women killed in the area have been found in ditches, in woods and in the Obj river near Barnaul, a city of 700,000. The police set up check points, questioned thousands and conducted widespread searches, but no trace of the five young women could be found. Then in October 2000, two bodies suspected of being those of students Ksenia Kirgizova and Anzhela Burdakova were found in a forest 25 miles from Barnual. Investigators later positively identified one of the bodies as Kirgizova’s.
Investigators believe the killer has been active around Barnaul for several years and has been responsible for an undetermined amount of unsolved murders. Forty-year-old Alexander Anisimov was arrested, but committed suicide in mysterious circumstances after several days in custody.
On 5 February 2001, a man identified only as Alexander, a 30-year-old driver for the Barnaul police department’s drunk tank, was arrested after a 22-year-old Barnaul University student told the police she had jumped out his apartment to escape. She said that Alexander had made sexual advances in his apartment the previous evening but she rejected him. In the morning, she managed to escape by jumping off a balcony while Alexander was in the bathroom. A recent police search of the suspect’s apartment found about 300 photographs of sexual orgies and a collection of women’s underwear. However, despite intense speculation, city prosecutor Nikolai Mylitsin dismissed him as a suspect in the abduction of the five girls.
“When a man is accused of sexual violence we check whether he had anything to do with all unsolved rape and murder cases,” he said.
Then on 10 February, the police in Novosibirsk, 120 miles north of Barnaul, arrested three men and one woman on suspicion of kidnapping and murder. An official said the suspects have confessed to abducting and killing a 16-year-old Barnaul resident named Irina Serova. But she was not one of the five girls who went missing while applying to enter Altai State Technical University. The three men, aged 20 to 27, and the 27-year-old woman were charged with kidnapping and forcing girls into prostitution.
Roman Kuminov, a senior investigator overseeing missing person reports in the Altai district, said the gang is thought to have lured girls from across Altai with promises of well-paid jobs before selling them as prostitutes.
If convicted, the suspects face up to 15 years in prison, he said.
Kuminov did not say whether murder charges would be brought against the group, although two bodies believed to be the missing girls’ have been found. Kidnappings have become common across Russia and especially in Chechnya, but few suspects are detained.
Russian police in the city of Perm in the Urals had little more luck when hunting a serial killer who claimed seven victims in less than three months in 1996. On 28 August, Perm’s police chief Andrei Kamenev said: “His latest victim was a woman who was raped and stabbed in an elevator shaft in the same Perm neighbourhood where six other women have been attacked in recent months.”
Police believe that one person is responsible for all the crimes, but the only suspect was not recognized by victims who survived the attacks. This was all the more disappointing as in June the police had arrested a man in Perm who they charged with murdering and disfiguring six women. The murders took place over a single month. In each case, the attacker struck the victim in the head and mutilated her face.
Meanwhile a serial killer was stalking the streets of Moscow. Between dusk on 21 July and dawn on 22 July 2003, four women were murdered in the capital of the Russian Federation. That brought the body count to ten for that month.
The first six victims were strangled. At midday on 1 July, 28-year-old Yulia Bondareva had taken a walk with her boyfriend in the botanical gardens. After the couple parted, Yulia set off towards the underground. An hour later, her body was discovered. She had been gagged with a piece of her own shirt, beaten, raped and throttled.
Before dawn the following day, the police discovered the body of 17-year-old Kseniya Medintsevaya dumped in the courtyard of a kindergarten. Her face was smeared with blood and her dress was ripped open. Again she had been raped, beaten and strangled. She had last been seen alive at 11 p.m. in her apartment the previous night.
On 4 July, the naked body of 28-year-old Irena Gera was found several miles from the centre of Moscow where she lived. She had been raped and strangled with the strap of her handbag.
The next victim was a 25-year-old Ukrainian prostitute named Alexandra. She was found strangled in her apartment on 8 July. One end of a belt was tied around her neck. The other was attached to a door handle.
Near Alexandra’s apartment, the police found the partially clothed body of 32-year-old teacher Elena Tolokonnikova on 11 July. Last seen out with friends the night before, she had not returned home.
Then on 15 July, the decomposing body of a woman was found near a pond. The remains were not identified. However there were signs of the handiwork of the same killer. Like the other victims, she was short, slim, with a fair complexion and long, light-coloured hair.
The seventh victim was 17-year-old student Tatyana Nikishina. She was killed on 21 July. Her assailant had tried to rape her. Then he strangled her with her bra and left her body in the northwest of the city. Police did not release the names of the other three victims slain that night. However, the killer seems to have begun to adopted a variety of methods. One was bludgeoned as well as strangled, another purely bludgeoned, hit by a blunt object from behind, and the third was killed having her head smashed against concrete. The youngest victim was 17; the oldest 35.
Moscow police have organized a task force to investigate the murders, but did not, at first, admit a serial killer was at work, due to the various methods of strangulation and bludgeoning he had employed. Some victims were strangled with ligatures, others manually. Some were beaten; some sexually assaulted. Seven of the ten victims were found in the northern section of the city, but the other three were killed several miles away in the northeast. There was no single MO.
At least six were well educated. One, Alexandra the Ukrainian prostitute, was not. She was the only one to be found indoors. She had been soliciting in a nearby market that day and could have picked up what she thought was a client, or she might have been followed home. There were other inconsistencies. Yulia Bondareva, the first known victim, was attacked and killed in a public park in broad daylight, while the others were killed at night. Why had Irena Gera travelled from her home to the city’s northern section where she was attacked and murdered? And why did Kseniya Medintsevaya leave her apartment in the middle of the night?
Russian Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov said that the ten women were killed by different assailants, claiming that three men had already been arrested. And a senior police official characterized the bunching of murders as “coincidence”.
Then on 23 July, a man stepped from a wooded area and grabbed a female pedestrian by the throat. He pulled her to the ground and dragged her into the bushes. A woman looking out of the window of an apartment opposite called the police, who caught the man. He was an immediate suspect in Moscow’s string of unsolved murders. However, he was soon dismissed as a copycat. On 28 July, while he was in custody, the body of a 42- year-old woman was found in a schoolyard northwest of the city. She had been raped and strangled. As in the case of 17-yearold Kseniya Medintsevaya, she had been dumped outside a kindergarten. A pattern appeared to be emerging.
Investigators found three victims who had survived similar attacks. In each case the assailant had concealed himself in bushes or behind a fence, then sprang out on the unsuspecting victim as she walked past. They also provided detailed descriptions of their assailant. He was a white male with short hair, a thin face, small eyes, bushy eyebrows, a large nose and thick lips. Aged between 35 and 40, he was between five foot seven and five foot nine, and wore jeans and a dark T-shirt.
These details were never released to frightened Muscovites, who drew their own conclusions. Women remained indoors while the men were sent out to do errands. They knew that, if a serial killer was at work, he was killing at a terrifying rate. But he could not be found.
Then in mid-June, the body of a woman was found in Bitsa Park in the south of the city. The following day, her work colleague at a small grocery store in southwestern Moscow Alexander Pichushkin was arrested. A loader there, he confessed to killing the woman and said that he had planned to kill as many as 64 people.
In all Pichushkin has so far confessed to killing 62 people, beginning in 2000, but investigators say they do not have sufficient proof to believe everything he says. However, prosecutors charged him with 49 counts of murder on 14 December 2006. There are questions about his sanity and the killings in the north of the city were far from his usual patch, opening the possibility that a second killer is at large there.
