Once the girls had been forced to comply, he would take them one at a time into the smaller room, where the walls were covered with pictures from pornographic magazines. There he would act out his fantasies with them.
This was not Mokhov’s first offense. In December 1999, a sixteen-year-old girl and her boyfriend visited him. He gave them alcohol, then began to make advances toward the girl. She rejected him and left, so he followed her out into the street, hit her in the head, and dragged her back to his bunker. For the next two weeks he kept her in the dungeon and raped her, until she managed to escape. However, she did not report the incident.
But Mokhov had learned a lesson and had tightened security.
“We tried everything to get away,” said Katya. “We tried to kill him once, a month after we were kidnapped. We attacked him and tried to strangle him with a heater cord. But he threw it off his neck.”
When that failed, they tried to persuade him to let them go.
“We promised him we wouldn’t go to the police,” Katya said. “And we meant it. But he said, ‘I’ll only let you go in twenty years, when each of you has given me ten kids.’”
Lena gave birth twice in the underground dungeon with only Katya and a medical manual Mokhov had given them to help her.
“I just helped Lena with everything,” said Katya. “The first boy, Vladik, was much healthier than the second, Oleg, who was small and blue, and did not cry. I was washing and cleaning the baby after tying up his tummy button and Lena collapsed on the bed. Could I ever imagine I would deliver two babies successfully? I don’t know how I managed.”
Both babies were taken away by Mokhov and abandoned on doorsteps in the small town of Skopin. Later, the two boys were adopted.
Katya was determined not to suffer the same fate.
“I was terrified,” she said. “Every day I would pray that I wouldn’t be pregnant. If I had been, I would have exercised my stomach so hard that I aborted the baby.”
For Katya, this brutal, humiliating experience was her first introduction to sex.
“I was a virgin when I went in there,” she said. “It was my first time. Just think how that makes me feel. He ruined something that should have been so special for me.”
Lena had a boyfriend at the time of the abduction, but after she disappeared, he assumed she was dead and married another woman.
There was little to do in the dungeon except await the next sex attack, though after the three years and eight months they spent in the cellar, Mokhov’s demands tailed off to twice a week. As the girls became more cooperative, he rewarded them with paints, pens, and paper, and some books. They also passed the time learning English. An exercise book they found on the floor was filled with neat handwriting in blue ballpoint pen. One entry read, “The remains of an extinct hippopotamus have been found by a party of Soviet and Mongolian paleontologists.”
The conditions they lived under were appalling. The walls were slimy and damp. They had two bunk beds with moldy mattresses, a small table, and a stool. To brighten their dull existence, the walls of the main chamber were decorated with posters of Madonna and Pamela Anderson, along with a religious icon and a landscape painted by Katya showing a woman standing by a river. Katya also built a castle out of matchsticks, which she took with her when they were let out of the cellar.
“There were two bunk beds, but we slept together,” said Katya. “At the beginning, we just lay on it with our arms around each other and cried all the time. During the first six months we were apathetic. We did nothing. It was only later that we started making our bed, cooking, keeping busy. We needed to make our life as bearable as we could to survive.”
They clung to each other and to the routine they built.
“Katya and I prayed every day,” said Lena. “We never gave up. We lived in fear of death but still hoped. We wanted to believe that one day he’d let us go, though he said, ‘Why should I? It is easier to kill you.’ But we planned it anyway. We always had a note ready with our addresses and what had happened to us. We tried to hide notes in the clothes of my second son but that bastard must have found them all.”
They certainly couldn’t reconcile themselves to being Mokhov’s sex slaves.
“He was a cruel, poisonous, sly, stupid coward—cruelty and cowardice were his nature,” said Katya. “Contact with him was the worst thing. He was old, smelly, and so ugly. Don’t think either of us got used to it.”
The girls started exercising every day, while Katya wrote poems and read. Then on May 1, 2001, Mokhov bought them a small black-and-white TV.
“We watched it for hours on end,” Katya said. “We even watched the ads with the same excitement.”
They saw Sabine Dardenne on TV after she was freed from Marc Dutroux in Belgium. That gave them both hope.
“We saw her smiling and saying she wouldn’t let this experience ruin her life in the future,” said Lena. “I remember turning to Katya and crying, like we did hundreds of times. I remember asking, ‘Will we ever give interviews and smile like this?’”
Later he bought them a tape recorder.
Eventually Mokhov began to drop his guard. He boasted to drinking companions about the “mini-harem” under his garage, and people became suspicious of the amount of food his mother, eighty-year-old Alisa Mokhova, was buying. Occasionally, he let them go up to the trapdoor and smell the air. It was their biggest treat. But then in the last few months of their captivity, he allowed them outside one at a time to exercise after dark.
Of course, he had an ulterior motive. He hoped they would help him seduce a female student who had moved into the house as a lodger. Katya was introduced to her as a relative. Then Katya was able to give the neighbor girl an audiocassette tape, ostensibly as a gift, and asked her to give it to the police. Inside was a note that read: “This person knows where we are.”
The plan worked. On April 26, 2004, the police, who had long since given up on finding the girls, assuming they were dead, went to Mokhov’s home and found them.
After being deprived of sunlight for 1,320 days, Lena could not walk more than a few yards without help. She smelled of mold, and her skin was light green. When she was released, Lena was eight months pregnant, but her third child was stillborn. She still didn’t know what had happened to her two other children.
“When they were inside me, I didn’t think of them as my children,” she said. “They were his babies, implanted against my will.”
But she could not suppress her maternal instincts. When the police finally rescued the two girls, her first words were, “Please, please find my babies and bring them back to me.”
She remained torn between her love for them and the feeling that they could never have a normal mother-child relationship.
“I don’t want to see them now, because I know I will only cry and get distressed,” she said after six weeks of freedom. “They will always remind me of him, and that’s not best for them. They deserve the chance of a decent life and I don’t know if I’m strong enough to give them what they need.”
Mokhov told investigators, “I wanted to have many children. I wanted to improve the demographic situation of Russia.”
Mokhov was sentenced to seventeen years in a labor camp plus two years in jail.
“Nothing is enough for him,” said Lena.
Badukina was jailed for fifteen years, but no charges were filed against Mokhov’s mother, who does not seem to have known what her son was doing.
Although Lena thought she would never trust another man, less than two years after she was released she married Dima Isaev in a Georgian ceremony. They had been introduced by Katya in 2004.
“I thought it was utterly impossible that I’d ever be able to love or even trust a man,” she said. “My wedding day felt like a miracle. It was as if I was watching a film. When I was in the cellar, I stopped dreaming of the future. I didn’t think I would ever get out. I thought I would die down there and never love again. If I’d imagined having someon
e to love me, I would have gone crazy. Instead, I focused purely on survival. I knew which thoughts it was safe to have and which ones were too painful to cope with… It still seems surreal that I have a normal life ahead of me.”
She also went to college to study journalism. She hopes to have children with her husband.
“I would like two or three,” she said.
When Natascha Kampusch was freed, Lena sent her a message.
“My message to Natascha is private, for her only,” it was reported. “I hope it will help her with what lies ahead. Back then I never would have thought that I could have a normal life ahead of me, so when my family and friends toasted us at our wedding last year it felt like a miracle.”
And when Elisabeth Fritzl was released, Lena and Katya sent a message of hope, saying, “We want to tell Elisabeth, it can be all right. Not all men are monsters. You can find true love, as we have. We know something of what you went through and will go through in the future as you try to recover.”
Katya added, “Elisabeth, please know you will recover and you will learn to trust again. Love can conquer anything, however horrific. Our lesson is that you can put all this ordeal somewhere at the back of your mind and get on and live a completely new life.”
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About the Author
NIGEL CAWTHORNE is known for his best-selling Sex Lives series, including Sex Lives of the Kings and Queens of England and Sex Lives of the Roman Emperors; the books are available in 23 languages. He is also the author of Serial Killers and Mass Murderers, Confirmed Kill, Warrior Elite, Canine Commandos, and more than 60 other books.
Text copyright © 2012 Nigel Cawthorne. Design copyright © 2012 Ulysses Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.
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