The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  They were the bones of a young woman, in her late teens or early twenties. She was lying, naked, on her back. Her body had been sliced open from the breastbone down. The killer had amputated both nipples and one entire breast. He had slashed at her left eye.

  The remains matched none of the current missing-persons cases around Novoshakhtinsk. The militsia could not establish an identity, and without an identity it was hard to investigate. But the medical examiner said the body had been lying in the woods since July or August. Yuri Kalenik had been at large in those months.

  On October 30, near Shakhty, the militsia found a corpse harder to reconcile with the theory that Yuri Kalenik committed the lesopolosa killings. It was another young woman, half covered with dirt. She had been dead only three days, which meant that Kalenik had been in custody for about six weeks when she died. Her wounds seemed to identify her as part of the lesopolosa series. Her murderer had bashed her skull in, presumably with the blunt end of his knife. He had strangled her. Then, in a frenzy that was by now becoming familiar to the medical examiners, he had tried to remove virtually all her female physical characteristics. He had cut open her abdomen and removed her uterus, her clitoris, and the labia of her vagina. He had sliced off her nipples. Searchers, combing the woods, found neither the excised organs nor the victim's clothing.

  One fact distinguished this case from the lesopolosa killings. The victim's eyes had not been touched.

  Three weeks later, working with a fingerprint taken from the corpse, the investigators established the victim's identity. She was Vera Shevkun, nineteen years old, a school dropout who lived, officially at least, with an aunt in Shakhty. She had no job and wandered about, frequently riding the elektrichka. She drank heavily, and she led what the militsia reports described as a "disorderly sex life."

  The investigators in Shakhty checked out Shevkun in all the known pritony in the city. A priton is an apartment whose tenant allows criminals to use it as a hangout. Sometimes the tenant is himself a criminal. Sometimes he simply likes the side benefits: an occasional stolen television set, some illegal drugs, or a woman. Shevkun, it turned out, had been hanging out in a Shakhty priton in the days before her death; according to the Shakhty investigators, she had slept with several men in succession there. Most intriguing of all, one of the witnesses said that, on the night before her death, a man rumored to be a militsioner in plain clothing had visited the prison. The Shakhty investigators, though, had been unable to determine which militsioner, if any, the witness had seen.

  Burakov, still charged with completing the case against Kalenik, monitored the reports on this new investigation. He had wondered how the lesopolosa killer had been able to lure his victims away from their trains and buses without a struggle. One possible explanation was that the killer was someone with an appearance of authority, someone in uniform. He might, Burakov thought, be a militsioner or, more likely, someone who had been fired from the militsia. Or he might be the man seen in the priton the night before Vera Shevkun died. But this case raised other questions. How could the killer, he wondered, know enough about anatomy to remove a woman's uterus? Could he be a physician or someone who worked in a morgue? What kind of sickness motivated him? Was he even the lesopolosa killer? And if he was, why had he broken his pattern of attacking eyes?

  On November 27, in the woods south of Skakhty, not far from a railroad station called Kirpichnaya, yet another skeleton turned up. This victim had apparently been dead for several months, since summer. Animals had scattered the bones about the site. But there were cuts on the left eye socket. The investigators found some clothing nearby, but the pockets contained only two movie tickets for a theater in Shakhty. The syshchiki there could not identify the body.

  Still more questions arose. The apparent time of death, in late summer, left open the possibility that Yuri Kalenik had killed her. But if Kalenik had killed her, why had he not mentioned this victim in his confession? And if this was not Kalenik's work, why was the victim's left eye socket cut?

  The new year, 1984, entered with at least nine unsolved lesopolosa murder cases on the books of the Rostov militsia. Then, on January 4, a hunter walking on a ridge overlooking the Rostov-Shakhty rail Hne found the body of a boy, covered with pieces of clothing and a wispy coating of snow. Mikhail Fetisov led the militsia team that drove out from Rostov to examine the corpse and the site. It was not far from Kazachi Lagerya, the railroad station and military base where the still-unidentified woman's corpse had been found in the autumn of 1982.

  Fetisov already had an idea about the new victim's identity. A week earlier, on December 28, the militsia had received a report on a boy named Sergei Markov, fourteen years old. Markov lived in Gukovo with his grandfather, and he had a good school record. In accordance with Soviet practice, he had been spending time during the fall semester getting some practical work experience at an agricultural equipment factory called Krasny Aksai, in a small city adjacent to Rostov. On December 27, he had left home, planning to take the elektrichka to the factory to collect some belongings he had neglected to bring home. He never came back. The preliminary description of the body fit Markov.

  Near Novocherkassk, Fetisov and the other militsionery left the paved road and took a dirt road to the ridge where the hunter had found the body. The decomposed remains he had seen in Donskoi and other crime scenes had not prepared him for the body on the ridge. The cold weather and the snow had preserved it like a morgue refrigerator. The killer had perforated the boy's neck dozens, scores of times; the medical examiner would later count seventy wounds there, most of them light and superficial, suggesting how much the killer enjoyed seeing his knife enter his victim. Sergei Markov had suffered dismemberment analogous to that of Vera Shevkun. The killer had excised his testicles, his penis, and most of the scrotum. Turning the body over, they could see signs that his anal sphincter had been stretched and broken. Fetisov shuddered and hoped that the boy had died of his neck wounds before that had happened to him. Nearby, they found his clothes and, curiously, three separate piles of human excrement.

  In the valley below, perhaps a mile away, an elektrichka rumbled along, slowing for a stop at a rural station called Persyanovka. Most likely, Fetisov thought, the killer—or killers—had met the boy on the train, somehow lured him off at Persyanovka, and then killed and mutilated him. How did the killer lure the boy off the train without being noticed? And why did he kill so sadistically? And how did he do it and walk away without being seen or heard by witnesses? Was the same person dispatching males and females? Or was this a new killer? Fetisov realized that he had wondered about some of the same questions as he examined Lyubov Biryuk's body in Donskoi, eighteen months and perhaps a dozen murders ago. With a sinking feeling, he began to suspect that, despite the arrest of Yuri Kalenik, he might be no closer to the answers than he had been then.

  Fetisov began his investigation of Markov's killing in Gukovo, where the boy had boarded the elektrichka. It might not, he thought, be coincidental that Markov's last trip began in the same little town that contained the internal for retarded children. He stopped at the school and found the conditions as appalling as Burakov had a few months earlier. Stifling his disgust, he asked the director if any of her charges had been out and riding the trains on December 27.

  As it happened, a former student, Mikhail Tyapkin, had been at the internal that day, and had left to catch the same train Markov had taken. Tyapkin was twenty-three, severely retarded, and massive. He stood almost six feet three inches and weighed over two hundred pounds. He had spent most of his life in intemati, and it had taken years for him to learn to talk. After he had grown too old for the internal in Gukovo, the director said, he had been assigned to an adult home in Shakhty. He had shown up at the internal that day to hang out before the director shooed him away.

  Fetisov ordered his men to find Tyapkin. He was not at the adult home in Shakhty. He had not shown up at the home of his closest relatives in a village called Gorny. But the relatives
suggested that the militsia check with Tyapkin's friend, another retarded boy, named Aleksandr Ponomaryev, at yet another internal, near Gomy. Ponomaryev was described as short and slender. He was seventeen. Later that night, Fetisov got a telephone call at his hotel. The local militsia near Gomy reported triumphandy that Aleksandr Ponomaryev had been found and questioned. He had confessed that he and Tyapkin murdered Sergei Markov.

  Fetisov ordered them to stop the interrogation until he could get there. Early the next morning, he conducted his own interrogation of Ponomaryev. Ponomaryev told a plausible story. He and Tyapkin had gone to Persyanovka in hopes of watching an exercise by tanks from nearby Kazachi Lagerya; the tanks, in winter, used the local fields for mock battles. At the station they had met Sergei Markov. They had bought some wine and bread at the station's snack counter. Tyapkin had invited Markov to go for a walk. After walking out of sight of the rail line, he had killed him.

  Fetisov tried to check out the story. At the station, the woman behind the snack counter confirmed part of Ponomaryev's story. She had seen him on December 27. He had tried to buy wine, but she had refused to sell it to him because he was under age. Ponomaryev had gone and gotten someone bigger and older, who then bought the wine. Yes, she said, looking at a picture. It was Tyapkin.

  "Can you show us where you killed Markov?" Fetisov asked.

  "Yes," Ponomaryev replied.

  The boy led the group of militsionery, along with four citizen witnesses enlisted for the occasion, out along the railroad tracks. For a while, Fetisov thought, he was going in the wrong direction. Then he turned off the tracks and led them up through the muddy field and thorn bushes toward the site of the murder. But he walked past the site and circled around, evidently looking for something.

  "What are you looking for, Sasha?" Fetisov asked him.

  "For the shit we left here," Ponomaryev answered.

  That persuaded Fetisov. The three piles of feces, he knew, had been removed by the investigators. He had written about it in the protocol of the crime scene examination. How could Ponomaryev know about them if he had not participated in Markov's murder?

  A short time later, the militsia found Mikhail Tyapkin. He was not as bright as Ponomaryev and, to Fetisov, not as useful a witness. At the Persyanovka railroad station, he could not get oriented.

  But, yes, Tyapkin said, he had killed someone. He had caught a partisan (a guerrilla fighter during the German occupation) on the train, killed him, and cut off his testicles.

  Not only that, Tyapkin's confession went on. He had killed Vera Shevkun. And there was a psychiatrist working at the home he lived in whom he would like to kill. He wanted authorization to drive a tractor, and she refused to give it to him. He wanted to fuck her and cut off her breasts. He had already killed another girl, he said. He had tossed her body into a hole near a gas station and covered the body with branches.

  Fetisov ordered a search around the gas station. It yielded nothing. But two weeks later, the militsia searched again. They found a woman's body.

  Meanwhile, two more bodies were found in different areas of Rostov oblast, one near Salsk and one near Rostov. Ponomaryev confessed that he and Tyapkin had killed both victims.

  Very quickly after that, though, the local militsia found other suspects, who also confessed. One of them was caught with a victim's jewelry.

  The investigation was beginning to resemble a juggler trying to keep too many eggs in the air as the barrage of bodies, suspects, and confessions got heavier. If Ponomaryev and Tyapkin had confessed to two crimes they had not committed, could their confessions in the Markov case be valid? If they weren't, how had Ponomaryev known about details like the piles of feces and the site of the crime? How had Tyapkin known about the body near the gas station?

  Most of the Rostov militsionery were ready to ignore the discrepancies and press ahead with the prosecution of what they were now calling the "Kalenik-Tyapkin Gang." Pavel Chemyshev, the deputy chief of the oblast force and Fetisov's boss, held that view. So did Igor Zakshever, Fetisov's deputy in charge of the division of very serious crimes. Fetisov and the procurator, Aleksandr Ryabko, wavered in the middle.

  Viktor Burakov stood, more or less alone, on the other side. The reports he was reading about the "gang" failed to persuade him. From what he had seen at the crime scenes, it seemed highly unlikely that more than one person could have taken part in any of the lesopolosa killings. Burakov had a difficult time conceiving of the personality that could inflict such wounds. That such a personality could have friends and accomplices struck him as impossible. He had seen enough in the Kalenik investigation to discount Ponomaryev's performance at the crime scene. Ponomaryev might have heard enough during his first interrogation, before Fetisov's arrival, to know that the killing occurred on the ridge above the railroad and that the investigators had found feces near the body. Tyapkin, in his wandering, could have stumbled across the woman's body. The two additional murders that Ponomaryev had admitted to, which were subsequently found to be the work of others, only strengthened Burakov's suspicion that neither Ponomaryev nor Tyapkin had killed anyone.

  Early in 1984, word came from the medical examiner that fundamentally altered the investigation. The examiner had found a small quantity of semen in Markov's anus.

  The presence of semen suggested several things. First, it appeared that Markov had been raped before being killed. The previous corpses in the lesopolosa series had either decomposed too far or been too brutally mutilated to allow a finding of rape.

  But who would rape a boy? Could the killer be a homosexual? Could a homosexual also have killed the female victims?

  Equally important, the semen was the first physical evidence that the killer, or killers, had left behind.

  The first task was to type it. In those years, in the United States the FBI was developing genetic identification of samples of semen and other secretions, like sweat and saliva, that police encountered at crime scenes. By analyzing the DNA found in a secretion and comparing it to a suspect's, the FBI could make as precise an identification as it could with a fingerprint.

  But such tests were years beyond the capability of Rostov's crime lab. In Russia, forensic laboratories tested secretions only for the antigens found in blood. In about eighty percent of a given population, a person with type A blood, for instance, will also have the A antigen in his secretions. (The remaining twenty percent, which show no antigens, are called non-secreters.) In Russian labs, technicians applied standard laboratory antibodies to a blood or sperm sample. Then they examined it under a microscope. They looked to see if the sample cells, which looked like the tiny bubbles in champagne, remained separate or began to lump together in clusters. A sample that reacted to neither the A nor B antibody was type O, the blood type with neither antigen. If it reacted to both, it was type AB, the rarest blood type, possessed by only six percent of the population.

  The initial lab report on the semen found in Sergei Markov confirmed Burakov's doubts that Kalenik or Tyapkin or any of the other boys from Gukovo had been involved. It said the semen was type O, and none of them had type O blood.

  But a couple of days later, the lab corrected itself It had mixed up the sample from Markov with another, the medical examiner's report said. The actual semen sample appeared to be, if nothing had contaminated it, type AB, the type found in only six percent of any given population.

  That was Mikhail Tyapkin's blood type.

  4

  GIRLS WITH

  DISORDERLY

  SEX LIVES

  In 1984, bodies turned up continually, as if silently to mock the pretensions of those who thought they had solved the case. On January 10, someone walking a dog in the woods near the Rostov airport discovered a young woman's remains, naked from the waist down and half hidden in a thicket, on a blanket of snow and dead, rotting leaves. She lay no more than one hundred fifty yards from the spot where, six months previously, someone had killed Irina Dunenkova.

  Mikhail Fetisov, when h
e got word of this discovery from the local militsia, ordered them to stay clear of the scene until his staff could arrive. When he got there, he could see that this victim had been dead for only about a day; she had died after both Tyapkin and Kalenik were in custody. In twenty-four hours, time and nature had erased none of the traces of her killer's rage. A knife had ripped her nose and upper lip from her face, then torn open her dress and her body from the neck down. Her breasts, her neck, and belly showed approximately thirty cuts, some shallow and some deep, from the point of the killer's blade. But her wounds differed in two respects from those found earlier in the Rostov woodlands. Her eyes were intact. And the ring finger of her left hand had been cut off. The searchers at the scene found a cheap metal finger ring not far from the body. In the mud near the scene, they found a footprint, a huge one. Whoever left it there had a size thirteen shoe.

  The investigators also found traces of semen and blood on the victim's clothing. They sent them to the laboratory at the Rostov Institute of Medicine for testing.

  Fetisov ordered in bloodhounds. They sniffed around the scene and then tugged their handlers north, toward a little village in the woods called Lesnichestvo, a collection of half a dozen buildings that housed workers who harvested the trees in the state forest. Syshchiki went door to door in the village. Several residents said they had heard a brief, piercing scream in the woods on the previous afternoon. None of them had thought to call the militsia or to investigate. The woods were full of punk kids and tramps, and a lot of strange sounds came out of them.

  Then Fetisov's searchers got lucky. If the victim had carried identification, it was gone. But in her clothing, they found a claim ticket for checked baggage at the Rostov bus station, three miles from the scene of the murder. A tag on the victim's luggage identified her: Natalia Shalopinina, eighteen years old, from a hamlet called Zolotaryevka in rural Rostov oblast.