But by the end of 1988, it had become clear that all the leads had combined to produce nothing. No one with gold teeth had turned out to be a viable suspect. Neither had any of the Rostov business travelers to Ilovaisk, or the people with relatives there, or the people who had moved there.
It seemed that they were back to where they started when Aleksei Voronko's body was found. But in fact, by the end of 1988, they were back further than that.
Dr. Svedana Gurtovaya, the head of the biology lab of the bureau of forensic medicine of the Ministry of Health in Moscow, sent a disturbing letter to all Soviet law enforcement agencies at the end of 1988.
The letter said that investigators of sex crimes should no longer assume that blood types and secretion types were always identical. In very rare cases, she said, her laboratory had found that suspects could have blood of one type and semen of another. Therefore, she concluded, the only completely reliable way to determine if a suspect's semen type matched the semen type found at a crime scene was to get a semen sample from the suspect and test it.
Gurtovaya's assertion that blood and semen types could differ had no support in the world community of forensic scientists and physicians who specialize in the matter. Their opinion was that, given proper testing, only two results are possible. Either a person will have the same antigens in his or her blood and secretions— that is, a person with type A blood will have type A secretions. Or he or she will be a "non-secreter," with no antigens at all in the semen, saliva, and other bodily secretions.
In addition, studies were calling into question the competence of Soviet laboratories, suggesting a different explanation for the discrepancies Gurtovaya had found. Successful testing required not only skill and care on the part of the laboratory worker, who had to mix the semen sample with reagents and peer into the microscope to determine whether the cells were clustering or not. It also required proper procedures and a supply of accurately manufactured, consistent, and uncontaminated laboratory reagents. In the decaying Soviet Union of the late 1980s, none of that could be assumed.
A study published in 1989 by a scientist named T. V. Stegnova, in a Soviet journal called Forensic Medicine Expertise, reviewed nineteen Soviet sex crime cases and found that in eight of them, the laboratories had incorrectly analyzed semen types. In some cases, they had failed to use proper controls or to follow other vital test procedures. In some cases, Stegnova wrote, it appeared that the reagents used on semen falsely showed the presence of the B antigen. Criminals with type A blood and secretions had left semen that Soviet laboratories had typed AB.
As a practical matter, it made no difference to Burakov and his team whether Gurtovaya had discovered a new medical phenomenon or whether the laboratories that had been working on the case had simply botched their testing. In either case, the fundamental postulate of the investigative strategy could no longer be considered completely reliable.
For more than four years, since Dr. Gurtovaya's definitive statement that the semen found at the murder scenes was type AB, the investigators had grouped suspects by blood type. The operation to check drivers had screened one hundred sixty thousand men, selecting those with type AB blood for further checking. All the lists the investigators had compiled—business travelers, homosexuals, psychiatric patients, convicted rapists, cashiered militsionery —went through the same filter. Now, Dr. Gurtovaya was saying that there was a chance, albeit a small chance, that the killer's blood and semen types differed, and that he might have slipped through that filter.
Redoing all the work of the previous four years presented two difficulties that seemed overwhelming. The first was the sheer volume of suspects. The card file in Burakov's office by the end of 1988 had nearly fifteen thousand entries, and about half were men who had been eliminated from suspicion because they had A, B, or O blood. More important, there could be only one way to recheck, reliably, all the thousands of suspects: each would have to submit a semen sample.
The Soviet militsia followed a simple method for obtaining semen samples. They gave the suspect pornography and access to an empty room and tried to persuade him to masturbate. In routine criminal cases, this often worked. They could convince a suspect that they had enough evidence to convict him without the sample, and that therefore the sample could only help him. But the method relied on the suspects' cooperation and on the investigators' ability to show that they had other evidence against him.
Burakov could not imagine calling thousands of men into the militsia station and persuading them all to cooperate. Apart from the logistics of such an operation—Where would they get enough pornography and enough empty rooms?—there was the question of leverage. Soviet law did not give the investigators the right to demand a sample. In Stalin's time, it might have been possible to demand one anyway; a suspect would have known that the alternative to cooperation might be Siberia. In the era of perestroika and glasnost, the militsia could not make that threat. And suspects would soon hear, via rumor or the press, that it was in their best interests not to cooperate, and that there was nothing the militsia could do to force them. So, testing the semen of all the old suspects was not an option.
With increasing certainty, Burakov believed that they would have to catch the lesopolosa killer in an old-fashioned way. Either they would finally get a witness who could identify him or they would watch the railroads and bus stations so thoroughly that they would catch him in the act.
But the investigation was floundering in a miasma of frustration, confusion, and recrimination. Periodically, Isa Kostoyev, the procurator from Moscow, would arrive in Rostov and conduct a meeting. Burakov, Fetisov, and the local sledovatyeli would recite statistics about how many people they had checked out and how many more they planned to screen. Kostoyev would upbraid them for something like failing to coordinate their efforts. "Everything that's been said here, the enormous numbers cited, is all fine," he said at one meeting. "But I can't agree that this is a thorough investigation. Information comes in here and it doesn't go to the right investigator. It just sits in a pile."
Burakov, for his part, found it increasingly difficult to tolerate the sloppy work that was the standard for some of his colleagues. Several months after Aleksei Voronko's murder, he tried to have a militsioner fired. The man was a veteran of the Rostov city militsia who had been assigned to the lesopolosa team. Burakov had found that instead of doing the tedious work of checking out suspects, this officer was likely to absent himself from work. On one occasion, Burakov had heard that the man was drunk on duty. He complained to Fetisov that the officer's example was affecting the work of other investigators. If he could be sloppy, why couldn't they?
Fetisov did not fire the man. Firing someone in the USSR was a bit like firing a government worker protected by one of the more muscular Western labor unions. It required an enormous amount of red tape. Instead, Fetisov transferred him out of the lesopolosa group. That solved the particular problem of this officer's poor performance. But his work was only one egregious example of investigative assignments completed carelessly or not at all.
As the snows melted in the spring of 1989, Burakov and his team waited to see whether the killer would give them another chance to pick up his trail. They were not disappointed. On April 10, 1989, lumbermen in a forest near the Donleskhoz railroad station, midway between Shakhty and Krasny Sulin, found the body of a missing boy named Yevgeny Muratov. His wounds left no doubt that he had become a victim of the lesopolosa killer. The corpse was badly decomposed, but the medical examiners were able to establish that someone had stabbed him dozens of times and cut off his penis and testicles.
Muratov was, at sixteen, the oldest of the male victims, though he had the body of a younger boy. He was slightly built, dark-haired, and dark-eyed, and only a couple of inches over five feet. In contrast to many of the earlier victims, he was an excellent student. He came from Zverovo, a small town a short distance up the line from Gukovo, where the intemat for retarded children was located.
Mu
ratov had disappeared in the summer of 1988 after going to Rostov to fill out the papers to enroll in a school that trained workers for the railroad. On the day after he registered, he and his family were scheduled to go off on vacation, but he never returned home. The militsia in both Rostov and Gukovo had mounted an intense search; they had broadcast his picture on the oblast television station, asking for information. They had found nothing. And that was not surprising. The Donleskhoz station was some seventy miles north of Rostov and thirty miles east of Zverovo, in a remote area frequented mostly by woodcutters and mushroom gatherers. It had one thing in common with the sites where many of the earlier victims had been killed. It was on the elektnchka route between Rostov and Gukovo.
Most likely, Burakov thought, the killer had met Yevgeny Muratov on the train. He had come up with a convincing pretext to persuade the boy to get off at Donleskhoz. They had walked into the woods together until they reached the secluded spot where he killed the boy.
But this hypothesis frustrated Burakov all the more. Since 1986, the lesopolosa investigative group had been ordering special patrols on that very elektrichka line. They could not cover all the cars on every train, but they were supposed to be riding frequently and observing. They had particular orders to look for adult males leaving the train with women or children. But none of the militsionery on duty the day Muratov disappeared had reported seeing him—alone, in the company of the dyadya with the gold teeth, or with anyone else. Somehow, Burakov thought, the killer had a way of protecting himself from their surveillance. He felt the same disquieting suspicion that had troubled him when they questioned Sergei Kolchin, the militsioner at the shelter for the homeless in Shakhty. What if the killer was one of his colleagues?
The investigators had two leads to go on. Yevgeny's parents had said the boy was wearing a wristwatch inscribed "To Zhenya on his birthday, from Uncle Tolya and Aunt Raya." They had not found the watch at the scene of the murder. Presumably, the killer had taken it with him, and perhaps he had tried to sell it. Burakov ordered a thorough check of all the watch repair and second-hand stores in the oblast. It turned up nothing.
The ticket clerk at the Donleskhoz station, a woman named Lyudmilla Yepisheva, offered a second lead. In the summer of 1988, she said, she had seen a suspicious-looking man hanging around the platform. He had, in fact, tried without success to persuade her son, Slava, to go off into the woods with him. The police soon found this man, living in a nearby village. But he denied any knowledge of the Muratov murder, and they could find no evidence to contradict him. In fact, he had been a patient in a prisonlike hospital for alcoholics from December 1982 until November 1984, the period when most of the lesopolosa killings had occurred. That effectively ruled him out.
Almost from force of habit, the investigators checked out an old suspect, Yuri Kalenik. Kalenik had, by then, been released from prison, and he was back in Gukovo, working as a boiler stoker at the intemat for retarded children where he had spent his adolescence. He was, the intemat director assured them, a good worker who caused no trouble. Only the fact that he lived not far from Muratov made him a possible suspect. But Kalenik denied any knowledge of the crime. This time, mercifully, the syshchiki believed him.
And there the trail they had hoped to find petered out. The Muratov murder, far from helping to narrow the list of possible suspects, in fact expanded it. Since 1986, the investigators had found two victims that they felt certain belonged to the lesopolosa series: Aleksei Voronko at Ilovaisk and Yevgeny Muratov near the Donleskhoz station. They were still not sure about the unidentified woman killed near Krasny Sulin in 1988. This buttressed, in the minds of some of the investigators, the old theory that there had been at least two killers in the lesopolosa series, one killing males and the other females, and probably working independently of each other. The killer of boys, they suggested, was the one still active. The killer of women might have gone inactive for any number of reasons: imprisonment on another charge, suicide, or fear of capture.
Isa Kostoyev, who arrived in Rostov to supervise after the discovery of Muratov's body, leaned toward this two-killer theory. 'Tm not sure these murders were committed by one man," he said at an investigators' meeting on May 11, 1989. "From these corpses, it's impossible to conclude that."
Burakov still believed in the theory advanced by Dr. Aleksandr Bukhanovsky that a single, uniquely twisted individual was killing both males and females. But he did not argue with Kostoyev. Burakov had been working on the case, unsuccessfully, for more than six years. He was not in a strong position to dispute someone else's theory.
On the same day the investigators met, May 11, another young boy disappeared. Aleksandr Dyakonov had turned eight the day before. But his birthday had not been a happy occasion. Aleksandr lived in Rostov, where the schools were overcrowded and the pupils attended in two shifts; he went to the afternoon session. He was supposed to come home right after school, to the two-room apartment in a five-story building on Second Five-Year-Plan Street, not far from the helicopter factory where both his parents worked. But Aleksandr was not particularly obedient. As the days warmed up and lengthened, he liked to stay out with his friends, playing on the street or in a vacant lot. His father often beat him for doing this. He had beaten him on May 10, his birthday. On May 11, Aleksandr did not come home. Both his parents went out to look for him, but they found nothing.
The Dyakonovs called the militsia the next day, and a search was organized. There was no secrecy about this disappearance. The militsia printed a flyer with a picture of the little boy—smiling, wearing sandals and his blue school uniform, and carrying a book bag decorated with two Russian cartoon characters, a mouse and a cat. It was a picture bound to cause anyone who looked at it to wonder what kind of man could harm such an innocent-looking child. The syshchiki carried it door to door in the Dyakonovs' neighborhood. But they found neither the little boy nor his remains.
Much of the investigators' initial attention focused on the missing boy's father, Vladimir. Relatives were always among the first to be questioned when a child disappeared, and Vladimir Dyakonov aroused suspicion by his responses. He said nothing about beating his son; the syshchiki heard about it from the neighbors. Then he admitted beating the boy, but denied he had anything to do with his disappearance. The local syshchiki suspected otherwise. They called him down to the station for questioning nearly every day. After one session, Vladimir Dyakonov told his wife that they had promised him a Hght sentence if he admitted to killing his son and showed them where to find the body.
Two months later, on July 15, a Rostov taxi driver stopped to urinate in a bushy triangle of empty land formed by the fork of two roads, Nansen Street and Stayonnaya Street. Five feet from the edge of the road, he saw some bones and a book bag that bore the pictures of a mouse and a cat. The process of decomposition had gone so far that the Dyakonovs said they were not sure the corpse was that of their son. The militsia, comparing the skeleton's size with the size of the boy they were looking for, and considering the presence of the book bag, came to a conclusion less driven by parental hope. It was Aleksandr Dyakonov. The medical examiner soon told them what they needed to know to put him on the list of the lesopolosa victims. He had died from several dozen knife wounds, and his sexual organs had been cut off.
To Viktor Burakov, the discovery of Aleksandr Dyakonov's body suggested a change in the killer's behavior. In the Voronko and Muratov cases, he had stalked his victims on or near a train. The militsia had responded, in part, by increasing their presence on the trains and in the stations. Now it seemed that the killer had noticed. He had, to the best of the investigators' knowledge, found Aleksandr Dyakonov on a city street. He had killed the boy, under cover of darkness and in a thicket of bushes, within a couple of yards of cars whizzing past. Once again, he had shown an almost preternatural ability to avoid being seen. But he also seemed, to Burakov, to be showing the behavior of a man growing increasingly desperate, compulsive, and careless.
But the
next victim, who disappeared on August 19, 1989, showed that the killer shared none of the investigators' desire to impose a current pattern on his actions, either in the sex of his victims or the place where he killed them. She was Yelena Varga, nineteen years old, and she strongly resembled the string of young women who fell victim to the lesopolosa killer in his early years, from 1982 to 1986. They found her body in a woodland near the village of Rodionovo-Nyesvetaiskaya, thirty miles north of Rostov and far from any railroad. As far as the syshchiki could determine, she used buses when she traveled. But there was no doubt that she belonged in the series. Her killer had slit open her abdomen and removed her uterus. He had sliced off her nose and her breasts.
Nine days later, attention shifted to a ten-year-old boy, Aleksei Khobotov, who lived in Shakhty. He disappeared much as Aleksandr Dyakonov had, from Karl Marx Street in the center of the city. The investigators in Shakhty grilled Khobotov's father so intensely that at one session he fainted. But they could not find the boy.
The killer's rage subsided for a little more than four months. On January 14, 1990, an eleven-year-old boy named Andrei Kravchenko disappeared from the streets near his home in the center of Shakhty. His body, with the sexual organs cut off, was found several days later in one of the wooded strips not far from where he disappeared.
On March 7, 1990, a ten-year-old boy, Yaroslav Makarov, disappeared from a park near the Rostov railroad station. His body was found a few days later, the tongue and sexual organs missing.
Two months later, woodmen found a female's corpse, which could not be identified, near the Donleskhoz railroad station, not far from the spot where Yevgeny Muratov had been found a year earlier. The woman's uterus and breasts had been removed.
On July 30, 1990, in some woods on the left bank of the Don, near the city beaches that were filled with bathers in midsummer, workmen found the body of a thirteen-year-old boy, Viktor Petrov. He had disappeared on July 28 from the Rostov railroad station. He was a big boy, standing about five feet, six inches. But his body was mutilated just as those of the previous victims had been.
The Killer Department Page 17