This was an apartment long known for its excesses. When the screaming and fighting started on Saturday nights, the neighbors knew the routine. They would just turn up the volume on their TV sets.

So, the night when a babushka found her alcoholic husband with 95 stab wounds in the bathtub and started screaming hysterically, no one thought to call the cops. They figured it was just another Saturday night non-event.

Eventually she got her act together and called the militsia, who reconstructed the crime. According to Moskovsky Komsomolets, right before the murder the pensioner’s 22-year-old grandson had gotten out of jail. Like most ex-cons, he didn’t have anything going for him. No money, no prospects, and a lot of unsightly tattoos.

He decided to turn to his family for help. On the day of the murder, he arrived at his grandfather’s apartment with a mask and a long knife. He demanded all the pensioner’s money. In spite of his alcohol-eroded mind, Pops probably recognized his grandson, but feigned ignorance and forked over his life savings of 200 rubles. Apparently, this amount didn’t satisfy the grandson. Even in jail they know the price of modern living. So, he stabbed his grandfather almost one hundred times and made tracks.

It didn’t take the militsia long to catch up with this vagrant. Two hundred rubles doesn’t get you as far as it used to. Upon his next release from jail, he should be able to treat his father to the same homecoming as he did his granddad. Generally, heinous murderers get 25 years in Russia.

At first it seemed like a simple tragedy. The charred remains of an 11-year-old girl were found after a nighttime apartment fire. Her mother worked the night shift, and her brother was out clubbing when the fire started. No one was there to save her. It seemed that she was simply locked in and was consumed by the flames while trying to open the door.

Then an autopsy reveled that the girl actually had been strangled to death before being burnt to a crisp. Suddenly, things were not so simple.

The militsia began canvassing the neighborhood looking for clues. No witnesses were forthcoming, but one neighbor acted shifty. Soon, the cops devoted their energy to finding out more info about this 17-year-old kid.

He lived with his two brothers and led a reasonably untarnished existence. However, one item stood out. Several years ago, he had been busted stealing a cassette player from the dead girl’s apartment. He got in by climbing through the window.

After the police found this out, it didn’t take long to force a confession out of the kid. Apparently, he broke into the apartment assuming nobody was around. Obviously he knew about the little girl—one of his brothers was a friend of her brother—but he didn’t count on her being home. When she surprised him, he did what any reasonable burglar would do. He strangled her to death.

This unexpected twist led to another problem. Now he had a dead body on his hands. But, as a man of action, he quickly decided to light the apartment on fire. He figured a burning inferno would consume any and all evidence of his misdeed.

Apparently, he placed too little faith in the skill of Russian forensics. How was he to know that they liked examining little girls so much?

A Ukrainian national living and working legitimately in Prague is in and of itself a newsworthy event. Prague is for Ukrainians what California is for Mexicans. Since the Ukie had a green card, he figured it would be no problem to drive his seven-month pregnant wife back to Ukraine so that she could give birth. After all, in Ukraine, family and friends would help her care for the newborn. He planned to drop her off with trusted relatives, then return to Prague in order to earn some more bread for his fledgling family.

However, he never got that far in the game. While passing through Poland, not far from the Ukrainian border, his wife started having pains. It was probably too early for her to be going into labor, but—like any concerned husband and father-to-be—he started to panic. He accelerated, hoping to cross into friendly territory before seeking help.

Unfortunately, a group of five Polish border guards caught up with him first. There are few things that Polish border guards hate more than Ukrainians. They drool at the prospect of EU membership, if only because it will keep out those dirty Khokhli. Hating Ukrainians in eastern Poland is an institution; they scapegoat Ukrainians for the fact that they live in the shittiest, most expendable part of Poland.

When they stopped the car with this Ukrainian and his wife, the guards were already worked up. They were so pissed he was speeding that they didn’t even bother to ask any questions. They pulled him out of the car and one of them shot the unarmed guy point blank in the head.

After seeing her husband blown away, the wife’s pains mysteriously stopped.

Elena Kokareva was the director of the graphic-design firm MLM-1. But authorities aren’t sure if that was got her killed. While her firm dealt in pretty large sums by most Russians’ standards, the money probably wasn’t enough to interest most racketeers. Besides, her death certainly didn’t resemble a typical hit.

Elena was returning home around eight in the evening, after putting in a full day of work at the company she had created from scratch. The killer met her right outside her podyezd and apparently tried to grab her purse.

According to Moskovsky Komsomolets, she wasn’t about to just hand the bag over; the newspaper claims that she was carrying about 25,000 dollars in cash at the time. When she started struggling, the killer stabbed her several times and made off with the loot.

While a knife is definitely not a hit man’s weapon of choice, investigators are not ruling out a contract murder. Elena did live in a relatively peaceful Moscow neighborhood, and petty thieves usually don’t resort to murder. Perhaps it was a hit dressed up as a robbery. But one thing is probable—they won’t find the killer. Random violence cases get solved with about the same frequency as contract murders.