The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  To Viktor Burakov, it seemed immediately apparent that Byeskorsy's admissions were just another false confession squeezed out of a frightened and disoriented suspect. He was certain that Byeskorsy could not be the lesopolosa killer. Byeskorsy's work gave him no opportunity to travel about the oblast; the killer either traveled for his work or had a job that allowed frequent absences. The killer did not, Burakov believed, drink with his victims. He did not have normal sexual intercourse with them. And he certainly did not leave them in the woods while he took off after another bottle.

  But Burakov's doubts only fueled the growing rancor within the Rostov oblast militsia. Several of the department's leaders, including Fetisov's boss, deputy chief Pavel Chernyshev, had already committed themselves to the case against the "Kalenik-Tyapkin Gang." Chernyshev had not personally witnessed the interrogations of Kalenik, Tyapkin, and Byeskorsy, nor had be watched the field experiments with them. He had read the reports, and the reports indicated to him that the increasingly embarrassing lesopolosa cases could soon be closed. To Chernyshev and others who had supported the theory of Kalenik's and Tyapkin's guilt, Byeskorsy's confession was a welcome event. If he turned out to be the killer of Ryabenko and Shalopinina, it would leave undisturbed the cases against Kalenik and Tyapkin. Just after Ryabenko's body had been found, Tyapkin had been formally charged with Markov's murder. Dropping the charges against him could provoke a major scandal; in the Soviet bureaucracy, it was almost always better to avoid admitting a mistake.

  At the initiative of Chernyshev and Kolyesnikov, Byeskorsy was held on a charge of rape, based on the observation that he had incapacitated his woman friend with alcohol before their intercourse. But the real goal of the charge was to give the investigators time to build a case against him for the Ryabenko and Shalopinina murders.

  Burakov could no longer keep silent about his doubts. When the militsia officers working on the lesopolosa investigation convened for their regular meeting, he stated openly that he was convinced Kalenik and Tyapkin had nothing to do with the killings. The murderer, he said, was still at large. The deaths of Shalopinina and Ryabenko showed that. So did the flaws in the cases against the boys from Gukovo and the flaws in the case against Byeskorsy.

  Burakov's statement provoked a stiff', cold reaction from Chernyshev. It was as if, Burakov thought, he simply did not want to hear a contradictory opinion. Burakov left the room chagrined, all but certain that he would be removed from the case. When he was not, Burakov assumed that Fetisov had interceded on his behalf.

  But the division among the militsia investigators was open and all but irreparable. One faction believed in Kalenik's and Tyapkin's guilt in the initial string of murders. The other was convinced that the case against them was a sad mistake.

  The forensic laboratory at the Rostov Institute of Medicine had yet to give a definitive analysis of the semen found on the clothing of both Natalia Shalopinina and Marta Ryabenko. Typing semen was almost as much art as science. Much depended on the state of the sample, and in murder cases like the lesopolosa killings, the sample might have remained in the woods for months or more. Much depended on the skill of the analyst. Working with only the kind of microscope and test tubes that might be found in an average American high-school chemistry lab, he or she had to make judgments that came down, in the final analysis, to how clearly and convincingly the little bubbles, the magnified antigen cells reacting to an antibody, clustered under the lens.

  Dr. Lydia Amelina, the director of the forensic laboratory at the Rostov Institute of Medicine, fell under intense pressure to issue a definitive analysis of the samples the militsia had forwarded to her. Finally, the investigators convened a meeting. She could not, she said, tell for certain whether the samples she had were group A or AB. The tests clearly showed a reaction to the A antigen. But there seemed to be a very weak B reaction as well. She delivered a long and frustrating discourse on the possibilities. There might be sweat or saliva from the victim mixed into the sample. There could be more than one criminal involved, and a mixing of secretions.

  Amelina's waffling frustrated the investigators. Officials in Moscow had begun to monitor the case with growing impatience. At their suggestion, the Rostov investigators sought help from an outside expert. Dr. Svetiana Gurtovaya, chief of the biology lab in the bureau of forensic medicine of the Ministry of Health in Moscow.

  Gurtovaya flew down to Rostov and collected the samples, stopping long enough to criticize the way they had been stored in Rostov. She is a genial, matronly woman, bespectacled, with her light brown hair cropped short. She works in a crumbling old building on the banks of the Moscow River, and her lab's activities range from forensic work to establishing paternity in child-support cases to offering opinions on whether bones dug up near Sverdlovsk could have belonged to members of the family of the late Czar Nicholas II. Gurtovaya shows no uncertainty when she delivers her opinions. She showed none in analyzing the samples she received from Rostov. They were type AB. Nikolai Byeskorsy had type O blood, so the case against him all but collapsed. The killer was still out there.

  5

  THE KILLER'S FEVER

  On the evening of March 24, 1984, the worried parents of a ten-year-old boy named Dmitri Ptashnikov called the militsia in Novoshakhtinsk to report that their son was missing. They got a more serious response than the parents of Olga Stalmachenok had received fifteen months previously, when she disappeared from the same street on her way home from her piano lesson. Syshchiki from the local station interviewed the parents that same night. They learned that Dima, as he was called, collected stamps. He had saved a few kopecks, and he wanted to buy some stamps at a kiosk on Lenin Street, the main thoroughfare in Novoshakhtinsk. He had gone out to get them and hadn't returned.

  The militsia mounted a search and notified headquarters in Rostov that another child was missing. But their efforts led to no more success than in the search for Olga Stalmachenok. Three days later, it was a group of boys, playing in the woods about a mile from the site of Stalmachenok's murder, that found the body.

  Viktor Burakov left Rostov immediately to supervise the examination of the scene. The body lay on a low, wooded hillside that overlooked a dirt road and a drainage pond that served the Sixth Collective Farm.

  Ptashnikov was on his side, loosely covered by some of his own clothing. From the position of the arms and the marks on the wrists, it was clear that his hands had been tied behind his back. His body bore the evidence of numerous knife wounds. The killer had cut off the boy's penis and the end of his tongue. His anus showed traces of penetration, and there were splotches of semen on his T-shirt. The investigators sent the shirt to the forensic laboratory in Rostov; the semen was found to be type AB.

  Burakov expanded the search to the other side of the dirt road, and there his men found one of the boy's shoes. They also found a footprint of roughly the same size as the one found near Shalopinina's body. But the ground was too muddy to give more than a rough gauge of the shoe's size.

  Burakov directed a house-to-house interrogation of everyone in the central quarter of Novoshakhtinsk and everyone in the general area where the bodies had been found. He had higher hopes for this operation than he had harbored for the interrogations after Olga Stalmachenok disappeared. Only three days, instead of three months, had passed since the boy disappeared. And Ptashnikov, unlike Stalmachenok, lived in the neighborhood around Lenin Street. People knew him.

  This time, the inquiries produced some witnesses. Four people recalled that they had seen Dima Ptashnikov walking along Lenin Street on the evening of March 24. They all said that he had seemed to be following a tall man who strode along a step ahead, not speaking to the boy. All of them had noticed the man's gait: he walked with stiff knees, almost goose-stepping. A couple of people recalled that he had unusually large feet. But their descriptions of the man's clothing varied. One said he had on an old, brown fur hat. Another said he had a cloth hat. One said the man wore dark glasses. Another said the man had glass
es with clear lenses. None of them had recognized him and none had gotten a particularly good look at him. It had been dark, and he had walked past them in profile.

  The militsia working the Sixth Collective Farm also found witnesses. They reported seeing a white Volga sedan, the type supplied to mid-level Soviet government workers, parked on the dirt road as night fell on March 24. They remembered that the car's radio had been playing. They had not thought much about it. Couples from Novoshakhtinsk who were lucky enough to have cars frequently used the more remote places on the farm. The town had, after all, no motels. The witnesses had not noticed the car's license plate. They could add only that the driver had glued a strip of blue, translucent plastic to the top of the windshield. But so did a lot of drivers, since tinted glass was not an option on Soviet cars.

  The questioning of Ptashnikov's parents produced a third lead. On the day before he disappeared, Dima had visited a middle-aged bachelor, a fellow stamp collector named Malyshev, who lived with his mother. Malyshev, however, said he knew nothing about Ptashnikov's disappearance. And he did not own a car.

  Burakov tried to sort out the useful information from the useless. It seemed clearer than ever to him that the killer had a car, quite possibly the white Volga with the blue plastic strip. How else to explain how he got his victims to remote locations before killing them? How else to explain how he left the scenes of his murders, his clothes presumably spattered with blood, and yet avoided being seen by anyone?

  He was not sure what to make of the man seen walking ahead of Dima Ptashnikov. The size of the man's foot suggested that he might well be the killer. But none of the witnesses had seen him exchange so much as a word with Ptashnikov, let alone grab him or drag him. He could have been someone just coincidentally walking ahead of the boy. And if he used a car, why was he walking? Nevertheless, Burakov ordered an artist's sketch done, based on the witnesses' recollections—a glowering man with hollow cheeks, a cleft chin, glasses, and a hat pulled down over his face. The militsionery began carrying it with them as they made their rounds from door to door. But no one recognized the picture. And they could not pin down which white Volga, of all the thousands in the oblast, had been parked on the Sixth Collective Farm on March 24.

  Even before the investigators could finish their first round of inquiries in the Ptashnikov case, a new victim turned up in June in the countryside near Aksai, the industrial suburb on the rail line northwest of Rostov. It was a woman, naked. Someone had stabbed her dozens of times—in the back, in the neck, in the area of the genitals—and left her lying in a cluster of reeds near the Don.

  It took a week for the investigative group from Rostov to identify the body. She was Tatyana Polyakova, age seventeen, and she was, like Shalopinina and Kuprina, a young woman with a disorderly sex life. But she differed from Shalopinina and Kuprina in one important respect. They had abused alcohol. According to friends whom the interrogators questioned, Tatyana was part of a circle that also smoked marijuana.

  Drug use, in the Soviet Union of 1984, was a distinctly underground phenomenon. The news media almost never acknowledged its existence within the country, hewing to the line that narcotics were a capitalist plague. In a certain sense, this was true. Since the Soviet ruble was worthless outside the country, there was no incentive for foreign sources to try to smuggle drugs past the extremely vigilant Soviet border guards. The drugs that did exist inside the country were almost all home grown, and since private property was forbidden, growing marijuana plants or opium poppies in any quantity meant running the risk of using collective farm or forest land that anyone could walk through. But a limited amount of drug use occurred. Cynics among the users calculated, with good reason, that the militsia and the KGB tolerated it for political reasons: when they caught a drug user or seller, it was rather easy to turn him into an informer.

  Once Burakov and the investigators discovered that Tatyana Polyakova had smoked marijuana, it was simple to establish a number of her friends and contacts among Aksai's drug users. None of them, however, immediately looked like a murder suspect. Then the team got a break from another source.

  Thinking that Polyakova and her killer had perhaps used the elektrichka to ride out into the countryside, Fetisov stationed syshchiki at the closest station to her home and began questioning everyone who used that platform. Had they seen her? When? Whom was she with?

  After a couple of days, they turned up a young man, a couple of years younger than Tatyana, who had attended her secondary school. Early on the morning of the day she disappeared, he had seen her with a man she introduced as Artur. They had talked for a while about old school friends, then got on the train in separate cars. He did not know Artur's last name, where they were going, or why.

  But Artur is not a common Russian name, and it was not hard for the syshchiki to find his name among the lists of drug users they had compiled. Artur Korshenko was twenty-three, married, and the father of a child. He worked as a laborer in the local farm equipment factory, Krasny Aksai. He had blue eyes and light brown hair; he was a good-looking man. For a hobby, he practiced karate.

  The militsia placed a tail on him for a week, waiting to see if he would exhibit behavior that would link him more closely to the lesopolosa killings. He did not. They decided to take him in for questioning.

  Stealthily, the militsionery surrounded the house where Korshenko lived with his parents, wife, and child in Aksai. Several of them went to knock on the door. When Korshenko heard the knock and the words "Militsia, open the door!" he tried to bolt through a rear window. The men waiting outside caught him.

  His arrest excited Burakov. For the first time, they had a suspect who fit his idea of what the killer would be like. Korshenko's drug use, he thought, might explain the perverse rage reflected in the victims' bodies. Karate might explain how he had subdued them all so quickly and quietly. Certainly his flight suggested guilt.

  For the preliminary interrogation, they took Korshenko to Burakov's new office. Room 24 in the main militsia building on Engels Street. This suspect was too hot to be left entirely to the syshchiki. Aleksandr Ryabenko, the procurator in charge of the lesopolosa killings, hurried over from his office to ask the questions. Within fifteen minutes, Korshenko began to talk.

  Yes, he said. He had murdered Tatyana Polyakova. They had attended the same school, some years apart, and he had known her for more than ten years. He knew she used drugs, and he had suggested that they go out to the country to a place he knew where poppies grew. Korshenko knew how to gather poppies, process them, and produce homemade heroin for the syringe he kept hidden at home. He had brought along a few bottles of vodka for their outing. They found an isolated place in the reeds, and drained two of the bottles. Drunk, he tried to initiate intercourse. She was not in the mood. She pushed him away, and they quarreled. He lost his temper. She struck him, he said, and tried to run away. He ran after her, knife in hand. He caught up to her and plunged the knife into her back. Then he spun her around, and kept thrusting the knife into her, penetrating her neck, her abdomen, her genitals. Stabbing her became a surrogate for the sex she had denied him. When it was over, he left the body in the reeds, picked up the bottles, and went home.

  But Korshenko insisted that she was the only person he had killed. His blood, the tests said, was type A.

  Burakov could not give up on Korshenko easily, regardless of what the lab results showed. But just as the investigators began the tedious process of establishing Korshenko's whereabouts on the days of previous murders, a report came in of yet another body.

  Farm workers, spraying insecticide on trees near the village of Kirpichnaya, just south of Shakhty, had found the remains of a young girl in a densely wooded area not far from the railroad. It was early July, and the heat had accelerated the process of decomposition. The body lay, naked, on its stomach. When the investigators turned it over, they had no doubt that the lesopolosa killer had struck again. The victim had apparently been about ten years old. The remains fit none o
f the active missing-persons files in the area, but Burakov was getting used to the idea that the killer in the woods often picked victims whom no one would miss.

  This time, however, Burakov sensed something else. He thought he could smell something in the woods. For days, he and his men tramped through the trees and thickets in widening circles. They found some of the girl's clothes, rent by a knife, strewn in a trail a quarter of a mile from the body. They found the carcasses of some dead animals. And after three weeks, they found another body, a half mile from the first.

  This was the body of a grown woman. Her murderer had bashed in her skull with something blunt, perhaps the handle of a knife. But when the medical examiner's preliminary report came in, it stated that this victim's wounds differed from those of the girl discovered on July 5. Her killer had not stabbed her.

  But the medical examiner had the makings of an explanation for that. As closely as he could determine, the two victims had died at the same time, toward the end of May.

  Burakov tried to maintain his grip on reality. In an ordinary time, he would have had no doubt that these two bodies were related. The odds against unrelated victims being killed separately by different killers in the same woodland, at roughly the same time, were too high for him to bother trying to calculate. This was, obviously, no ordinary time. Bodies had been turning up at an extraordinary rate—these were, by his calculation, the sixteenth and seventeenth in the lesopolosa series. Still, he could not imagine that one killer, or even two killers, could have taken unrelated victims in roughly the same area at roughly the same time. He would operate on the assumption that these victims knew each other. They could have been sisters. They could have been a mother and a daughter.