual intercourse. But, again, Bukhanovsky backed away from an unambiguous prediction. He could not exclude the possibility that X had fathered a family at some time in his life or that he was still married. He could, Bukhanovsky said, have a wife who demanded little of him sexually, perhaps because she was indifferent or frigid. His wife, if he had one, would be happy to let him keep his own hours.

  And whoever he was, X was not likely to stop killing of his own volition. He would be capable of stopping temporarily if he sensed an increased danger of capture. He might even be hiding the bodies of his victims more carefully at this stage, which would explain the sudden decrease in the number of bodies found after the summer of 1984. But only his own death or capture could contain the perverse fires within X that drove him to kill.

  Burakov found Bukhanovsky's report fascinating and persuasive, but also frustrating. It supported his belief that neither the persecution of gay men nor chasing after a supposed gang of retarded boys would
lead to the lesopolosa killer. It explained, as much as such a thing could be explained, the awful wounds inflicted on victim after victim.

  But Burakov longed for more practical information. If Bukhanovsky had said X's perversion was caused by the lack of the left testicle, the militsia could have organized the physical examination of every man in Rostov. If he had said that the killer was definitely a prison guard or definitely a bachelor who lived alone, that would have narrowed the search. But Bukhanovsky's report, boiled down, said that they were looking for a middle-aged man capable of hiding his perversion from all, or nearly all, the people around him—a man who might even be married and a father. That description could fit hundreds of thousands of men.

  Chance soon gave the Rostov investigators another window into the mind of a serial killer. In Stavropol, a city a couple of hundred miles south of Rostov (where Mikhail Gorbachev spent his formative political years in the local Communist Party organization), the militsia in 1985 captured a man named Anatoly Slivko. Over the course of twenty-one years, beginning in 1964, Slivko had killed seven young boys. The court in Stavropol sentenced him to death. In that part of southern Russia, death sentences were carried out at the prison in Novocherkassk, the city thirty miles north of Rostov that was the geographic epicenter of the lesopolosa killings. Slivko was, in the final days before his execution, at the disposal of the Rostov militsia, who ran the prison in Novocherkassk.

  Burakov, Fetisov, and Kostoyev agreed that it was worth studying Slivko to glean whatever insights they could into the mind of a serial killer. They knew that Slivko had no role in the lesopolosa killings. The Stavropol police had already accounted for his whereabouts on many of the days when people were murdered in Rostov oblast. And, he had type B blood. Burakox' requested copies of the investigative files from Stavropol and began reading them, looking for patterns of behavior or personal quirks that might help in the search for the man Bukhanovsky called X.