#28 | February 12 - 19, 1998  

low-yield murder	"skull-brain trauma"	podyezd	really stupid criminal	children	Russian Sports Connection	murder-suicide
cries for help ignored	"investigation continuing"	carved up like a turkey	related to victim's job	cannibalism	riddled with bullets	old people

You Won't Believe This!

That's the only possible headline for the comma, self classic brought to you by a 19 year-old border guard named Alexander Pukhov this week from the woods of the St. Petersburg oblast. Pukhov had been stationed in a border outpost in the small village of Lebyazhye, along the Gulf of Finland, when a surprise two-front attack of homicidal mania and cinematic verve led him to the weapons room of his barracks. There, he swiped two AKS-74 automatic rifles, eight magazines, and two Rambo hunting knives before disappearing into the wilderness. Alarmed by the desertion, the entire unit, in conjunction with local law enforcement officials and FSB troops, formed a 40-kilometer ring around the area, blocking off all roads and rivers. About twelve hours following the desertion, one of the search groups sighted Pukhov in the Sosnovy Bor region- not far, incidentally, from the area's creaky nuclear plant. The party was astonished to find-and this is not a joke, folks-that Pukhov had covered his face in camouflage makeup, shed his hat and tied a Stallone-style headband around his head. A Russian Rambo!

"No, no not there. Higher! No, you almost had it! Damn this itch!"

Apparently Pukhov was anxious to give the viewer a good return on his box office ruble, because he opened fire on the search party the instant he spotted them. A four-hour gunfight interspersed with periodic attempts at negotiation ensued, with Pukhov at one point screaming out from behind a tree stump, "I am the destroyer of the border!"- whatever that means. He also managed to write a letter to his mother during a break in the gunplay, explaining to her that "It's better to be a dead lion than a live dog." According to the newspaper Segodnya, Pukhov ended the gunfight at 10:15 p.m., when he shot himself in the head after being wounded in the leg by his own troops. The search party discovered him minutes later with the trademark Russian "Skull-Brain Trauma" and rushed him to a hospital, where an emergency brain operation was performed that appears to have left him a vegetable for life. And here's where the story gets really interesting. Just after the outbreak of hostilities in Sosnovy Bor, a different search party nearby came across the body of a driver of a "Khleb" truck who had been shot in the head with an automatic weapon and dumped along the side of the road. No bread was stolen. Police subsequently matched nearby shell casings to Pukhov's rifle and in an official announcement said that it was "unclear what had occurred between Mr. Pukhov and the victim." Border Guard officials then quickly hastened to inform reporters that Pukhov could not possibly have had a real grudge against his superiors (or a legitimate reason to desert), because "he had already served one and a half years and therefore could not have been the victim of any serious hazing." And just as it appeared that no one in this story was going to make any sense at all, bunkmates of Pukhov informed Segodnya reporter Vadim Nesvizhskiy that Pukhov had had a psychiatric history prior to entrance into military service. Military officials later confirmed that Pukhov had in his youth received a concussion-yet another "skull-brain trauma"-and had as a result occasionally demonstrated "inadequate behavior." At press time Pukhov's condition remained critical, and there was no word yet about a sequel.

Contract Innovations

The creative range of the contract murder medium in Russia continues to expand. Already in the past six months, Death Porn has reported on mothers putting contracts out on daughters and sons putting out contracts on mothers. Now the MVD has confirmed that new ground has been broken: the nation's first underage contract victim was killed in Moscow on Wednesday, January 21. 17 year-old Vladmir Gordon was a student in vocational school who earned spare change working in the post office in the "Otradnoye" region. Somebody must not have liked the way he handled mail, because on the night of the 21st he walked out of his apartment only to be fired upon immediately in his stairwell by an unknown assassin. A bullet from a TT pistol, the usual trusted weapon of Moscow's killeri, penetrated Gordon's forehead, causing a fatal "skull-brain trauma." Police later found the pistol in a nearby garbage dumpster but as yet have no other clues to the crime. As Moskovsky Komsomolets wrote, "Police are mystified: who would need to kill this teenager, and who particularly would need to plan it so professionally, as though he were planning on settling a score with, at the very least, a krupniy businessmen.

"No, that's a nine, not a strike! The one in the back is still alive..."

How it Was Done By an Odessan

A 35 year-old woman was stabbed to death in her apartment last week on 3 Ulitsa Sanikova in the Otradnoye region of Moscow after refusing to pay an additional $5000 for a home furbishing to her contractor, a 32 year-old Odessan. The Odessan had orginally set a price of $5000 for the job, but when he finished he demanded $10,000. The woman balked, and...well, hey, you've gotta die sometime. After administering multiple stab wounds to her stomach and chest, the contractor set the apartment on fire, kissing his chance for a good reference goodbye. Incidentally, what's the deal with this whole setting-the-building-on-fire-after-you-inflict-multiple-stab-wounds thing? Death Porn statisticians have been observing a rising tendency among Russian murderers toward setting their victims' apartments on fire after the crime, imperiling the lives of everybody else in the building. This occurs, incidentally, even when the murders are premeditated, which begs the question: why not set the building on fire right up front, and skip the individual murder? It's a mystery. The practice probably first gained widespread popularity after the 1996 killing spree of Anatoly Onuprienko, who shot and set on fire 42 people in the space of two months in and around the region of Lvov, Ukraine. Onuprienko's usual modus operandi was to enter a single family house at night, kill everyone he encountered with a sawed-off shotgun, drag the bodies into a pile, then set the house on fire. After becoming the first serial killer in history to necessitate

"Hey, John, good to see you! Where's your head?"

a mobilization of a National Guard division, Onuprienko was eventually turned in by his cousin and subsequently confessed that aliens from outer space had commanded him to kill innocent families. This is the kind of thing that tends to get imitated in this, our former Soviet Union. The thing about Onuprienko, though, was that he actually meant to kill everyone in the houses he set on fire. He didn't bother with killing one person discretely and then setting whole properties on fire. He wasn't like this week's Odessan, or an arsonist in the Podmoskonoye village of Yegorevsk who this past Sunday set fire to an woman's apartment from the inside, only to send four other old ladies in adjoining apartments to the hospital in addition to killing what police believe was his intended victim. We're going to be paying attention to this whole phenomenon, so stay tuned. This might be the next big craze after the podyezd.