The night before, she’d visited the house of a girlfriend, whose parents were away, to celebrate her friend’s birthday along with several of their friends. With no adult supervision, the vodka and port flowed and, according to complaints made by neighbors, the music wailed. At about midnight, after arguing with her boyfriend, a very drunk Marina left without saying a word.
Just as was the case with the body of Galina Kuskova, Marina was discovered with her expensive gold earrings still in her ears. The cheap nickel-silver bracelet she always wore on her right arm, however, had been taken.
Three months later another body was found, this time on the outskirts of Tyumen, in a wooded park not far from the city’s summer camp, where older schoolchildren and vocational students went during vacation. Once again, toxicology reports showed that the victim, sixteen-year-old Irina Kozlova, had been intoxicated at the time of her murder.
Kozlova, a ward of the children’s home, was learning the painting trade at the vocational school at the time of her death, but wasn’t known for her exemplary conduct. She had already had several run-ins with the local police. Approximately two hours before her murder, she had been dancing at a nightclub. Then she got into a fight with two other intoxicated girls. The other two were giving her a beating, but Irina managed to break free and run away. Marks from a beating were discovered on her body. As were the strangulation marks her killer left around her neck.
Of her numerous cheap adornments, only one was found to be missing—a silver seal ring that Irina wore on her pinky.
One of the girls who’d fought with her told investigators that she remembered seeing “some older blond guy, badly dressed and stinking drunk” standing by the fence outside the club. She even cadged a cigarette—a Pegasus—off him. Though he never spoke a word to her, she noticed a tattoo on his arm—maybe letters, maybe numbers, she didn’t get a good look—when he lit her smoke.
The murder was never solved. That this murder might be related to the other two similar ones in the area never occurred to any of the investigators working the case.
Nine months later, in late May 1981, a fourth body was found in Tobolsk, at the same abandoned construction site where a year before the schoolgirl Marina Laricheva had been killed.
Eighteen-year-old Olga Fomicheva was in her second year at the Tobolsk teachers college. Unlike the three previous victims, she had not been drunk at the time of her death. She didn’t drink, was an excellent student, and didn’t frequent nightclubs. The rapist robbed her of her virginity and knifed her in the heart. The blow was so precise that there was almost no blood and death was likely instantaneous. The murder weapon was never found. Neither was anything else that could have helped investigators solve the crime. A hard rain fell all night, quickly washing away any clues from the ground and the dead girl’s clothing. Her large, fake leather bag was found right next to her body. In it were her notebooks, a comb, a mirror, and a small purse with fifty-five rubles.
Olga wasn’t wearing jewelry, cheap or expensive. The murderer had taken only her small Dawn watch.
Zakharov was the first to have the idea that all four murders had been committed by the same person. He went to Tyumen and studied the cases carefully. Based on his examination of all the case files, Zakharov created a profile of the killer. In his opinion, the murderer was extremely cautious, although he made no attempt to hide the corpses. He wasn’t interested in money or valuables, but he took something—a souvenir—from each victim, which meant these murders had a ritual aspect for him. He was psychologically disturbed, but not a fool. He managed to leave almost no trace of his presence other than the sperm in the dead girls’ bodies at the crime scenes. No witness had ever seen him. And this was no accident. He carefully prepared and thought through every crime.
The cases had been looked into by four different investigators. Zakharov was able to get ahold of the forensic reports, which said that the sperm discovered in the bodies of the four raped and murdered girls could belong to the same man. But they hadn’t wanted to combine the two Tyumen and two Tobolsk murders into a single case.
In June 1982, a fifth body was found at a construction site in Tyumen. A classmate of Natasha Koloskova, the sixteen-year-old student at Vocational School No. 8 who’d been killed, stated she’d seen a tall, fair-haired man looming in the door during the graduation dance. The girl was raped and strangled. A piece of jewelry was missing—a cheap, heart-shaped enameled pendant with a red rose drawn inside.
She had a low blood alcohol level. During the dance, Natasha drank only half a glass of vodka. She left the dance alone and in a bad mood.
Just ten days later, in Tobolsk, deep in the city park, the body of yet another dead girl was discovered. Seventeen-year-old Angela Nasebulova, unemployed, had been raped and knifed in the heart. According to the forensic report, she was highly intoxicated at the time of her murder. Her blood showed high levels of drugs and alcohol. The murder weapon was never found.
It was not known whether any of the girl’s jewelry had been taken. Nasebulova was an orphan, and she lived with her alcoholic aunt, who couldn’t remember what kind of trinkets and jewelry Angela owned or wore. What was known was that the sperm found inside her body belonged to the same serial rapist and murderer that had killed the other five girls.
Major Ievlev was starving. He’d been poring over the case files since nine in the morning. And it was now half past one.
In the cafeteria at the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office, a man of about thirty wearing jeans and a colorful patterned sweater sat down at his table. The man had a pleasant, round face with a bushy mustache.
“I hate digging around in old cases,” he said with a smile.
Ievlev gave him a surprised look.
“Zhenya Kostikov. I’m an investigator in the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office.” He held out his hand. Ievlev shook it and introduced himself.
“In these parts for long?” his new friend inquired.
“Depends on how it goes,” the major growled vaguely.
He didn’t feel like socializing. He had some serious thinking to do, and he did that best over a meal. When he was a boy, his grandmother was constantly grumbling and taking away his book when he read at the table. For some reason, complicated episodes of history got learned more easily in the kitchen, over a bowl of soup than in his room at his desk.
The pickled cucumber soup in the cafeteria of the Tyumen Prosecutor’s Office didn’t compare with his grandmother’s, but he thought pretty well over it, too. Investigator Kostikov was a perfectly nice guy, but his chatter kept Ievlev from concentrating.
They left the cafeteria together.
“I’m on my way to breathe dust, too,” Kostikov told him, descending into the archive with Ievlev.
The major went back to his reading and soon after forgot about his chance acquaintance. He forgot about everything. Everything but the case.
In the files, he found three typewritten pages of a psychological portrait of the killer. This quasi-official document suggested that the girls had been killed and raped by a man aged forty to fifty with a midlevel technical education. Married, a drinker, psychologically unbalanced. Possibly registered at his local drug or psychiatric clinic. In his adolescence he probably had difficulties in relations with the opposite sex and may have suffered some serious setback or insult, which traumatized him so badly that it left a deep scar on his psyche. The document, which gave a name to the psychological illness of the killer—the so-called heboid syndrome—was authored by “R. V. Gradskaya. Medical student, Serbsky Institute of General and Forensic Psychiatry.”