The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  Sergei Kolchin, the militsioner from the shelter for the homeless in Shakhty, ranked fourteenth. But the investigation had established his connection to only one victim: Inessa Gulyaeva, who had last been seen at the shelter. There was a possible connection to Vera Shevkun, who had last been seen in a priton visited, according to one witness, by an unidentified militsioner. But the investigators had failed to link Kolchin to any of the other victims. He was still on the list because his blood type was AB.

  Burakov supervised the completion of the booklet and its binding in red covers. His department mailed it to all the militsia departments in the country, and waited for a response.

  The booklet project had one immediate side benefit. The flow of data into the militsia building on Engels Street had already become voluminous, as the investigators turned up hundreds, and eventually thousands, of potential suspects. The militsia had no computers, which was in keeping with the generally low level of computerization in Soviet society. The information being gathered in the field had begun to overwhelm the filing system, which consisted primarily of manila folders locked in safes. Faced with the task of collating all the data for the booklet, Burakov had requested help from Moscow. Several filing experts were dispatched to help organize the material.

  They created an alphabetized card file, rather like a library's card catalog. Each person who became involved in the investigation got a card. Suspects with blood type AB had cards with a red stripe. Other suspects had cards with yellow stripes. People who discovered bodies or otherwise provided information had cards with blue stripes. Relatives and friends of the victims were denoted by a green stripe. Some cards had no stripe. If, for instance, the syshchiki got a tip that an unidentified man had been seen bothering children in a Shakhty park, they filled out a stripeless card on the incident.

  The card on each suspect was supposed to have the individual's name, address, blood type, and date of birth. It was supposed to indicate whether he had a car and, if so, its license plate number. There was a line to indicate why the man had fallen under suspicion. And there were lines to indicate where he was on the dates when murders had occurred. Very quickly, the file grew to include several thousand cards.

  In fact, that was one of the investigation's major problems. It was quite easy to convene a meeting and decide on plans: checking all drivers with AB blood or identifying all convicted sex criminals and former psychiatric patients. It was much harder to complete the tedious work of checking out each theory, each suspect. And the more successful they were at generating theories and suspects, the less successful they became at checking each of them out thoroughly.

  In a way, their problems mirrored the general problems of the Soviet system. It was easy for the members of the Politburo, sitting in the Kremlin, to decree that the central economic plan for 1986 would be adjusted to provide a twenty-percent increase in shoe production. But that didn't assure that the shoemaker sitting in a cramped, dark little workshop in Rostov got the leather and thread he needed, or that he showed up for work sober, or that he completed each shoe properly. As any Soviet consumer could attest, the system all too often broke down somewhere between the Politburo meeting and the shoe store.

  Similarly, Burakov knew, much of the work being done on the lesopolosa case was suspect. To begin with, many of the cards in the card file should not have been there. His own name turned up as that of a suspect when he renewed his internal passport and entered his blood type, which was, ironically, AB. Someone filled out a red-striped card with his name on it. Yet, if the investigation were to follow its own rules, some syshchik would have to waste dozens of hours verifying Burakov's whereabouts on the days of the murders.

  More often than not, Burakov knew, syshchiki in the field did a superficial job of checking things out or didn't do it at all. They might, for instance, simply assume that because someone was employed at a given factory he was in the factory on the day of a murder, rather than going onto the factory floor, finding the foreman, and checking his records. Assignments tended to slide or be superseded by new assignments; there were, after all, more than four hundred murders a year in Rostov oblast. A year after the murder of Natalia Pokhlistova in Moscow, the investigators still did not have a complete list of business travelers from all three hundred forty-two Rostov enterprises that traded with Moscow enterprises. Nor had the investigators completed numerous other assignments.

  This was no secret to Fetisov, Kostoyev, or anyone else who monitored the investigation. Virtually every internal document criticized the performance of the investigation. "There have been serious inadequacies and organization omissions in the work of different city and local militsia organs, and there have been instances of failure to perform work and failure to carry out orders," read a typical internal critique, written in September 1986.

  The militsia authorities in Moscow remained unhappy. But at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev was struggling to get a handle on the growing national problems of crime and corruption, and he frequently fired his Ministers of the Interior. The turmoil at the top helped protect Fetisov and those below him on the ladder, including Burakov.

  Kostoyev's superiors at the office of the Russian procurator in Moscow were also unhappy. In April 1987, I. S. Zemlyanushin, a deputy procurator of the Russian Republic, flew to Rostov with Kostoyev for one of the meetings of the investigative group. Moscow was concerned about the failure to solve the case, Zemlyanushin said. The Central Committee of the Communist Party had decided to monitor the progress of the investigation. Zemlyanushin would, in turn, be monitoring Kostoyev's work.

  Kostoyev, by that time, had been on the case for eighteen months, though he spent most of his time outside Rostov. He took the floor and tried to shift the blame to his predecessors. Stupid mistakes made in 1983, such as the fixation on Kalenik, Tyapkin, and their "gang" of mentally retarded youths had delayed and complicated the search for the real killer, he said.

  They would, Kostoyev promised, catch their man by working through five hypotheses. He predicted that the killer would turn out to be: someone with a previous conviction for a sex crime; a homosexual; someone with a mental illness characterized by a sexual perversion; a present or former law enforcement officer; or a railroad worker.

  At his orders, Kostoyev said, the investigation was focusing on the operation to identify drivers with type AB blood and on people from Rostov who were in Moscow at the time of the Pokhlistova murder. But, he complained, the militsia were guilty of sometimes sending out unqualified people who hindered his work. They had tramped all over the scene of Irina Pogoryelova's murder, possibly obliterating the killer's footprints. And, he complained, he was finding it hard to supervise the work, since he had other assignments, which took him away from Rostov.

  The frustration, backbiting, and recriminations began to affect the emotional stability of both Mikhail Fetisov and Viktor Burakov. The split within the militsia over the case against Yuri Kalenik had gradually healed as more victims turned up and the theory of a retarded "gang" became more obviously untenable. But in its place came a more general fear that the case might never be solved, to the lasting discredit of those who had worked on it.

  Other men had joined the investigative team, retired, been reassigned, or quit because the pressure of the case became more than they could bear. Fetisov's original deputy, Vladimir Kolyesnikov, had been transferred to the Ministry of the Interior's academy in Moscow for advanced training.

  Fetisov was the only person who had been on the case since its beginning in 1982. But even he had other duties to occupy some of his time. Burakov had been assigned to the lesopolosa case virtually full time since the beginning of 1983. He had been given command of a special unit, his killer department, established specifically to handle the investigation. He bore the responsibility with no respite.

  Fetisov found that he could not sleep well. He would awaken in the middle of the night and tiptoe compulsively to the bedroom of his eight-year-old son to check and make sure that the boy
was still there. And when he could sleep, his dreams were filled with blood and bodies.

  Occasionally, it would seem to him that he was living in a nightmare. The thought would occur to him that he himself got up in the middle of the night, went outside, committed the murder, and then returned home and fell asleep, remembering nothing in the morning.

  Fetisov confided this only to Burakov.

  "Listen, Viktor," he said quiedy one day. "Does it ever seem to you that something—that we're committing these crimes? You and I?"

  "I've thought of it," Burakov said.

  Burakov could not, in fact, stop thinking about the case. At night, he would go home and try to relax. But he could not sleep. He would try to read, and toss the book away. He watched television until the last program signed off after midnight, trying to distract himself Then he would slip into bed and stare at the ceiling, thinking about suspects that had not yet been checked out. Or, worse, he might think about the bodies.

  Finally, at the end of 1986, he had what in the West would be called a nervous breakdown. He recognized only the physical symptoms—a debilitating lassitude that felt like a general weakness. He found that he could not climb the flight of stairs to his office on the second floor of the militsia headquarters without grabbing the banister and literally dragging himself up.

  He checked himself into the hospital. The doctor told him that due to nervous stress and exhaustion, he had weakened his heart. For three days, he was kept in an intensive-care room, receiving injections. They did not tell him what the drug was, but eventually it caused him to sleep. For the better part of a week, he slept. When he awakened, he could tell that his body was returning to normal. But he was kept in the hospital for three more weeks, and then sent to a militsia rest home called Salyut, on the Black Sea near Sochi, for another month.

  Svetlana Burakova asked her husband to let someone else take his place in the lesopolosa investigation. He refused. He had already invested four years of his life in the search for the lesopolosa killer. He could not leave the job undone. It would be like pounding the mat and submitting in a Sambo match just because something had snapped in his knee.

  He had no new ideas for catching the man. In fact, he had a sense of powerlessness, a sense that the investigation had reached a dead end. But it had become a personal matter between him and X, the man Bukhanovsky said felt superior to the investigators.

  He would catch the man.

  9

  THE KILLER SURFACES

  In a way, Viktor Burakov wanted the killer to murder again. Thinking about the case as he lay in the hospital, then recuperated by the Black Sea in January 1987, he grew increasingly certain that none of the methods they were using was likely to work. They could identify all the drivers in the oblast with type AB blood, but they might be looking for a man who didn't drive or a man who had bought a false blood-type stamp for his passport. They could check out all the convicted rapists, all the homosexuals, and all the former psychiatric patients in the Soviet Union, but they might be dealing with a man who had kept himself off all those lists.

  He felt like a fisherman who sees a big fish surface and casts repeatedly toward that spot without getting a bite, until he is convinced that the fish has gone elsewhere. He can only hope that his fish breaks the surface again.

  In the same way, Burakov felt that he would catch his prey only if the man killed again. Surely, if he continued to kill, he would eventually slip up. He would leave a fingerprint, or he would be seen in the act by a witness, or he would pick a victim strong enough to fight back, escape, and tell the story to the militsia.

  But during all of 1987, no corpses turned up in Rostov that unmistakably bore the lesopolosa killer's signature.

  On April 6, 1988, railroad workers near the station at Krasny Sulin found the body of a young woman. It lay on a flat, weedy piece of ground near the tracks. There was no question of how she had died. The entire left side of her skull was bashed in. The militsia who first got to the scene speculated that the killer might have used one of the chunks of concrete that some construction workers had tossed away. They littered the ground not far from where the body lay. The woman was naked, and her hands had been bound behind her.

  Burakov drove up to Krasny Sulin, a farming and logging town about fifteen miles northeast of Shakhty, and helped conduct the examination of the crime scene.

  The first task was to identify the remains. Though the woman's wounds were massive, enough remained of her skull to permit a photograph. Her fingerprints were intact.

  Burakov's crew prepared a circular with the woman's photograph, fingerprints, and body measurements, then mailed it to militsia departments throughout the Soviet Union. They compared her characteristics with all those on the missing-persons lists. Nothing matched, and no one sent word that they were looking for a woman of that description.

  Burakov, by this time, could make an intelligent guess about the victim. She might be an orphan or she might be totally estranged from her parents. She might have lived in an internal until she was eighteen, and then been assigned to a menial job. She might have quit the job or been fired, and lived a few years in the ranks of homeless women who spent their time going nowhere on the elektrichka. When she was murdered, she had no one to miss her.

  None of the Krasny Sulin station workers, the investigators soon found, remembered seeing the woman get off^ the train. None had heard a cry. None had seen a man walking away from the scene of the crime. Their search turned up only one bit of physical evidence: a muddy footprint, size twelve or thirteen, that could be a match for the footprint found near Dmitri Ptashnikov's body four years previously.

  Burakov could not decide whether to place this victim on the lesopolosa list. Her wounds differed significantly from those of the other women in the series. She had been stabbed many times, and her nose had been cut off But it was clear that it was the blow to the skull that had killed her. Her eyes and genitals were untouched, and there was no semen on the body. More significantly, Burakov thought, she had not been killed in the woods, as nearly all of the lesopolosa victims had been.

  Before this question could be settled, the lesopolosa investigators heard on May 17, 1988, of a murder in Ukraine that did seem to bear the clear signature of the killer they were seeking. The victim was a nine-year-old boy named Aleksei Voronko, who lived in a town called Ilovaisk, some thirty miles west of the border between Ukraine and Rostov oblast. What attracted Burakov's attention was the fact that Ilovaisk was a regional rail hub. Trains to and from Rostov passed through it. Crews from Rostov handed off their trains to Ukrainian crews at the Ilovaisk station. And Aleksei Voronko's body had been found in the woods near the station.

  Burakov mobilized his department. With a group of sledovatyeli from the procurator's office, he drove to Ilovaisk. The details of the killing, they quickly learned, coincided with those of the killings they had seen before. The boy had apparently been sodomized. His mouth and anus were stuffed with dirt. His penis had been cut off, and he had died of a multitude of knife thrusts and a blow to the head. The body was discovered two days after his parents reported him missing.

  This time, though, the investigators turned up a witness.

  A classmate of Voronko's had been playing near the tracks on the afternoon when Aleksei disappeared. This boy had encountered Aleksei walking toward the woods in the company of a man. The witness had spoken to Aleksei, and Aleksei had told him he would soon return. And when the boy pointed out the place where he had last seen Aleksei, it fit. It was on the way to the spot in the woods where the body had been found.

  Carefully, mindful of what had happened in the Fischer case when a boy of a similar age had made up a story about seeing the killer, they asked if the boy could describe the man.

  He was a dyadya, the boy said, using the Russian word that literally means uncle but frequently is used in reference to any middle-aged man. He was perhaps thirty-five years old, well built, athletic-looking, with a wispy mustache and
a mouthful of gold teeth. He had been carrying a sports bag over one shoulder.

  Finally, Burakov thought, the killer might have tripped up. He had given them several solid leads to work on.

  The first was the gold teeth. Russian dentists quite frequently dotted their patients' mouths with metal crowns. White smiles were a relative rarity among adults. But so were mouths completely full of gold crowns. Burakov directed the syshchiki in the killer department to assemble a list of all the dentists and dental labs in the region. If someone had all his teeth crowned, they should be able to find him.

  Perhaps, Burakov speculated, the killer had been sent to Ilovaisk from a Rostov enterprise on a business trip. The investigators had tried to pursue a similar theory three years before, after the murder of Natalia Pokhlistova in Moscow. That effort had become a chronic embarrassment. Burakov and Fetisov had badgered the syshchiki in the field for more than a year to complete the survey of all Rostov enterprises for a list of all business travelers to Moscow at the end of July 1985, then check them out. The syshchiki had never completed the task. But this time, it might be easier. Only a few Rostov enterprises traded in Ilovaisk. Burakov ordered a new effort to come up with a business travelers' list.

  Or it might be, Burakov reasoned, that the killer had moved from Rostov oblast to the Ilovaisk area. Or he might have been visiting relatives. Burakov and his team could think of only one way to find out. In coordination with the local militsia, they conducted a door-to-door inquiry. During the course of the next six months, they interviewed at least one person in every household in the town, which had a population of twenty-five thousand people.