The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  Anatoly Slivko, Burakov learned, had been such a respected member of the community in Stavropol that he had been awarded one of the honorary titles that the Soviet Union bestowed in lieu of higher salaries. He was a Meritorious Cultural Worker; for many years he had headed a children's club called Chegid, organizing youth trips and activities. His hobby was photography. He was married, and the father of two boys.

  But Slivko had a hidden sexual problem. He had been born in a village in southern Russia, the child of a stormy marriage. At one point in his childhood, his father left his mother, although they later reunited and still lived together. Slivko had told the investigators that his family had a history of schizophrenia.

  Anatoly Slivko had little or no interest in girls as a boy and young man. He married at twenty-nine after a chaste courtship. His wife-to-be had taken his lack of physical interest in her for a becoming modesty. He was, at first, unable to consummate his marriage. He told his mother about the problem, and she persuaded him to consult a sex pathologist. The doctor had only laughed, prescribed a tonic, and told him everything would be fine if he relaxed. Eventually, he did occasionally manage a weak erection and quick, humiliating intercourse with his wife. But it had happened, he estimated, no more than ten times in seventeen years of marriage, and never after the birth of their second son.

  By that time, Slivko had already discovered what did arouse him sexually. In 1961, when he was twenty-three, he had happened to see a grisly traffic accident in which a boy of thirteen or fourteen had died. The victim had been wearing the standard Soviet schoolboy uniform: a white shirt, a red neckerchief, blue trousers, and black shoes. Slivko saw flames and smelled gasoline. There was blood all over the asphalt. And for reasons that he himself could not explain, this scene sexually excited Anatoly Slivko. He began to dream about it, to think about having such a boy himself, making the boy feel pain, and getting that feeling of sexual arousal again.

  Unfortunately, his work gave him a chance to do so. He developed a pattern. Once or twice a year, he would make friends with a boy of the right age, a boy who wore the requisite red neckerchief and black shoes. He would be a boy who had not yet begun his growth spurt and was worried that he would forever be shorter than his peers. After gaining the boy's trust, Slivko would tell him that he knew of an experimental way to accelerate growth. It involved a controlled hanging—to stretch the spine—while the boy was anesthetized with ether. Slivko would then take the boy into the woods and fashion a noose. The boy, wearing the neckerchief and shoes, would inhale the ether, put his head in the noose, and hang, like a man being executed. During this time, Slivko would take photographs or make a film and masturbate. Then, most often, he would revive the victims.

  It seemed incredible that he could persuade boys to do this, but over the course of twenty-one years, he had done so forty-three times. In thirty-six cases, he had revived the boys. They, cautioned by Slivko not to talk about the experiment, had gone on with their lives. It was a testament to the way Soviet society reared young people never to question authority figures.

  But seven times, Slivko's lust demanded more. In those instances, Slivko's behavior turned bloody. He dismembered and decapitated the bodies, taking photographs of the raw stumps where limbs had been. Then he poured gasoline on the remains and set them afire, reminding himself of the sights and smells from the auto accident that had first triggered his sadistic perversion. Then he buried the remains, took his film home, and developed it. The pictures and movies served as stimuli for his masturbation fantasies for months or years, until he needed fresher stimuli and killed again.

  Because of the long periods of time that elapsed between murder victims and the burial of their bodies, the Stavropol police had apparently never mounted the kind of intense investigation that could have captured Slivko earlier. The victims who disappeared were dismissed as runaways.

  Burakov asked Slivko to write him a letter, trying to explain the way serial killers thought and behaved. Slivko, facing death and eager to show that he felt remorse, complied.

  He wrote that many people had asked him how society could cope with killers like himself. He had given the matter much thought and reached several conclusions. People like him, Slivko said, all had difficulties engaging in normal sex. They were sadists, aroused by the blood and suffering of their "partners." They were prone to incessant fantasies and savored the act of planning their crimes. They had a nature that craved rules and discipline, so they created rules for themselves. They had rules for the kind of equipment they could use in committing their murders. They had rules for the kinds of victims they could select. Slivko, for instance, never selected a boy older than seventeen.

  Slivko suggested that Soviet schools, which studiously ignored all but the basic biological facts of reproduction, had to provide children with more knowledge about sexuality. "If I had had it," he wrote, "I might have gone to a doctor as soon as the first abnormal symptoms appeared." He suggested a vague kind of social campaign against perversion and homosexuality in the army, in the prisons, and other places where young men gathered. But he knew nothing about the murders in Rostov, and he offered no practical tips for catching the murderer.

  Burakov, Fetisov, and Kostoyev agreed that it could be worthwhile to drive to Novocherkassk and interview Slivko personally before his sentence was carried out. They met him in an interrogation room. He was a gaunt, haggard man with eyes that looked haunted by guilt, a shaggy dark pompadour, and a wispy mustache.

  How did his attraction toward boys arise, they asked him.

  "Without my wishing for it," Slivko replied. "I hadn't read anything about it, I hadn't seen or heard about such an attraction. It just came of its own volition." Then he told them about the automobile accident he witnessed when he was twenty-three.

  He had tried, he said plaintively, to control himself But the desire had become an arbitrary and dictatorial tormentor that seemed to exist as a force outside himself "It persecuted me constantly," he said.

  They asked him detailed questions about his murder ritual. Had he ever sodomized his victims? Had he ever massaged their sexual organs?

  Slivko seemed to pull back in disgust at the idea. He had had no such desire. He had simply used the tableaux he created, especially the boys' shoes, as masturbatory stimuli.

  They reminded him that the medical examinations of some of the exhumed bodies suggested that he had cut off their penises.

  "I don't remember that," he said. "If I did it, I can't explain it."

  Was he covered with blood after he dismembered the bodies?

  "Never," he said. "Because after the person was dead, the blood flowed very lightly."

  This was important. The Rostov investigators had often wondered why no one had ever come forward after a lesopolosa killing to report seeing a man spattered with blood leaving the area of a murder. This might explain it. Slivko was suggesting that an experienced killer would know how to kill without causing excessive bloodshed. He would know that once the heart had stopped, the blood flow ebbed to a trickle. And he would tailor his killing ritual accordingly.

  One of the more innocuous questions elicited the most remarkable answer. Had he ever used tobacco or alcohol?

  Slivko reacted slightly indignantly. He had never smoked. Once, he had tried to get drunk, thinking that it would help him feel attracted toward women. It did not.

  More importantly, he said, he took his duties as a youth worker very seriously. "I was always working with children, and I felt a responsibility toward them," said the man who had killed seven boys. "It was a matter of morality, a matter of principle, that I could not appear before them smelling of alcohol."

  That comment, as much as anything else Slivko said, gave the investigators a glimpse into the mind of the type of man they were seeking. Slivko was a man whose psyche was so compartmentalized that he could kill a series of children and still think it immoral to appear before children with liquor on his breath. The lesopolosa killer could be equally
compartmentalized. He could be living an altogether normal existence—except for the times when the sadistic lust that seemed to live outside him compelled him to kill.

  Something, however, had banked that lust. The melting snows of the spring of 1986 revealed no new bodies. Since the horrible summer of 1984, only one, in fact, had turned up in Rostov oblast—Inessa Gulyaeva in the summer of 1985. The public mood in Rostov reverted to its normal cynical apathy. The investigation rolled along like a great, suspect-producing machine, testing drivers and spitting out the names of those with type AB blood, and turning up occasional gay men, psychiatric patients, or sex criminals. But the near absence of new victims perversely increased Burakov's frustration, by adding to the questions he could not answer. Had the original lesopolosa killer left Rostov or just stopped killing in Rostov? Was he in jail, or had they come so close to catching him that they had frightened him into curtailing his killing? Could Inessa Gulyaeva be the victim of a different killer? He didn't know.

  Then, on July 23, the militsia in Chaltyr, a farming town south of Rostov, reported the discovery of the body of Lyubov Golovakha, thirty-three, a collective farm worker. She had been stripped naked by her killer, then stabbed twenty-two times. Near the body, the militsia found a scrap of cloth that looked as if it might have come off a man's shirt. They tested it and found traces of semen—type AB.

  Burakov had his doubts whether this killing belonged to the lesopolosa series. The victim had last been seen at a wedding feast, which she left at one o'clock in the morning to walk home. And her killer had not cut her breasts or her sexual organs. After what he had heard from Bukhanovsky and Slivko, he had an enhanced appreciation for the importance of ritual and rules in the mind of the lesopolosa killer. He had always selected his victims in the daytime or evening, and always near or on public transport. And he had always, in the cases where enough of the body remained to make a determination, turned his frenzy on the victim's sexual organs.

  The Golovakha investigation turned into frustrating work over a long, hot summer. Nearly all Golovakha's neighbors were Armenian peasants, descendants of the Armenians invited into the Rostov area by Empress Catherine II in the 1750s. They did not talk readily to outsiders, particularly Russian syshchiki. The investigation produced no witnesses and no leads. Burakov kept the murder on the lesopolosa list, though he suspected Golovakha had been killed by someone she knew, due to something that happened at the wedding feast.

  Then, on August 18, the militsia in Bataisk, one of Rostov's industrial suburbs, reported the discovery of the body of a young woman named Irina Pogoryelova on the grounds of a collective farm. This time, the lesopolosa killer appeared to have left an unmistakable signature. Her body had been slit open from her neck to her genital area. One breast had been hacked off, there were numerous shallow knife wounds, and her eyes had been cut out.

  But there was an intriguing new quirk in the crime scene. Pogoryelova's body had been left in a natural depression, almost a pit, in the earth. Then the killer had apparently gone to a greenhouse about three hundred yards away and stolen a shovel. He had used it to make a serious effort to bury the body. Previously, his attempts to cover his female victims had seemed to Burakov largely symbolic; he had used leaves or branches. This time, the killer had apparently wanted to really conceal the body; only a hand had been visible above the ground. The medical examiners estimated that Pogoryelova had been dead for a week before dogs happened to sniff out her remains. Could this explain the relative dearth of new victims since 1984? Were there more bodies out there, buried deeper?

  Pogoryelova, it turned out, held a responsible job as a secretary in the local criminal court. But she also, the syshchiki soon established, led an extremely active and varied sex life. Some of her partners were men she met at the courthouse, and not all of them had come there on the right side of the law. Burakov's team quickly assembled a thick file of potential suspects whose whereabouts on the day she disappeared had to be checked out.

  But he suspected, even as he ordered the work, that all her prior sexual contacts would prove to be false leads. The killer would turn out to be a man just passing through Bataisk, a man she hadn't known until she met him, perhaps at a bus stop or on a train, when she agreed to go somewhere with him. They knew only that the man had type AB blood and at least twenty-six prior victims.

  So many of the investigators' leads and plans frittered away after enormous expenditures of money and manpower.

  Shortly after the initiation, in early 1986, of the operation to check all drivers and investigate the ones with type AB blood, Burakov got some disturbing news. Thieves had broken into the city hospital in Aksai and stolen the rubber stamps used to denote blood types A and O on official documents.

  He could guess why. It would not take long for criminals in the Rostov region to figure out that the militsia were looking for people with type AB blood. The way for a criminal to avoid a potentially damaging investigation was to have a stamp on his driver's license or in his passport certifying his blood as any type other than AB. Now there were people ready to sell such a stamp. All that their checks of drivers had accomplished, Burakov thought, was the creation of a new black market enterprise. The operation went on nevertheless.

  A year into the investigation of all the Fischers in Rostov oblast, in the autumn of 1986, the investigators got new word from Moscow. The boy who had originally reported seeing the man had recanted. Now he said he had made the whole story up.

  At about the same time, the team of handwriting experts in Novoshakhtinsk gave up. After three years of effort, they had been unable to find any documents with writing that matched the style of the Black Cat postcard.

  The advent of glasnost made it possible for the militsia to publish, in coordination with the editors of the Rostov newspapers, a few cautious stories that suggested the existence of a serial killer and grouped some of the victims' photographs. They asked the public to respond with information.

  In response, they got a steady stream of telephone calls and letters attesting to the miserable state of many Rostov marriages. Women complained that their husbands asked them for perverted sex, or beat them, or stayed out all night for no good reason. The militsia checked all these "leads" out. In many instances, they found that the couple was divorcing, and the woman had decided that she would rather see the man in jail then split up the communal property with him.

  In some cases, the receipt of such a tip would devastate a man's life. The militsia investigated one respected, married university instructor after receiving a tip that he drove around the city at night, trying to pick up girls. They found no connection to the lesopolosa case, but they did find that the man had a pornography collection and a string of liaisons with students. He lost his job.

  By the autumn of 1986, the men in Burakov's special department had decided they had to work harder on the possibility that the killer had relocated, to another part of the Soviet Union. Since the summer of 1984, there had been only two—or three, depending on how Lyubov Golovakha was classified—^victims found in Rostov. Natalia Pokhlistova's murder in Moscow in the summer of 1985 established the fact that the lesopolosa killer could travel outside his original home territory. It was entirely possible that he had moved to another city and that the militsia in his new home had encountered a couple of bodies and not yet realized they were part of a series begun in Rostov. He could be returning for summer vacation visits to Rostov, which would account for the fact that the three post-1984 victims found in Rostov were all killed in the summer months.

  Burakov and his crew began to work on a booklet about the case, to be sent to militsia departments throughout the Soviet Union. Burakov found writing it a useful exercise, for it forced him to collect and classify all the data about the murders. He made a chart showing all the victims. In a row running to the right of each name, he placed notations indicating the presence or absence of the clues found until that time: eyes cut out, semen samples, disfigurement of the corpse, and so
on. He listed the sex, age, and characteristics of the victims. Thirteen of the twenty-seven victims were homeless or tended to wander. Twelve had promiscuous sex lives. Five had psychiatric problems.

  He boiled down the killer's modus operandi. Only two common threads ran through all the cases. All the bodies had been found near a road, and all had been killed with a knife. There were many disparities. Seventeen of the victims were women over sixteen. Four were girls under fifteen. Five were boys, all under fifteen. Most came from Shakhty and Rostov, but there were three from Novoshakhtinsk and others from scattered rural areas. Some had had their sexual organs completely removed and some had not. Some had had their eyes removed but others, particularly among the more recent victims, had not. The killings for which they could establish the exact time of death had occurred on every day of the week except Wednesday and Friday, although the killer seemed to prefer Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  Compiling the list of suspects was the most embarrassing part of the exercise. The investigators culled from the files a list of twenty-two prime suspects and forty-four lesser suspects; then Burakov ranked them in the order of likely culpability.

  But it was, he felt, an implicit admission of failure. The case against each suspect on the list had huge, disqualifying holes. There was not one truly likely suspect that Burakov could cite. The first six places were occupied by Kalenik, Tyapkin, and their various friends from the intemat for retarded youth. Then came Nikolai Byeskorsy, the drunken baggage handler at the Rostov airport who had had an assignation in the woods in Aviators' Park. Artur Korshenko, the drug user from Aksai who killed Tatyana Polyakova, was next; but he had type A blood, and Burakov was already satisfied that he was guilty only of the single murder to which he had confessed. The ninth suspect was Andrei Chikatilo, the man whom Aleksandr Zanasovsky had shadowed through the Rostov bus and train stations. But Chikatilo also had type A blood.