THE KILLER DEPARTMENT
DETECTIVE VIKTOR BURAKOV'S
EIGHT-YEAR HUNT FOR THE
MOST SAVAGE SERIAL KILLER
IN RUSSIAN HISTORY
ROBERT CULLEN
Pantheon Books New York
Copyright 1993 by Robert Cullen, Wevster Stone, and Robert Stone
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Pantbeon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,
Toronto.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collen Robert, 1949-
The Killer Department : Detective Biktor Burakov's eight-year hunt for the most savage
serial killer in Russian History / Robert Cullen
p. cm
ISBN 0-679-42276-5
1. Serial murders-Russia (Ferderation)Rostovskaia oblast-Case
studies. 2. Sex crimes-Russia (Federation)-Rostovskaia oblast-
Case Studies. 3. Chikatilo, Andrei. 4. Murderers-Russia
(Federation)-Rostovskaia oblast-Biography. 5.Insane, Criminal
and dangerous-Russia (Federation)-Rostovskaia oblast-Biography
I. Title
HV6535.R942R673 1993 364.1'523'094777-dc20 92-50776 CIP Map by Eric Elias Manufactured in The United States of America
First Edition
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Mary C. Carroll, with love and gratitude
CONTENTS
1. THE BODY IN THE WOODS
2. THE DETECTIVE
3. THE CONFESSIONS OF YURI KALENIK
4. GIRLS WITH DISORDERLY SEX LIVES
5. THE KILLER'S FEVER
6. THE GAY POGROM
7. A BODY IN MOSCOW
8. DEAD END
9. THE KILLER SURFACES
10. THE SNARE
11. CONFESSION
12. PORTRAIT OF A KILLER
13. THE TRIAL
A NOTE ON SOURCES AND NAMES
1
On a sunny Saturday in June 1982, a Russian girl named Lyubov Biryuk left her home in a village called Zaplavskaya to buy cigarettes, bread, and sugar. She did not come back.
Lyubov had just turned thirteen, but she was still a child, short and scrawny. She had light brown hair, cut close and blunt, chubby cheeks, a pug nose, and gray eyes set a little too far apart to be pretty. She was talkative and friendly. One of her uncles thought she was a bit simple, but she got average grades in school. She seemed, in all likelihood, destined to take a place beside her mother among the heavy, tired women who tended the grapes, the cows, the geese, and the pigs at the local sovkhoz, or state-owned farm. She had only one bad habit: though her mother had warned her against it, she liked to hitchhike.
Some of the peasants in the village of Zaplavskaya live in one-story cottages with carved wooden shutters and hntels painted a bright orange or blue, picket fences, tidy vegetable gardens, and perhaps a few plump chickens pecking by the roadside. A few have cars or motorcycles. But Lyubov's family had neither. They lived in a four-family concrete house, owned by the sovkhoz, at the end of a short, dusty path, surrounded by weeds and berry bushes. When Lyubov went on an errand, she walked up the path about seventy-five yards to the paved road, scattering the occasional cluster of sovkhoz geese. There, if she was being obedient to her mother's strictures against hitchhiking, she waited for one of the grimy little buses that occasionally clattered, their sheet-metal panels loose and flapping, down the road to the town of Donskoi.
Donskoi, named for the broad, placid Don River that flows a few miles to the east, has the closest stores to Zaplavskaya. Its population, of about five thousand people, works primarily at the Fiftieth Anniversary of the USSR Electric Power Station, whose triple smokestacks tower over the south end of town. The bus from Zaplavskaya to Donskoi stops at a traffic circle a kilometer or so from the power station, in front of a huge, red billboard with portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. From there, a paved walkway leads to the five-story apartment blocks in the town, past a statue of Lenin and a cultural center with an enormous mural immortalizing the deeds of Soviet soldiers in the Second World War. Opposite the mural stands an unnamed little store that then sold vodka, cheap wine, and cigarettes. Farther down the way, there is a grocery store called the Dawn, which generally displays some canned fish, loaves of bread, a few chickens, and a host of flies caught on a swatch of homemade flypaper. Outside, in the summertime, half a dozen peasant women wearing kerchiefs on their heads usually sit on low stools, their tomatoes and green peppers and carrots spread out on newspapers before them to entice shoppers disappointed with the offerings inside. Donskoi's secondary school is around the corner, behind a weedy soccer field.
When Lyubov's mother, Pelagea, returned from work in the cattle barn that evening and discovered that Lyubov had not come home, she assumed that her daughter had gone to visit relatives, most likely her grandmother in Krivyanka, a village five miles up the road. Pelagea, a stocky woman with a mouth full of gold-crowned teeth, had sisters, brothers, half brothers, aunts, and uncles in many of the neighboring villages. Her own parents had divorced after having two children, and her father had gone on to a second marriage and three more children. She had raised the younger ones. Then she had three children of her own—a girl named Nadezhda, another named Valya, who picked up a germ in a day-care center at the age of five and died, and finally Lyubov. The absence of her youngest child evoked more annoyance than alarm; Lyubov was supposed to let her mother know when she wanted to visit someone. Since Lyubov's grandmother had no telephone, Pelagea would need to make the trip to Krivyanka to confirm her assumption. She decided to wait until morning.
On Sunday, she rode the bus to her mother's cottage. Lyubov was not there. Nor was she with Pelagea's stepmother, nor with her sister, Nadezhda, in Semikarakorsk. Pelagea spent all Sunday fruitlessly calling on relatives. On Monday, increasingly worried, she walked through a driving rain to Lyubov's school, hoping that one of her schoolmates might have seen her. But the children were taking their final examinations, and the principal would not let her talk to them. Finally, on the verge of desperation, she called her half brother Nikolai.
Nikolai Petrov had done well for a peasant boy from Krivyanka. He was a senior lieutenant on the detective squad of the militsia in Novocherkassk, the nearest city to Donskoi. In Soviet parlance, the police had always been militsia, as if they were just a group of civilians working temporarily until the state withered away. Only bourgeois societies had police. At thirty-one, Nikolai was nine years younger than Pelagea, who had been more a mother than a sister to him. In his youth, he boxed and lifted weights and worked as a construction laborer. He was tough, husky, and handsome, with several distinguishing characteristics. His arms and hands bore a half-dozen tattoos. The knuckles of his right hand bore the letters valya, for his wife, and the knuckles of his left had the four suits of cards: spade, heart, diamond, and club. And he had a full, neatly trimmed beard, just starting to turn gray, which he had started to grow a few years earlier, when a skin condition prevented him from shaving. That gave him the nickname by which everyone on the streets and in the bars of Novocherkassk knew him: the Beard.
When he heard that his niece was missing, Petrov got permission to take a militsia car and drive the twenty miles to Donskoi to help his sister. Pelagea could tell him very little. Lyubov, she recalled, had been wearing white sandals and a thin, blue summer dress. Her most recent photograph had been taken four years earlier, when the child was nine.
Petrov took the picture and the description of the clothing, and began making the rounds in Donskoi. One of Lyubov's sch
oolmates, a boy named Yuri Popov, told Petrov he had ridden into Donskoi on the bus with her just after lunchtime on Saturday. They had gotten off in front of the big red billboard and walked together toward the town for about one hundred yards. Then they separated. Popov had gone straight ahead, to see a doctor at the town clinic. Lyubov had turned right, toward the stores. But in the liquor store, where she would have gone to buy the cigarettes, and in the grocery store called the Dawn no one recognized the photograph. It was summer, and a lot of kids were running around, doing errands, flitting in and out of the stores. It was not remarkable that no one remembered seeing Lyubov, particularly since the picture was four years old and she lived not in Donskoi itself but in a village a couple of miles down the road. Petrov learned one more thing. The early-afternoon bus that should have come through Donskoi toward Zaplavskaya had not run that Saturday afternoon. And there the trail ended.
Petrov had his suspicions. They were not pleasant, and he did not share them with his half sister. He imagined that, once Lyubov had learned that the bus was not running, she had decided to ignore Pelagea's warnings and to hitchhike. In Donskoi, on a warm, sunny Saturday in June, a lot of the traffic would be cars from cities like Novocherkassk and Shakhty, passing through on their way to one of the httle beaches along the Don. She might have gotten into a car with someone who invited her to go along for a picnic and some swimming. And after that, there was no telling what might have happened to her. The militsia focused their search on the roads and fields between Donskoi and the river. They found nothing.
Some two weeks later, on June 27, a middle-aged Donskoi man named S. A. Parukha, looking for fence posts for his garden, walked into a wooded strip between a cornfield and the Zaplavskaya-Donskoi road. Russia has hundreds of thousands of unnamed little woodlands like it, strips left natural by Soviet town and city planners who had decided that, in the workers' state, people should not be jammed together as they had been in the city slums and peasant villages of the old regime. They called such a woodland lesopolosa, an amalgamation of the words for forest and strip. But the lesopolosa, like so much of the Bolshevik experiment, had not turned out exactly as the planners envisioned it. The strips are everyone's land, and no one's. People use them to dump trash; that summer, there was a big pile of rubbish behind the Marx-Engels-Lenin billboard at the Donskoi bus stop. Even the woodlands without litter are usually untended and scruffy, broken by footpaths worn into the ground by weary Russians plodding from work to store to home. The lesopolosa along the Zaplavskaya-Donskoi road is about fifty yards wide and has a dirt path running down its length, like a spine.
Under a tall, spindly oak tree, in the midst of thick green underbrush, Parukha saw bones and flesh beneath a scattered cover of leaves and dirt. Bending over cautiously, he looked more closely. It was the body of a human being, almost completely decomposed, with a hank of black, wet hair hanging from the top of the skull. He left the woods and hurried to the Donskoi militsia station, only a quarter of a mile away, and reported what he had found.
The body was naked, on its back, head turned to the left. Its hands were raised to shoulder height, suggesting that the victim had died trying to fend someone off'. The knees were splayed about a foot and a half apart. Most of the flesh had already disappeared, but there were patches of dark brown skin on the legs, the skull, and the hands. The length of the hair hanging from the skull and the earring holes in the intact earlobes suggested the victim's sex.
The condition of the corpse left no doubt that this was a murder. Two ribs had been splintered, apparendy by a knife, and a closer examination found traces of twenty-two knife wounds, including, most curiously, several serrations on the eye sockets, suggesting that the victim's eyes had been gouged out. The killer's knife had left traces as well in the pelvic area, as if he, or she, had sliced away at the victim's genitals.
The local militsia thought immediately of Lyubov Biryuk, and they called Nikolai Petrov in Novocherkassk. He arrived before the body had been moved. For a time, he allowed himself to hope that this was not his sister's child. The hair on the skull was much darker than his niece's, so dark that it looked as if it had been clumsily dyed black. And the process of decomposition had gone so far that it looked, to him, as if the body had been there in the woods for six weeks rather than the two that had passed since Lyubov disappeared.
The Donskoi militsia left the remains in place for a few extra hours to allow another visitor, Major Mikhail Fetisov, to inspect the scene. Fetisov had just been named chief of the criminal apprehension section of Rostov oblast. He was, in effect, the chief detective for an area with a population of three million people.
Normally, the discovery of a single body in the woods would not warrant a trip out from militsia headquarters in Rostov-on-Don by a person of Fetisov's rank. Murder was an almost daily event in Rostov. Although the statistics were the closely guarded secret of a state that defined crime as an essentially bourgeois phenomenon, the oblast had four hundred or more homicides a year. The chief syshchik, or detective, could not take a personal hand in each investigation. But Fetisov, being new on the job, was making a point of visiting as many local departments as he could, sizing up the men he would be working with and setting an example of diligence. On occasion, he would spend a week at the scene of a murder, sleeping on a table in the local militsia headquarters, sharing food and cigarettes with the local syshchiki, supervising the first stages of the investigation. Politically, Fetisov hewed to conventional beliefs in discipline and order. But as a law enforcement officer, he was an agent of change, a representative of a generation that could bring a certain professionalism to the militsia.
He had no illusions about the abilities of the average Russian militsioner. He had been born not far from Donskoi, in the city of Shakhty, the son of a coal miner. (Shakhty means "the mines.") In those days, Nikita Khrushchev had decreed that every Soviet child, no matter how intellectually gifted, should get some practical worker's training, and Fetisov finished high school certified to drive trucks and operate bulldozers. After graduation, he worked for a while in a factory, until the inevitable draft into the Soviet army. Fetisov was stocky, strong, and quick with his hands. He became an army boxer, and won the welterweight championship of the Caucasus military district. One of his army buddies had a sister who worked as a criminal investigator. She would write letters describing the more interesting cases she worked on. Fetisov started to think about becoming a syshchik.
When the army discharged him in 1967, Fetisov found that the militsia would be delighted to take him on. In the Leonid Brezhnev years, the militsia and the Ministry of the Interior, which supervised it, both suffered from a miserable reputation. The minister, Nikolai Shcholokov, was infamously corrupt. When Brezhnev died, in 1982, Shcholokov committed suicide rather than face an investigation into his finances. While Brezhnev had been alive, Shcholokov had enjoyed immunity, in part because he employed Brezhnev's son-in-law, Yuri Churbanov, as his deputy, and Churbanov was also blatantly lining his own pockets. What began at the top extended down through the ranks. Nearly every Russian driver carried a bottle of vodka in his trunk, in case he got stopped for speeding. Handing it over to a traffic militsioner beat paying the fine for speeding. People who objected to the high prices charged for produce in the peasant bazaars in the big cities suspected that cartels of Georgian or Azerbaijan "Mafia" were paying off^ the militsia to look the other way when they beat up would-be competitors to maintain their monopoly. The militsia pay matched the job's prestige.
As a result, the militsia tended to fill its ranks with high-school dropouts from the collective farms. Even Fetisov's own relatives thought that having a militsioner in the family would be a step down the social ladder. They felt he would be better off going into the mines.
As a high-school graduate, a boxing champion, and a licensed driver, Fetisov had some leverage with the militsia recruiters. He demanded that they take him into the detective ranks immediately, and that he work from the start in
civilian clothes. Somewhat grudgingly, the militsia agreed.
On a force filled with men of limited education and integrity, Fetisov moved quickly and steadily upward. By 1982 he had been through two academies for advanced training, including the Ministry of the Interior's most prestigious school in Moscow. He had taken courses in economics at a civilian institute in Shakhty so that he could track down white-collar criminals. He had served as chief of a local militsia station in Shakhty. He had joined the Party. A spot in the Soviet nomenklatura was within his reach, if he succeeded at his new assignment.
To Fetisov, as to Petrov, the corpse looked as if it had been lying there for at least a month. He ordered a check of the missing-persons records to determine whether someone else matching the size and sex of the remains had been reported missing. And he summoned the cadets from the militsia training school in Shakhty to the scene to help conduct a thorough search of the area.
The next day, the cadets combing the surrounding underbrush found a white sandal and a yellow bag containing a package of Nasha Marka cigarettes—the brand that Lyubov Biryuk had been instructed to buy. Whatever doubts existed about the identity of the corpse all but vanished. Three days later, the body was officially identified by means of a fingerprint taken from a remaining bit of skin and matched with a print taken from a plastic cover on one of Lyubov Biryuk's schoolbooks. The process of decomposition, the medical examiner stated, had probably been accelerated by the heat and heavy rain in Donskoi that June. Not surprisingly, the rain had washed away any physical traces the killer might have left. They found no fingerprints, no threads. Nor could they find the girl's dress.
The Killer Department Page 1
