The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  At that point, Burakov's list of probable lesopolosa victims numbered thirty-two. The number was still an official secret, as were the details of the wounds the victims suffered. But the existence in Rostov of a serial killer, or killers, was not. By 1989, thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost policy, newspapers and the oblast television station were no longer the docile instruments of state control they had been when the lesopolosa killings began. Censorship still existed, and editors still responded to suggestions from the local Communist Party hierarchy, but they no longer feared to publish anything not specifically authorized by the Party. They carried reports and pictures on each victim, generally urging witnesses to come forward and help the militsia.

  The panic that had set in during the killer's most feverish period in the summer of 1984 had subsided during the years from 1985 to 1988, when he had taken only a couple of victims in Rostov oblast. But by summer of 1990, after the discovery of the mutilated bodies of Yevgeny Muratov, Aleksandr Dyakonov, Yelena Varga, Andrei Kravchenko, Yaroslav Makarov, and Viktor Petrov, the cities were full of fearful rumors. The most persistent, reflecting the political tension among ethnic groups in the rapidly decaying Soviet Union, had it that a gang of cutthroats from one of the Transcaucasian republics was bent on killing and mutilating as many young Russian boys as possible.

  Mikhail Fetisov felt intense pressure to solve the crimes. The turmoil of the perestroika era had been a blessing to Fetisov. The leadership of the Ministry of the Interior in Moscow changed hands half a dozen times in the late 1980s. No single minister was in office long enough to set a deadline for solving the case and enforce it. The turnover was high in Rostov oblast as well, opening up chances for advancement. General A. N. Konovalov retired. Deputy Chief Pavel Chernyshev was transferred to a new post in Moscow. In the spring of 1990, the oblast Party designated Fetisov as its choice for commander of the entire oblast militsia and promotion to major general.

  But the Party could no longer place its choices automatically in plum jobs. The oblast had a new Supreme Soviet, or council, chosen for the first time in competitive elections. Just as the Supreme Soviet in Moscow was demanding, and receiving, the right to vote on Mikhail Gorbachev's choices for the Council of Ministers, the Rostov oblast legislators demanded and got the right to approve the Party's choices for the top administrative positions in the region. Fetisov, for the first time in his life, had to face the elected representatives of the people.

  He prepared a careful and constructive speech, outlining a program that he thought would allay the growing concern over street crime. He recommended purchasing a computer network for the department; by that time it had a handful of personal computers, but they were not connected in a network and played a very limited role. In Burakov's office, clerks had just begun the task of copying the information in his card file into a program that could sort and group suspects by criteria such as address, previous convictions, and, still, blood type. Fetisov recommended the construction of new apartments for the militsionery to help in the effort to recruit better-educated men and women. He recommended new radio equipment for the fleet of militsia cars to help them respond more quickly to calls for help. It was, he thought, just the right speech at a time when Russia was looking for new leaders with pragmatic and popular programs.

  But that was not on the minds of the legislative committee members who questioned him.

  "When are you going to catch the lesopolosa killer?" one of them asked.

  And the best Fetisov could do was to answer them as he answered Isa Kostoyev when he arrived from Moscow to check on the investigation. He recited the statistics: the number of investigators working on the case, the number of people already checked out, the number of people convicted of crimes that came to light because of the investigation. And he assured them that the case would be broken soon. They endorsed his candidacy, and he took over the big office on the second floor of the building on Engels Street and had a single golden star sewn onto each of his epaulets.

  But privately, Fetisov was seething. The investigation seemed to be falling into the same slough of incompetence and irresponsibility that afflicted the entire Soviet system. At a meeting of the investigation leaders on March 11,1 990, he thumped his heavy fist on the table and shouted, "Do I have to give one hundred and one orders before people start looking for Khobotov, and then Kravchenko? You people aren't carrying out orders! You're not supervising the work your subordinates are doing! Some of you are taking missing-persons reports on children lightly. When Makarov was reported missing, the militsionery didn't even find out what clothes he was wearing when last seen!"

  Then he threatened all of them, including Viktor Burakov. If the investigators' performance didn't improve, he warned, "people are going to be fired."

  But nothing the investigators tried worked against a killer who seemed to have the ability to select, mutilate, and kill his victims invisibly.

  On the warm, lingering evening of August 17, 1990, Burakov received word that another victim had been found, this time at the municipal beach in Novocherkassk, thirty miles north of Rostov. Recreational facilities were never high on the priority list of any of the towns in Rostov oblast, and the Novocherkassk municipal beach reflected it. To get there, Burakov's car had to slalom over one of the worst roads in the Soviet Union, a collection of razory ridges and cavernous potholes interspersed with crumbling bits of pavement. The beach itself was a spit of sand at a bend in the sluggish, turbid tributary of the Don called the Aksai River. A couple of rough, concrete booths served as changing rooms, and a pair of faded metal umbrellas provided some shade. Green reeds grew six or seven feet high along the bank on the beach side; the railroad tracks occupied the opposite bank. When he saw the setting, Burakov wondered immediately where the closest elektrichka stop might be; it turned out to be about a mile away.

  The victim was an eleven-year-old boy named Ivan Fomin, stabbed forty-two times and castrated, then left in the reeds about fifteen yards from the beach. He had last been seen on the street outside his grandmother's cottage on a bluff overlooking the river and the railroad tracks. It had been a hot day, and his grandmother, who was looking after him, allowed him to go down to the beach alone to swim. The little spit of sand was crowded that day with the usual crowd of Soviet bathers—small children and their mothers and grandmothers, splashing and wading, taking the sun in their underwear if they could not find a bathing suit big enough to fit them.

  But only the militsionery and the sledovatyeli were there by the time Burakov arrived to examine the corpse and the scene. The reeds were thick by the river. As Burakov pushed his way through, they closed behind him; a few feet into them and he could turn around and not see the beach or the river. He knew, from experience with similar beaches, that bathers would use the reeds as a quick alternative to waiting in line for the changing booth or the toilet. The reeds afforded a certain privacy. But it was still hard to imagine a man so reckless as to kill in these reeds on a summer day, a stone's throw from dozens of potential witnesses. How could he be sure no one would hear his victim's cries? The image that flashed into his mind was that of a wolf—brutal, quick, and cunning.

  The body lay in a small hollow in the reeds. As Burakov knelt down to examine the wounds, he thought of his own son, Maksim, who was about the same age and size as this boy. He bit his lip until he tasted his own blood. Frustration and anger reverberated inside his chest until his heart started to ache sharply, and he thought that this time he might be having a true heart attack, more serious than the coronary weakening that went along with his breakdown in 1986. He put his hands on the wet ground to steady himself Sweating, he shook his head, then got slowly to his feet. Gradually, the pain passed. The anger and frustration remained.

  10

  THE SNARE

  The elektrichka dominated Burakov's thoughts. So many of the killings had occurred near railroad tracks and railroad stations. So many of the victims had been riding the trains. Ivan Fomin was not one of the
m; he had, as best the investigators could reconstruct his movements, walked to the site of his murder. But the killer might well have used the elektrichka to get to the little beach. And the rumble of a passing train, fifty yards away, might well have drowned out the boy's last screams. The investigators had to find a way to make the elektrichka work for them rather than for the killer.

  Burakov ordered the usual steps after Fomin's death. Syshchiki questioned everyone who lived in the area. They released the news of the murder to the newspapers and the oblast television, asking for anyone at the beach that day, anyone who saw anything, to come forward. They found no witnesses.

  They checked out all the former mental patients, all the convicted rapists and perverts, all the known gay men in Novocherkassk. Nothing came of it.

  After seven years of fruidessly checking such leads, Burakov was not surprised. And after the pain of his team's failure to prevent yet another murder had subsided somewhat, he was even slightly encouraged. The killer had murdered five times already in 1990, more than in any eight-month period since the summer of 1984. Whatever it was that triggered his rages—hormones, as the experts in Moscow had suggested, or weather patterns, as Bukhanovsky had postulated—was obviously peaking again. The risky circumstances of Fomin's murder suggested that the killer was approaching a point of desperation and might soon make a major mistake.

  They might, Burakov thought, be able to arrange things on the elektrichka and at its stations in such a way as to induce the killer to make that mistake where they could see him. That was the essence of the plan that he and Fetisov put into operation as the summer of 1990 ended.

  Since 1984, they had been keeping watch at railroad stations and bus terminals, because that was where the killer most often selected his victims. Since 1986, they had assigned special units, both uniformed and in plain clothes, to ride the elektrichka, though these units had not covered every train every day. And though not all of Burakov's men knew it, some investigators had, since the discovery of Yevgeny Muratov's body in 1989, been secretly filming and photographing passengers on the trains, with the help of the KGB. Some elektrichka cars had dummy compartments packed with cameras. The investigators' luck had not been good; not once had they been able to go back to their film or to the reports of the operatives on the trains and find a picture or report of a victim or the man riding with him or her.

  Part of the problem, Burakov thought, was the sheer number of people who used the trains and stations, particularly around cities as large as Rostov and Shakhty. It was impossible for the operatives there, whether in uniform or plain clothes, to notice everyone. The discovery of two corpses—those of Yevgeny Muratov and the unidentified woman found in May 1990—near the Donleskhoz station suggested a way to improve the odds.

  Donleskhoz was one of three elektrichka stations in the middle of a forestry sovkhoz—the Soviet equivalent of a national forest. The Station consisted of a ticket booth and two low concrete platforms, with weeds sprouting through the cracks. Except on weekends in late summer, when Russians descended on the forest to pick mushrooms, very few people used it. Express trains on the Rostov-Moscow line passed it by; only the slow elektrichka stopped there.

  They could, Burakov thought, prod the killer into using that station again. They could blanket all the larger stations on the line with an obvious uniformed presence that the killer could not fail to notice. At Donleskhoz and the other two forest stations, Kundryucha and Lesostep, they would have only plainclothes operatives. If the killer selected a victim on the elektrichka, Burakov reasoned, he would want to lure the victim off the train at a station where the militsia were not in evidence. Only the three forest stations would seem safe to him. But the plainclothesmen there would have instructions to take the name of every person who left or got on the trains at those stations, particularly if they saw a single man with a woman, girl, or young boy. Other plainclothesmen would be stationed in the forest itself, disguised as sovkhoz workers.

  Fetisov approved the plan. It would be a major undertaking, requiring three hundred sixty men, both in uniform and plain clothes, to cover all the stations during the hours when the trains ran. He ordered the men deployed. By this time, the lesopolosa working group had grown from its original complement of ten men to include twenty-seven syshchiki working out of the Rostov headquarters under Burakov's supervision and twenty-eight sledovatyeli working from the Rostov procurator's office. Local militsia stations in Shakhty, Novoshakhtinsk, Gukovo, and Krasny Sulin had assigned seventy-two additional men to work full time on the case. Normal patrols were left unmanned and other work was left undone to provide the manpower for the operation, even though the overall crime rate in Rostov was rising. If the plan failed, Fetisov knew, he would have a very difficult time explaining his orders to his new masters in the oblast soviet.

  It was a very Russian plan. Marshal Kutuzov, who led the Russian army that defeated Napoleon in 1812, or Marshal Zhukov, who led the armies that rolled back the Nazi Wehrmacht in 1943, would have understood and appreciated it. They had both given ground to the enemy, sustained horrible casualties, and triumphed in the end primarily by throwing overwhelming numbers of men into the battle. They relied on numbers and persistence rather than brilliant tactics.

  The operation plotted by Burakov and Fetisov was imbued with a similar spirit. It recognized, tacitly, that the killer had thwarted all their efforts to identify him through the shrewdness of their deductions or through the work of their forensic laboratories. It accepted, tacitly, the fact that if the killer did show up at one of the three forest train stations, it might very well be in the act of luring another victim into the woods. The forest was vast, with many secluded groves. The plainclothesmen there might not stop the killer before another victim died. That was a risk the investigators felt they had no choice but to take.

  Just to make certain that there would be no mistakes, Fetisov called a special meeting of the officers supervising various aspects of the plan on October 27. He warned them that anyone who fouled up would be fired.

  By then, though Fetisov did not know it, the killer had already struck again, near Donleskhoz, one of the three stations targeted by the plan. On October 30, workers in the forest near the station found boy's clothing as they worked in a grove of pines. They alerted the militsia, and a search began in a cold, heavy rain. The next day, the searchers found the short, slightiy built body of a boy. He had been dead, it appeared, about two weeks. The wounds on the corpse left little doubt about the killer. The boy had been choked, then killed with twenty-seven thrusts from a knife. His left eye had been stabbed and his testicles removed. The tip of his tongue was also missing.

  A check of the missing-persons reports quickly established the corpse's identity. The boy's name was Vadim Gromov, aged sixteen. He suffered from mental retardation and he had, until April, been a student at an intemat in Shakhty. Then he dropped out and lived, officially, at least, with his mother. She saw him only sporadically. He spent most of his time riding the elektrichka. On October 17, he had taken seven rubles from his mother and said he intended to ride the train to Rostov or Taganrog, where word had it that some of the stores still had candy; the stores in Shakhty were out. His mother had not seen him again.

  The discovery of Gromov's body embarrassed and enraged Mikhail Fedsov and Viktor Burakov. The killer had gone to one of the three stations they wanted him to go to, killed, left a body, and gotten away. He did it ten days before the inception of their snare plan, but there were still standing orders to keep close track of stations up and down the elektrichka line. The surveillance records held no reports of anyone unusual at the Donleskhoz station on October 17, particularly not of anyone exiting the train with a sixteen-year-old and returning alone.

  Kostoyev, Fetisov, and Fetisov's newly appointed deputy chief, Vladimir Kolyesnikov, all left Rostov for Shakhty, where they set up field headquarters. Burakov remained in Rostov, monitoring and analyzing the information that began to come in from the dozens of s
yshchiki who questioned everyone living on the sovkhoz and from the watchers at the various stations.

  But that same day, the investigators got more bad news, this time from the local militsia in Shakhty. On October 30, a boy named Viktor Tishchenko, also sixteen years old, had gone to the Shakhty railroad station to pick up some tickets for a family trip to Novorossisk, a city almost three hundred miles to the south, where his aunt lived. He did not return. The next day, his distraught parents reported him missing.

  Alarmed, Fetisov ordered a thorough search of the woods near the railroad station. Three days later, they found the body, in some thick woods about two miles south of Shakhty station, closer to the next station on the line, called Kirpichnaya. The body was not far from the place where Tatyana and Svetlana Petrosyan, the mother and daughter victims, had been found six years previously.

  Tishchenko was bigger than any of the previous male victims— almost a man. He stood five six, and weighed about one hundred thirty pounds. The woods near the corpse showed the evidence of a long struggle: branches were broken and leaves churned up. But his struggle had failed. He had forty knife wounds, including a long slash that ripped open his abdomen. His testicles, like Vadim Gromov's, were gone. His eyes, however, had not been touched.

  The militsia surveillance had failed. Four militsionery had been on duty at the Shakhty station that day. None could remember seeing Tishchenko. Burakov and Fetisov could understand why. Thousands of passengers went through the Shakhty station every day. Some bought tickets and got on trains, some got off. Some simply hopped quickly off trains that stopped en route to Moscow or Leningrad and bought some mineral water or apples from the peasant hawkers on the platform. Then they got on the train again and left. It would be hard to pick out or spot anyone in this swirl of faces. Moreover, the men on duty in Shakhty had been told to be especially watchful for a middle-aged man with a girl, a woman, or a young boy. Tishchenko, nearly full grown, fit none of those descriptions.